Scott Hilburn. The Argyle Sweater: A Cartoon Collection. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2009. 128 pages.
This is another book I got through the Amazon Vine program, so it has nothing to do with gambling. I just thought it would be a fun read.
This cartoon collection from Scott Hilburn is very much in the same vein as The Far Side. In fact, it’s almost completely derivative of The Far Side. Granted, there’s only so much you can do with a single-panel daily cartoon, but reading this book I kept on thinking of The Far Side, never They’ll Do It Every Time or The Family Circus.
That said, The Argyle Sweater is often funny. Most of the humor revolves around puns and wordplay. For example, the caption “Custer’s Last Tan” is under a cartoon of a sun-burned General George Custer laying out by the pool, or a vulture checking in at an airplane and being told there is a limit of one carrion per passenger. Nursery rhymes, dinosaurs, and wild animals show up pretty frequently, as do dung beetles.
Sometimes, though, the cartoons misfire, at least for this reader. One Star Trek-inspired panel featuring “static Klingons” might have been funny 40 years ago, but I think that joke has been pretty much run into the ground by now.
Humor is tough to review, because what one person finds hilarious another will groan at, so the best I can do in the way of a recommendation is suggest that if you like punny humor, you might like much of The Argyle Sweater.