Felix’s Friends

This is an oddity. It’s a twenty-five year old work that’s seen print before in Cruse’s earlier book, Dancin’ Nekkid With the Angels. Here’s it’s reformatted, as originally intended, as though it were a children’s book, and is only available from lulu.com, a print-on-demand publisher.

Cruse’s blog reveals he’s gone down the print-on-demand route because of a lack interest from mainstream publishers, who are unsure how to market it. Personally, after Stuck Rubber Baby, I’d have thought Cruse would have enough clout to be considered by any reasonably large-scale publisher. Evidently not: which is a rather sobering reflection on the comics industry today.

Anyway, it’s available in both print and download format, and is rather splendid. It’s a comic, but, as previously mentioned, it also resembles a children’s book. This is both in execution and, to a degree, in its intended audience: it’s subtitled “A Story for Grown-Ups and Unpleasant Children”.

An unpleasant child is exactly what Felix is. The story follows his life from the moment of his birth, through to his possible death. He’s a child that’s lighter-than-air, and spends his life with a string tied around his ankle, bobbing around like a thoroughly unattractive balloon. He’s also spoilt, demanding, and selfish, and he drives his relatives and friends demented (sometimes literally). It’s a morality story of sorts, and bears the moral that you reap what you sow.

This dates from the era that Cruse was also producing his Barefootz comic, and it’s similarly cartoony and fluid, sometimes verging almost into abstraction. There’s a wonderful page which reads “his parents were so upset that they fell into bed with a case of dismay” and their limbs entangle and protrude at all sorts of odd angles, almost merging in with the bedcovers, perfectly capturing in a humorous way the anxiety they’re feeling. It’s a synthesis of word and image you only tend to see when a comic creator handles both story and art (though there are notable exceptions, as I’m sure you’re all well aware).

In later years Cruse’s art would shift noticeably towards realism, and the writing would become more emotionally expansive. That’s not to belittle this early phase though. It has a charm lacking from many of his contemporaries – veers in fact towards being a little too sweet at points (always an accusation thrown at Cruse during this period) – but is saved by an acid edge that runs throughout.

It’s not major work, and if you’re looking to sample Cruse’s work for the first time, then Stuck Rubber Baby or the forthcoming Wendell collection are surely the places to start. This is nevertheless an amusing and entertaining diversion that’s deservedly been rescued from obscurity, and is well worth the investment of your time and money.