Vagabond Comics & Books

"Rooftop Stew" by Max Clotfelter

Rooftop Stew collects a plethora of Max Clotfelter’s depraved comics, both fictional and autobiographical, blending ‘60s psychedelic underground comic sensibility with Southern style debauchery. Full-color covers with black and white interior. Perfect-bound paperback book. 6" x 8", 120 pages. $12



"Max Clotfelter can crank out some pretty d*mn cool comic strips...Clotfelter’s always been wildly inventive, of course, creating comics that bridge the stylistic and thematic gap from old-school undergrounds to present-day “aht comics,” but perusing the contents of his recently-released Rat Tactics ‘zine shows something of a hitherto-unremarked-upon (as far as I know, at any rate) evolution in his work, albeit in severely, wondrously truncated form : the yarns at the start, dating back to 2012, are rough-hewn affairs with little by way of concern for even storytelling basics, much less actual narrative, pesky little concerns like coherence and the confidence attendant with it picking up metaphorical steam as we head toward the book’s 2017 finish line. All points along the trajectory offer their charms, of course, and are worthy of detailed exploration — something of an irony, I suppose, given that slowing down to smell the roses (or, hey, the post-apocalyptic mutant sh*t) isn’t something that the circumstances of these strips’ genesis allowed for — but make no mistake : not everything here, makes “sense,” nor should it...Not to mention everything else that Clotfelter’s work is known for : smart, disturbing, gruesome, frequently unsettling. Whether he’s doing autobio, stuff you hope to God is anything but, or stuff that you d*mn well know absolutely can’t be, there’s no mistaking the deliriously warped sensibilities (and trust me, I mean that as the highest possible compliment), the absurdist humor, the willful disposal of all things “high-brow,” and the dogged tenacity for just drawing the f*ck out of every single page that are our guy Max’s stock in trade. This is dynamic. Visceral. At its best, maybe even combustible..." BY RYAN C. (TRASHFILMGURU).