I've only just discovered the superb "Red Meat" strip by Max Cannon, published regularly in "The Onion". For anyone who hasn't tried it yet,it's VERY dark Americana, and definitely not for the easily offended. Anyway, does anybody know where in the U.K I can get hold of any collections of this?

Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask this but I couldn't really think of anywhere else...

I've read the strip when it appeared in The Met and The Dallas Observer and stopped after awhile. It wasn't just that it was unrelentingly mean-spirited. That doesn't bother me. "The City" by Derf (not the Derf who posts here on Nitcentral mind you. At least I don't think so.) can also be cruel and very dark. "The City" often goes beyond dark and can get downright sick. But I still like it. Heck, originally, the Peanuts gang could be - and was - described as "little monsters" (Ecco Umberto, I believe) and "mean little bastards" (Al Capp, I think said that). But that was before Charles Schulz mellowed out in the mid-Seventies and the series went downhill.

I just don't like the art. It's too static for my taste. (On the other hand, "This Modern World" is also static, but there an inherent irony in it. Tom Tomorrow is using a clipart style common to the Fifties and Sixties to reflect the passivity of the American public.)

The real problem I have with "Read Meat" is that I feel it's too limited. Most of the cartoons have dealt with what Milkman Dan does to the little girl, Karen isn't it? It's like "Peanuts" from the late Seventies on, or "Blondie", "Shoe", "The Wizard of Id" and other comic strips: Cannon has found his groove and doesn't deviate from it at all.

I wish I could appreciate it more. But it just doesn't work for me.