Features Podcasts Family Video Comics Music Tech Science Books Film & TV Games ✚

Jill

Dapper Caps and Pedal-Copters: more sharp-edged, elaborated whimsy from Wondermark

Cory Doctorow at 7:02 am Thu, Jun 24, 2010

— FEATURED —

Book Review

The Man Who Laughs: grotesque Victor Hugo potboiler was the basis for The Joker

Feature

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

Book Review

The Twelve-Fingered Boy - mesmerizing YA horror novel

— FOLLOW US —

Boing Boing is on Twitter and Facebook. Subscribe to our RSS feed or daily email.

 

— POLICIES —

Except where indicated, Boing Boing is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution

 

— FONTS —

Tweet
Kindle

Dapper Caps & Pedal-Copters is the third collected volume of David Malki's tremendously funny, dementedly complex clip art/steampunk comic Wondermark. Wondermark strips are made of collaged Victorian woodcuts along with snide, funny, weird dialog and commentary (there's also a lot of ancillary footnotes and such).

Dapper Caps collects 75-odd pages of published strips, along with a gallery of rejected strips, a long color story about a steam-powered robot that can find anything for its owner (except fulfillment), and an entire kids book presented, upside-down, in a single lines on the bottom margin of each page.

Apart from being a doubtless royal pain in the ass to typeset, Dapper Caps is just plain wonderful. Malki adds a bunch of original prose to accompany the strips, some of it screamingly funny (I literally snarfed water out my nose at the stuff on p17). It's just the perfect thing to settle down with on a summer Sunday and point out to your slightly puzzled loved ones.

Dapper Caps & Pedal-Copters

  • Clever Tricks to Stave Off Death: Wondermark collection is Terry ...
  • Wondermark's hilarious holiday cards
  • Hierarchy of Beards: the evolutionary history of face-fur - Boing ...
  • Next year's Internet memes, illustrated by Wondermark
  • Wondermark's Genre Fiction Generator
  • Wondermark's steampunk helicopter

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE:  Entertainment • Reviews

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

  • fubbs

    This is fantastic. There are so many collections of royalty-free woodcut illustrations available now; I wish more people would try this sort of thing. I have been working on a similar concept for some time now (using woodcut collage in interactive experiments – fubbs.net)

  • Jason Rizos

    He also has two books, “Dispatches from Wondermark Manor,” that are short stories. Those books are incredibly funny. I highly recommend.

  • Jason Rizos

    It’s also worth mentioning that the humor is, in my opinion, in a different style in the books vs. the comics. So if the comics aren’t doing it for you, give the books a chance. Also, don’t miss the Funniest Thing Ever On The Internet:

    http://wondermark.com/comic-strip-doctor/