Tundra: 100% Naturally Flavored Comics

Reviewed: April 16, 2008
By: Chad Carpenter
Publisher: Tundra & Associates
160 pages, $19.95

Chad Carpenter has blessed us with another collection of good natured chuckles. There’s a load of funny animal stuff in here, the usual assortment of road kill, and an increasing number of Far Side-ish diversions from the strictly Northern diet he started out with a few years ago.

The book is completely in colour on high quality paper so, while you may have seen some of these gags before (and a few of them have just run in the Star since I received this book), you haven’t seen them look quite like this.

Carpenter designs his strip a bit differently than most. His daily single panels are shaped like a regular daily strip instead of the usual large box panel, and though they are essentially gags, there’s often a combination of dialogue and commentary to get you to the point, which is probably in the visual.

He also does a Sunday strip that we don’t see, and these tend to be a seven or eight panel stories with a regular cast of rural Alaskan characters which includes Chad himself, a few other people and a menagerie of talking critters.

I’ll leave this with a description of one panel from the back cover of the book:

A family of beavers are driving down the road, the three kits in the back. One says, “Mom! Duane just go carsick and now there’s sawdust everywhere!”

As Stan Lee used to say, ‘”Nuff said.”

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