Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies: A Novel [Paperback]

Tom De Haven (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 1997

A rollicking and bittersweet look at the cutthroat world of professional cartooning, Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies is also a tribute to the redemptive powers of love, imagination, and the well-chosen wisecrack.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies, Al Bready ghostwrites a popular comic strip and struggles to get along with his boss and mentor, Walter Geebus. Set in 1930s New York, the novel is populated with characters who seem to have stepped straight out of a Damon Runyon story. While Mysterious Jones roams the city in a black mask, Marty Planet runs the Mafia, and an ambitious young cartoonist's assistant named Frank Sweeney rots in jail for lacing his boss's coffee with arsenic. He was trying to poison his way to a promotion, but it didn't work. Al Bready caught him, and although Walter Geebus survived the arsenic poisoning, he was never the same. This novel charts Geebus's decline and Bready's efforts to come to terms with the loss of the comic strip he clung to throughout his difficult childhood. Bready is a man of many routines who generally keeps to himself. He ghostwrites five or six comic strips and pumps out a pulp novel every month, but when he tries to write something personal, he feels stymied. He knows the story begins, "Derby's in a rowboat, it's night," but he can't fill in the rest. Bready yearns for the days of his youth, when reading the funnies aloud to his kid sister made everything seem all right. His story is not terribly moving, but it is quite funny, and he makes good company for a few hundred pages. This novel is a nostalgic, witty look back at the glory days of comic strips. --Jill Marquis --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Beneath the raffish surface charm of De Haven's comic-strip-like novel is a potent meditation on death, violence, broken hearts, friendships betrayed and life's other inconveniences. This sequel to Funny Papers is kinetically illustrated by Art Spiegelman (Maus), whose cover painting and comic-strip running heads mesh perfectly with a wickedly amusing romp that marvelously captures Depression-era Manhattan's tempo, lingo and places, from Harlem jazz clubs to chop-suey joints. It's 1936. Walter Geebus, the grouchy, five-times-married creator of the syndicated comic strip "Derby Dugan," mysteriously collapses and is hospitalized. His constantly feuding collaborator, prolific hack writer Al Bready, suspects that a disgruntled former partner, who went to jail for poisoning Walter in 1934, may somehow be involved. Through the cheerfully cynical voice of the smart-mouthed Al, De Haven conjures a world that has more moxie than ours. While evoking the romance of a bygone era, the story, filled with wry observations, depicts the birth pangs of the cutthroat, exploitive comic-strip industry with historical fidelity. Far from being two-dimensional, De Haven's off-kilter characters-an ex-bootlegger who's now a comic-book mogul; a flirtatious schoolteacher who is the swooning Al's confidante; her jealous husband, a lunchroom owner who always smells of chlorine from swimming twice a day at the Y-leap off the page into your face. 25,000 first printing; $30,000 ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks; 1st edition (May 15, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805053565
• ISBN-13: 978-0805053562
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #850,067 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Derby's in a rowboat. It's night., October 22, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies: A Novel (Paperback)

Imagine a very depressed Damon Runyan. De Haven's story works best as an Oedipal love-hate story between narrator Al Br[e]ady, funny-page ghostwriter par excellence, and cartoonist Walter Geebus, a misanthrope who has long since run out of ideas but whose drawings remain one of the few things in Bready's world to believe in. Less engaging is Bready's unrequited--well, unconsummated anyway--love for Jewel, who is married to a real-life cartoon dimwit. That relationship is bittersweet, as is the narrator's love for his damaged sister, the unwilling keeper of the family secret that Bready can't admit. But it's Geebus who breathes life into the novel and into Bready--Geebus: selfish, manipulative, but capable of a sweet belated response to a young letter writer who idolized him as a boy but has since accreted layer upon layer of cynicism.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful, touching, funny story, August 8, 2005

By 

M. Woinoski (New Paltz, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies: A Novel (Paperback)

The complex relationship between the two main characters, with its friendship, love, jealousy, and competitiveness, is beautifully constructed, but the story never get tedious or maudlin. The novel has many comic moments and a few heartbreaking moments. Mr. De Haven's ending ties up all the threads in the story so deftly that it left my head spinning. A very impressive book.

3.0 out of 5 stars Not as successful as Funny Papers, August 17, 1999

By 

Stu Shiffman ([e-mail]) (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies: A Novel (Paperback)

I enjoyed Tom De Haven's Derby Dugan, but not to the same extent as his Funny Papers. There is more of a dark cloud over the characters in this novel. Yet, although he's no Runyon or P.G. Wodehouse, De Haven creates living characters that you don't mind spending time with.