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Nuts Hardcover – October 18, 2011

4.7 out of 5 stars 37

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  • In this thematically and narratively linked series of one-page stories originally published in the National Lampoon's "Funny Pages" section throughout the 1970s, Gahan Wilson eschewed his usual ghouls, vampires, and end-of-the-world scenarios for a wry, pointed look at growing up normal in the real, yet endlessly weird, world. Watch as our stoic, hunting-cap-wearing protagonist (known only as "The kid") copes with illness, strange old relatives, the disappointment of Christmas, life-threatening escapades, death, school, the awfulness of camp, and much more ― all delineated in Wilson's roly-poly, sensual, delicately hatched line. Nuts was (partly) collected in a now long out-of-print volume back in 1979. If you don't remember what it was like being a child, this book will bring it all back... for good or for ill!

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Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* One of the greatest gag cartoonists, whose monthly contributions to Playboy may prove that magazine’s most durable legacy, Wilson gave National Lampoon something to be remembered for, too—his only comic strip, collected here. Titled to echo Charles Schulz’s great newspaper feature full of kids who think and talk like adults, the six-paneled Nuts develops a realistic situation from out of memory (the strips typically begin with the word “remember”). All the fully visible characters are children, mostly boys, but, contra Peanuts, what they say expresses kids’ enthusiasms, fears, and frustrations in the words grown-up memory gives them (the slightly precocious language is Wilson’s primary departure from naturalism, except for his loopy drawing, of course). The frustrations are particularly important, so much so that, despite the acorn next to it in every first panel, the strip’s title is best understood as a child’s curse, “Nuts!” The scenarios include summer camp, going to horror movies, being sick and obsessing about it, making models, eating too much, not knowing the answer (or even the subject) in school, selecting comics in the local cigar store, and other normal-enough stuff that holds the potential for humiliation, failure, and maybe worse. In Nuts, that potential is always realized and, as memory colors it, so uproariously that you just about choke with laughter. For sheer hilarity, this is Wilson’s masterpiece. --Ray Olson

Review

"(Starred Review) The scenarios include... normal-enough stuff that holds the potential for humiliation, failure, and maybe worse. In Nuts, that potential is always realized and, as memory colors it, so uproariously that you just about choke with laughter. For sheer hilarity, this is Wilson’s masterpiece."
Ray Olson, Booklist

"They’re
wonderful pieces of comic art..., applying Wilson’s usual sense of the grotesque and macabre to phenomena like summer camp and sick days. And they’re not all bitter either... He mixes the sour and the sweet exceptionally well."
Noel Murray, The A.V. Club

"The all-time greatest comic strip about what it is to be a child, ever. Insightful, hilarious, poignant and dripping truth from every panel,
Nuts is, was and ever will be in my pantheon of most life-altering reads. It showed me that comics could be more than just gag-driven. Beautifully drawn and essential to any library of cartoon books."
Bob Fingerman

"The kids in
Nuts are vain, covetous, not so very bright, and they stagger around, reeling, from one unpleasant surprise to the next…. Weirdly, by giving his kids the vocabularies of adults, he really captures the neuroses of childhood. We begin life as we live it now: Dazed, angry, and bitter at our own fundamental lack of control."
Paul Constant, The Stranger

"Dense, claustrophobic, intense and
trenchantly funny, the self-contained strips ranged from satire to slapstick to agonising irony, linking up over the years to form a fascinating catalogue of growing older in the USA: a fearfully faithful alternate view of childhood and most importantly, of how we adults choose to recall those distant days."
Win Wiacek, Now Read This!

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Fantagraphics Books (October 18, 2011)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 144 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1606994549
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1606994542
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 16 years and up
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.22 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8 x 1 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 out of 5 stars 37

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Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars
4.7 out of 5
37 global ratings
The great 'Anti-Peanuts" comic gets a great hardcover make-over
5 Stars
The great 'Anti-Peanuts" comic gets a great hardcover make-over
The great 'Anti-Peanuts" comic from the old National Lampoon (R.I.P. I miss you) magazine gets a great hardcover make-over. Good Ol'-you-know- who and his friends leaning on a brick wall discussing life's foibles in their idyllic world, were living in a world of luxury....and complained about it! In 'NUTS' Gahan Wilson shows the real world we all lived in as kids. Even all these years later I have to stop reading these after a while to give my aching sides a break from all the out loud laughing they put me through. Gahan Wilson is the master writer/artist.
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Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on October 20, 2011
I've always been a fan of Gahan Wilson, ever since I first discovered his cartoons in Playboy. I preferred him over the other cartoonists because his drawings didn't look like anyone else. He drew this morbid, crooked characters, and had the most twisted sense of humor I'd ever seen. He is also the only Playboy cartoonist who never had to rely on a naked gal to get his joke across. He also contributed to the National Lampoon, a magazine I discovered after growing out of MAD. The editors at the Nat Lamp were looking for artists to contribute to a comics section they were adding to their magazine, and Gahan Wilson came up with an idea that might have seemed unoriginal at the time, but was in fact, the most original idea of all. A story about a kid, who actually acts like a kid, and goes through all the horror and sorrow that an actual kid has to go through.

Now, most comic strips dealing with children rely on a gimmick of some sort. Either the kid lives in a dream world, or has an imaginary friend only he can see, or is nothing more than an adult transposed as a kid. The hero in Nuts is none of those. This is a kid who must confront the fear of what monster lurks in the shadows of his room or down in the basement, but who nonetheless has to tell his parents he is going to see a Disney nature film, when all he wants to see is another monster flick. If any of you remember what being a child was, you haven't read Nuts yet. Once you read this book, you will really remember what being a child actually was like. Remember building those airplane models that looked so cool on the outside of their boxes, only to find out that you glued certain parts wrong or forgot others, and it always ended up looking totally different from what you thought it would actually look like? Remember going to summer camp where they had you doing worthless things, and your only thought was of getting back home to read your comic books instead? Remember that first time you saw a girl and you didn't feel the same thing for her as you felt for your other friends? This and countless other situations are just some of what's waiting for you inside this book.

I remember reading Nuts for the first time in the National Lampoon. This strip would always open the Funny Pages section, where all the cartoonists drew their strips. Consisting of various panels arranged in three tiers, with an introduction under the logo in the first panel, we would then follow the kid (we never get to know his real name, as he is the kid in all of us) through a series of mishaps he has to go through. Almost two-thirds of each panel is taken over with dialog, and the bottom third is left so that Mr. Wilson can draw his kids, though we mostly only see their heads, as there is hardly any space left for anything else, and what little space is left, is covered with cross-hatching from Mr. Wilson's pen. So we aren't getting any cutie-pie kid frolicking in the playground or playing baseball with his little friends. No, in this strip we follow the kids thoughts as he has to go through the grueling events every kid has to go through; getting sick, going to school afterwards and not understanding a thing of what the teacher says, suffering through summer camp, visiting your grandparents, picking the groceries for your mom and then noticing that you had put the money in a torn pocket of your jacket, etc. Actually, all the stuff we all had to go through. Yet, through Mr. Wilson's pen strokes, all this produces a warm feeling of déjà-vu that will eventually bring a smile or even laughter to the reader, from the apparent, yet so true, ordeal the kid has to go through.

When I saw this book for the first time, it was in a comic shop way back in the early '80's, and I immediately grabbed it in sheer surprise that someone had actually had the good taste and decided to collect all this strips in a single book. When I was about to pay for it, the vendor at the counter asked me whether I knew who the person that drew this book was. And I pretty much told him all I've been telling you, and ended saying that Nuts was the best book ever written about what being a child really was like. The guy just nodded and leafed through the book... But you can't just leaf through this book! Mr. Wilson doesn't do cute drawings. You've got to read the strips to fully appreciate this book, as the combination of dialog and art has never been so perfectly matched. It's almost like a signature, a signature only one person can do and no one else can imitate.

But you know what? I always felt like I was the only person in the world who knew Gahan Wilson (although I've never met him in person). Whenever we talked about our favorite cartoonists among other fellow cartoonists, I always mentioned Gahan Wilson and was always met with blank stares. So I had to explain what he did, and at the time there were no books on his work and no internet, so I had a hard time trying to explain what his work looked like. Let's just say that without Gahan Wilson there would be no Piraro or Gary Larson. Also, there would be no Nuts...

But you know what? I always felt like a had a secret that no one else knew. That I had a book that collected the entire run of the strip Nuts, and that I was the only person that knew about it. And now it's about time you too get acquainted with the strip Nuts and its author, thanks to Fantagraphics, and become part of the elite of fans of Mr. Gahan Wilson and his strip about the kid (as once read, you'll forever be a fan of this book).

The artwork throughout this book is sharp and clear (maybe because it was scanned from the originals?) and the endpages reproduce the original 3D version of one of the strips, though I wonder if anyone can read them, as they overlap onto another page, making it totally unreadable. Also, the strips that appeared in color in the magazine are reproduced only in black and white. Other than that, this book collects the entire run of the strips, features an appreciation by Gary Groth, and is a hardcover. So what more do you want?

You won't regret buying this book, I promise you.
6 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2023
I gave this to my older sister, and she loved it.
Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2017
I've had a paperback copy of Nuts for over 37 years. The binding has hardened over the years and is crumbling. I was so pleased to see that Nuts has been reprinted and in hardback. Of course, I had to have it. I got it. I still love to read it. The Kid and I were alike in many ways.
I still remember the junk I used to buy with cereal boxtops, just like the junk the Kid buys, knowing it would be crap. None the less, I would still buy it hoping that "this time" it would not be worthless.
MY son discovered it when he was in middleschool and read it many times. We still will pull quotes about the Kid in out converstaions, like some kind of code, and we still get a chuckle or smile from each other.
My suggestion, if you like Gahan Wilson, get it. You and you children will love it.
One person found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on March 11, 2013
For years I'd loved Gahan Wilson's loopy art and wit, so I was excited when I first found this excellent collection (in paperback) in a local bookshop (remember those?) back in 1982.

I read this collection at least once a year, as it's just the most hilarious "TRUE" account of what it's like to be a kid.

It's dark and not for very young kids. (I'd give it a PG rating) Adults should read it first, before letting their kids read it, as some of the material is pretty dark, and there's some adult language.

I bought it in hardcover, as I'd like to pass it on to my sons someday, when they're a bit older.

PS: They made an animated cartoon based loosely on this collection, but it was pretty awful.
2 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2014
This lovingly produced collection of Gahan Wilson's 1970s "Nuts" strips from "National Lampoon" is a treasure and deservedly back in print after much too long. It is said that anyone who remembers the joys of being a kid really doesn't remember being a kid at all. Wilson remembers well. The page-long strips are wonderful bittersweet tales of discovery, of disillusionment, of sentimental memory, of revelation and new experience. Oh, and they're funny, funny, and sharp, and pointed. As a youth, I giggled, sympathized, and found strength in the fact that someone, somewhere felt some of what I did. I have been pleased to find this new edition and share it with my son, who devoured it.
One person found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2015
The great 'Anti-Peanuts" comic from the old National Lampoon (R.I.P. I miss you) magazine gets a great hardcover make-over. Good Ol'-you-know- who and his friends leaning on a brick wall discussing life's foibles in their idyllic world, were living in a world of luxury....and complained about it! In 'NUTS' Gahan Wilson shows the real world we all lived in as kids. Even all these years later I have to stop reading these after a while to give my aching sides a break from all the out loud laughing they put me through. Gahan Wilson is the master writer/artist.
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5.0 out of 5 stars The great 'Anti-Peanuts" comic gets a great hardcover make-over
Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2015
The great 'Anti-Peanuts" comic from the old National Lampoon (R.I.P. I miss you) magazine gets a great hardcover make-over. Good Ol'-you-know- who and his friends leaning on a brick wall discussing life's foibles in their idyllic world, were living in a world of luxury....and complained about it! In 'NUTS' Gahan Wilson shows the real world we all lived in as kids. Even all these years later I have to stop reading these after a while to give my aching sides a break from all the out loud laughing they put me through. Gahan Wilson is the master writer/artist.
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One person found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on October 20, 2019
I remembered reading these in National Lampoon when I was a teenager. I thought they were funny then, now 40 years later I see so much more now. Gahan Wilson is brilliant and this little comic is sometimes heartbreakingly poignant.
Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2019
I have been buying old Bizarro and old Far Side cortoon books. When I ran out of books by Pizarro and by Gary Larson, I thought " let me see how Graham Wilson does......... maybe it is just this book, but I found it tedious and banal.