“They Called Him Charles” is Darkly Hilarious

This one is a very odd book. I’m charmed by it, but I’m not entirely sure I’d recommend it.

Let me give it a go:

Give Charles Credits

A New Bizarre Gag on Every Page

“They Called Him Charles” is a one-off album from Poland filled with 20 one-page stories, all of which end humorously with a character saying of a dead man, “They called him Charles.” It is, indeed, another example of OuBaPo (creating within constraints), just like “Mickey All-Stars” is.

That’s about the only comparison I can make between this book and anything Disney-related.

The results are mixed, but I love the inventiveness, creativity, and occasional surprise that caught me so off guard that I had to laugh. Some of the jokes don’t even make much sense, except they’re in this book and your mind is working in that direction, so it’s funny.

How many variations on this simple idea can you produce? The book only has 20 of them, so the creators know their limits, thankfully.

It reminds me of the type of Saturday Night Live skit that becomes so well known for its one catchphrase that everything else became secondary to that.

For example, one of writer Jerzy Lanuszewski’s gags features a fencing duel in which one man pokes his blunt-tipped sword right through the other, killing him. He pees on his dead body and proudly proclaims, “They called him Charles.”

When I lay it out like that, it’s not funny. It’s nonsensical. When it’s surrounded by a couple dozen other gags of similar ilk, you get into the rhythm and find a weird humor in that repetition and how it’s different from the gags around it.

You quickly learn how critically you need to think with this book. Hint: Don’t think too critically. You’ll either get it or you won’t in pretty short order. Finish reading the book or not: It’s a VERY fast read, so it won’t take long, either way.

The book feels like the product of two friends who had a running gag between them and couldn’t stop themselves. It inspired a comic page, which inspired a second, which then caused the need for another and another. By the time they looked up, they had produced half an album’s worth of material.

Lanuszewski and cartoonist Ewa Cialowicz mix up their gags, delivering the catch phrase at a breakneck speed, but always in a different situation and from different angles — whether it’s the mailman delivering the package of a severed head, a vampire taking a stake to the heart, or an astronaut’s decomposed body floating in the deep of space. Oh, and there’s one with Cupid’s arrow that comes straight out of nowhere that made me laugh out loud. The Superman-fighting-Godzilla one is darky hilarious, also.

Sometimes it’s whispered. Sometimes it’s proudly proclaimed. Sometimes, it’s delivered ironically. But it’s always, “They called him Charles.”

It’s tough to pick out a a tier of panels to illustrate this review. Cutting straight to the punchline like this robs the gag of its pacing and some of its set-up. These two panels aren’t that funny, but if you add four more repeated panels of the astronaut floating in space above it, suddenly the punchline feels like it’s better earned.

The Artistic Stylings of Ewa Cialowicz

Cialowicz has a style that’s cartoony enough to make this book work. Everything is clear and concise. She has great rhythm and storytelling between her panels, and her style is bold and colorful. It feels a bit like a retro 60s design, but keeping enough black linework in place to avoid looking like a modern artist who works digitally and does all their art in the colors, often not even drawing the black outlines. (See Justine Cunha’s work on “Through Lya’s Eyes,” for example.)

Her characters help to sell the gags with their nonchalant glances at Charles. Page layouts and his panel compositions are well chosen. Everything is super clear when you read this book.

And let’s face it — she has a lot of work to do with this book. Every page is a new location with new backgrounds and new characters and new genres. She has to go from superheroes to ray-gun sci-fi to soccer matches. Every page is wildly different and, yet, also the same.

Charles is dead. And that’s what they called him.

I wasn’t surprised when I read in her bio that she’s worked in video games and animation. Those are two gigs where you learn to draw a lot of different things quickly.

It is, by the way, a very crude book. People die in all sorts of violent ways, on panel. There’s a lot of decapitations, for example. Cialowicz’s art is cartoony enough that it’s never overtly disgusting. It always feels too cartoony to be taken realistically.

Recommended?

I don’t normally review a book specifically with price in mind, but this one is a little different. It’s only $2.99. You’ve spent more for books that read faster and made less sense.

It’s a very particular kind of darker humor that you’ll need to appreciate this book, but it’s worth it if you have that. For $2.99, it’s cheap enough to take a risk on something new.

Buy It Now

• Izneo
• comiXology
• Amazon

Bonus Crediting Note

Jerzy Lanuszeski gets a credit for translating this book. If he got paid by the page, he made a killing!