Weasel #6
"Overbite"
by Dave Cooper

Fantagraphics Books

FC, 48 pgs
$23.95 CAN / $14.95 US

Riding bareback on the planet of giant naked ladies
by Dana Tillusz

Dave Cooper makes the weirdest comics in the business. And we should all be happy that he does.

This latest installment of Weasel is an oversized hard cover entitled Overbite. This special version of Weasel is filled with paintings and drawings of pillowy girls that Dave worked on in 2002. Besides giving the heavy duty Cooper fans a great taste of naughty fine art, this book also serves as a catalogue for Cooper's gallery show put on by Tin Man Alley in Philadelphia. Dave's "Overbite" gallery show runs from March 22 to April 27, 2003 with fellow artist Scott Musgrove.

His finer art is much like his comics. All the paintings portray women, naked or close to, pasty white with large folds of flesh. Large eyes, big heads, buckteeth and huge red gums stare back at you as you wonder what the hell was going through Dave's mind while he was painting these babies up. Cooper revisits the beauty in ugliness theme he used in his serialized "Ripple" storyline that ran through the first five issues of Cooper's ongoing comic series Weasel.

Like the character Tina found in "Ripple", these women show all and bare all. They stand in front of mirrors and gaze and play with their fellow women. They wrestle on all fours, ride each other like ponies and play with each other in their own sexiness. If they have an audience to strut their stuff to they do, playing and posing for the camera if you may, confident and emmanating an aura of complete self-satisfaction, sexual or otherwise.

There is an eeriness to it all. Most of these paintings and drawings work with each other and build an unknown story that only Cooper knows. These women and their god-awful smiles and their buggy eyes penetrate you as you wander page by page through the collection. They make you feel self-conscious about yourself as they look at you and judge you. It's truly bewildering and all I can say is I wanted it to end, but it dragged me back for more, torturing my psyche without me even knowing it.

Cooper's multimedia artwork is his strongest stuff. "Girl Sitting on Other Girl's Head", "Girl Clutching Other Girl's Head" and the other 33 untitled mini-drawing on mylar are truer to his comic work; one-panel comics, sketchy and unglamourized unlike Cooper's slickly finished oiled up canvas. Something is left unsaid with these etchings, while the oil work is concise and direct, leaving less to the imagination.

Dave's oil work is larger in scale and well reproduced. It's odd that some of these paintings are actually going to be included in the gallery show. "Pirate Girl", "Damn Bird People" and "Beauty Salon" just don't seem to fit in with the overall theme. On their own, they seem like magazine freelanced work and I must confess they take away from the strength of the collection as a whole. Hopefully, before the opening, the curator will realize that quantity doesn't mean better and he'll eliminate the few pieces of art that detract from its greatness.

Collection wise, Overbite is worth the investment for cultured-up, art snobs and Dave Cooper completists. I can see all types of people picking this book up on a whim; people unfamiliar with comic books and all of those Fantagraphics loyalists who aren't too cheap to spring for this baby. As long as this isn't an attempt by Dave Cooper to springboard out of the comic world, I'd be happy to support him in this happy medium.

5 of 5