4 out of 5

I love this description of Dave Cooper from Bleeding Cool’s Rich Johnston: “a very dirty Jim Woodring.”  Exactly.  And furthermore, I’d say if you like one, you’ll probably like the other, inured are your tastes to iconography over open-ended storytelling.  ‘Mudbite,’ Cooper’s first in-print thing in quite some time, is actually a flipbook (pretty groovy for a hardcover) of two tales: Mud River and Bug Bite, both starring his oddball illustrated proxy Eddy Table.  Something further to know about Cooper: Table (and any of his other autobiographically-veined characters/stuff) has always been more of a way to, like, let loose with his fears, obsessions, and neuroses than to create an admirable or “I can relate!” kinda dude.  I mean, you can relate, but while you’re locked in the bathroom and crying to yourself.  Aw.

Here’s Fantagraphics’ really well-defined summary of this book: “In Mud River, Eddy makes a foolish mistake, causing a sweet, innocent Amazon to bonk her head, turning her into a very impressionable automaton. In Bug Bite, Eddy has brought his family on a vacation to Europe, but he’s soon distracted by a series of manifestations of his own obsessions.”  Uh huh.  That’s… sorta what’s happening here, but it’s also widescreen pages of Dave’s lavish, sweatily detailed (all ripples and bumps) Robert Crumb women and queasily surreal landscapes and random, Cronenberg-esque creepy crawlies, and… gawd, yeah.  Bug Bite edges out Mud River, to me, because it has a tad more of a narrative, with Table finding a dreamscape inside a music store, whereas Mud River seems like more of a random fetish fantasy, oddly stilted by a Pacific Rim reference.

The good thing about Cooper and Woodring’s brand of weirdness is that you can sorta start anywhere.  And once you start, if you buy in, well, you’re in.  With Cooper, buying in means a willingness to feel weird about what you’re looking at, 10% titillation, 40% tittering, 50% wide-eyed wonder, and Mudbite’s a great addition to his catalogue.