Tundra: The comic strip mother nature warned you about

Reviewed: May 10, 2007
By: Chad Carpenter
Publisher: Tundra & Associates
160 pages, $19.95

>Tundra >seems to be the North’s answer to Gary Larson. Chad Carpenter’s creation does a number of different things. It follows the adventures of Chad and an assortment of goofy talking animals in a way that puts me in mind of the Red Green Show. It does crazy things with other animals and people out in the wild, in a Far Side sort of way. It does parodies of other kinds of strip ideas, a little bit like Bound and Gagged. It deals with all sorts of northern oddities: strange snowpeople; all sorts of weird stuff with igloos; whacky adventures in ice fishing.

>It’s a daily strip, a weekend strip, and sometimes a single panel gag. It’s probably the only strip in North America where some type of dead/rotting ungulate surrounded by carnivores or scavengers is a regular item of panel furnishing.

>This collection is definitely a high-end product. The strips are larger than you would have seen them in print, the paper stock of quality composition, and all the strips have been coloured.

>It’s also a popular book. I had to keep retrieving it from the other bathrooms so I could finish reading it.

Print Preview