A pleasure to review. Wonderful illustration talent (a là Bill Watterson), with a deranged humor we've never seen before. One can read the same comic over and over again, and continue to laugh. And because Nicholas Gurewitch has announced a semi-retirement, we may have to.

Nicholas Gurewitch's Perry Bible Fellowship is a refreshing exception among webcomics: it combines good ideas, great visuals (most webcomics seem to manage just one of these two) and twisted humor that has more than just shock value.

Not that it's all perfect: some of the strips are - in all honesty - quite mediocre. But when PBF hits the mark, it is just about the funniest thing around. If you're not already familiar with the comic, you should just read it on the official website to see if this is your thing.

This Dark Horse collection has all the PBF strips up until its publication and some previously unseen material as well. The overall quality is very good and does justice to Gurewitch's visual stylings. What I missed was more background: information about the author, origins of the comic, how the whole phenomenon grew online. In my opinion, it would be nice to have something more than hard covers (good as they might look) around the things that are already available for free online.

However, I don't regret my purchase one bit. The price was right, the book looks good and, most importantly, the content is great. I just wish there would have been a bit more of it.

I've been reading the Perry Bible Fellowship for a few years now and I was looking forward to this book. It's just as good as I hopped it would be. These are the best strips I've ever read anywhere. The humor is hilarious from every direction. At 10 bucks, you can't afford not to have this book.

If you could somehow harness the powers of pure awesomeness (even more rare than dark matter) and contain it in the form a book, this would be the end result...

Proudly display it on your coffee table, or wear it around your neck; just spread the word of PBF!!! Either way, it is by far one of the best Graphic Novels you will have ever owned.

Ever!!!

I'd read a lot of these comics on The Perry Bible Fellowship website, but my goodness, it is just so good having them all printed in a lush, glossy-paged book. Truly, the sick humor comes to life in a way that the internet simply could not dream of. Buy this book. Seriously. You won't be sorry.

I absolutely love the Perry Bible Fellowship. Hysterical from comic number one to whatever the end is. My only issue is with the incredibly small amount of new material there is in it. Honestly, 98% of the comics that are in this book are accessible for free on the website. The only ones that are new are a couple "deleted comics" and some "alternate endings" to some comics. The book is in an attractive hard cover with a red ribbon book mark, and is wonderful as a random pick-up or bathroom reading book. I had it on my bookshelf and on two separate occasions I had people who have never heard of PBF thumbing through. They thought it was hysterical. So do I, and so will you.

I'm so glad that I bought this - somehow the comics are even better when printed. It's one of those books you can leave on your coffee table (not while kids are around, though) to make your friends scratch their heads and laugh. The author definitely has a cracked sense of humor, but with each comic strip being a story within itself I just can't get enough!

Not for everyone, these comics are equal parts demented and hilarious (and maybe sometimes just stupid--but in a funny way). Clever, but not in a pretentious, look-how-clever-I-am way. Really, if you want to see if this is your thing just check out the website. If you like it and want it in book form so you can show it off to your friends or just support the creator, I'd definitely recommend it. It's good quality and well put together with just a few extras that you don't get on the website.

The title about sums it up.

If you follow the Perry Bible Fellowship's weekly descent into madness you'll enjoy this pantone-riffic bathroom book (or coffee table, i suppose, but the bathroom is the main stage for reading this one).

What can I say this book make you think. Think crazy insane thoughts. The artist style can take on any form and he makes great use of this ability.

Very well selected strips, nice print (good and detailed colors) and the funniest humor ever.

If you are not familiar with The Perry Bible Fellowship online then you need to acquaint yourself with it immediately if not sooner. Even if you're not into comics you will love this book. Not for kids, not for conservatives but perhaps the best damn book published from an online comic in the last year, probably ever.

It's great to finally have the PBF, one of the absolute funniest comics ever, in concrete form. This book is exactly what one would expect - a bound collection of Nicholas' online strip, with a few extra "lost" (unpublished) strips at the end. My only qualm is with the size of the strips; it would be great if they were larger in this book, as the artwork is also wonderful.

it's like having the best part of the internet in the palm of your hand.

Great Coffee Table Book, for those without children at least. Humorous in an off beat sark fashion.

Remember the first time you realized that Gary Larson's "Far Side" was getting predictable?

If you do, you'll love The Perry Bible Fellowship as much as I do, if you don't, visit the website (it's all free) first. This book has earned a place of honour on my coffee table.

I love this comic. Imaginative. Beautifully illustrated and LOL funny. Its creativity is rivaled only by the Web comic that I think is the best Web comic of all time. It's called Navy Bean and I think anyone who likes PBF will be blown-away by the quality and humor quotient in Navy Bean. But I digress ... this is a five star book and well worth the investment. The best comic collection I've read this year.

The commentary at the back of the book is excellent and explains a few comics that I didn't previously understand on his website. Not a dissapointment.

A great book to have by the funniest comic artist since ever.

Remember how you felt about Gary Larson? Nicholas Gurewitch will not only re-open those laugh hernias, but your insides will shoot out all over the floor.

If you're an avid PBF reader, this book is good to have so you can show your grandmother or your grandchildren if the internet isnt sitting on your coffee table.

This book is a best seller for a reason. A sure-fire A+ gift to buy for yourself or your boss.

Highly recommended to fans of dark comedy. I do not read many comic strips as i find the humor to be far too broad, and the artwork usually too dull. PBF changed all that for me. Each 3 panel comic tells an entire story, while also creating entire worlds. Not everyone will find the humor in PBF funny, and may very well offend those with weak sensibilities. Do you think it would be possible for you to laugh at a kid stuck in a barn buring down? Or how about a little girl and her friends being killed by a velociraptor? If you cringe at the thought of these, don't bother here. This is for fans of perverse, strange, and dark comedy. I keep this book on my coffee table and show it to guests to determine their worth as human beings. If they laugh, they are my friends for life, if they just give a puzzled/disaproving scowl, I quickly show them the door, and sit proudly upon my pedastal of self-righteousness.

Nicholas Gurewitch is an absolute genius. There is truly nothing else that can be said about this author and his work. If you want to support the artist, pick up the book. If you want an absurd dark look at life and what lies beyond it pick up this book. You will not regret this purchase. This dark comic will stand as one of the most unique artistic projects for what I believe to be a very long time.

This book is great, comes disguised as a sweet little children's book, with many sick, sad, and ironic comic strips inside. PerryBibleFellowship dot com is the writer/illustrator's website, you can view a lot of the strips there to get a feel for the book.

Before flipping through THE TRIAL OF COLONEL SWEETO, I had never heard of the Perry Bible Fellowship before. The Perry Bible Fellowship is not a bible study, youth meeting, or prayer study. In fact, the Bible has nothing to do with the Perry Bible Fellowship. Instead, the Perry Bible Fellowship is a series of comic strips that appear on-line and in a small number of regular publications. The comics are mostly in color and appear in one to five panes. Unlike typical comic strips, there is no ongoing storylines, very few reoccurring characters, and the style of the comics changes from one strip to another. Also, the strips have no message to deliver.

The Perry Bible Fellowship is all about humor and getting one to laugh. One might think from just looking at the illustrations and the cover of THE TRIAL OF COLONEL SWEETO that the book is a colorful comic book that will appeal to the visual imagination of children. Like everything else about the Perry Bible Fellowship, the visual playfulness is deceiving. THE TRIAL OF COLONEL SWEETO is very funny, but it is NOT for children. The comics in the book are brilliant, offbeat, quirky, disturbed, sometimes bizarre, and often twisted. Despite my better nature, I found myself laughing at most of them; they're like the dead baby jokes that teenagers seem to find so funny. For instance, in "Astronaut Fall" an astronaut falls and burns up in the atmosphere. In the last two panes two children are playing on a cold day and look up to the sky and see and taste "the first snowflake of the season." It takes a moment for the joke to settle in. I laughed at loud because I found the humor so painful. Almost all of the strips included in the book are like that. Some of the jokes are obvious, but most take a moment to understand.

The book also contains an introduction by Jim Woodring, a collection of "Lost Strips" that were not previously published, and a closing list of thank yous from Nicholas Gurewitch.

THE TRIAL OF COLONEL SWEETO is highly recommended for anyone who likes reading the Perry Bible Fellowship or for anyone who likes twisted, offbeat humor.

P.S. COLONEL SWEETO is the first comic in the book.

This book has great sarcasm, irony and mischievous humour only an adult could understand.

In the future, I hope Gurewitch releases extra volumes with the more current material, instead of updating the book.

96 pages? More than enough to convert anyone to this fellowship. This book was that good, and immediately made me a fan of its unique brand of art and humor for life. Sexually daring and intelligently flavored, "The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Others" is easily one of the funniest books I have ever come across, and not because it's lewd or shocking, but because it deals with cartoon characters behaving like crazed adults in no more than four panels per strip. 96 pages doesn't seem like a lot, but every one of the cartoons is idiosyncratic and contains something completely new. It's unlike anything I've ever read before, and the re-readability factor of this book is high. The cover art makes it look like a children's book, but once the very first page is turned and the "For Mature Readers" sign deceptively pops up, we're in completely different territory. Animals, fairy tale characters, household objects, food and an assortment of aliens and monsters all exhibit ridiculously funny behavior and some of the jokes are so well-timed that I found myself pedaling the book to anyone who seemed even remotely depressed. Reading this short collection really brightened up my day, and I can recommend it to anyone looking for a similar fix.

This book was really fun to look through. I am very familiar with the work of the author and I was disappointed that a few of my favorite strips did not make the book, but overall, I was very satisfied.

Very sharp, dark, and always entertaining strips make for a great collection. If you are a frequenter of the site this book is a must buy!

So.. There's not much that I can say really, except if you like dark humor smothering you at the end of each strip, and at times making you read twice to fully understand, then this comic book is for you!

Must have book, and bring on Vol 2 :)

The front cover looks like a kid's book. Thousands of anthropomorphic candies standing in front of a candy castle. Even after staring at the cover for 30 seconds, most people don't seem to notice that the subject of the candies' attention is an m&m being burned at the stake.

The next 97 pages are filled with Gurewitch's dark, humorous comics taken straight from his web site.

I know I could browse through the site to see these comics, but I love his work and want others to see this great collection when visiting my house. A great coffee table book.

I'm a huge fan of "smart people humor", and PBF has never let me down. It was torture having to wait the long months until I received this book for a Christmas present - I was instructed not to buy it from the gift giver.

Two thumbs up, Mr. Gurewitch. Two thumbs up. Hurry up with a sequel already!

A collection of the Perry Bible Foundation's best! I've always enjoyed PBF since I found it online, and the book does not disappoint. You get a nice hardcover that kind of looks like a children's story book, complete with Candyland-esque fonts and pictures. Inside, you get the best of the PBF comics that have been online. They've all been colorized and done in fine detail. For those who have never experienced the PBF, it's hard to describe - it combines some of the best oddities of The Far Side, but with a more biting edge on some of the comics.

Also included are the "lost" comics, but to be honest, I didn't find that section as amusing as the rest of the book.

If you're a fan of the PBF, you'll enjoy this book, and fans of humor in general will find much to like.

The problem a lot of comics face when switching from web or newspapers to collections is the reformatting sometimes alters the presentation too much from the original and some of the charm is lost.

Not so with the Perry Bible Fellowship.

It's printed full color and includes some strips not available on the web. It's a good gift for PBF fans and those sick twisted individuals who have never heard of it before. Just keep it away from the faint of heart!

If you love the Perry Bible Fellowship Comics online, then think of this as a hard-copy back-up. If you are not familiar with the online comics, the book definitely is NOT for children nor is it much of a story but it's instant entertainment. It's modern off-beat humor all the way through: complete with past pop-culture references, and completely random topics. Just remember to read the comics from left to right for the full effect of the jokes. (no cheating!)

This book is a great conversational piece, coffee table decoration or makes an awesome toilet read due to it being a series of short comic strips. I'm no one important but I highly recommend this book.

The Perry Bible Fellowship has long been one of my favourite online comics. The author has a brilliantly twisted sense of humour and a good sense of style. PBF is PBF, even though the illustrations vary a lot between strips, as Gurewitch experiments with different styles and techniques.

This book compiles almost hundred pages worth of strips: not all of them, but most. Few of my personal favourites are missing, yet I'm quite satisfied with the collection. There's some material that's previously unpublished, but it's nothing really interesting. So, if you've already read everything that's on the web site and don't want to buy stuff you've already read, this book offers very little. However, I'm rather glad to have it on my bookshelves.

If you've never heard of Perry Bible Fellowship, I envy you: you have a world of sickly sweet pleasure to explore. Check the web site or buy the book: whichever you do, you won't be disappointed.

I follow PBF pretty closely on the web, but apparently not closely enough to realize there was a book of comics coming out. A coworker a few years ago turned me on to PBF and I've grown to love the off-the-wall, demented, widely varied comics. It's probably mostly the demenetedness.

As one poster pointed out, this is just a collection of strips, with a few unreleased strips at the end of the book. It isn't a story (like it at first might appear) with one of the featured PBF characters. That said, if you know what you're getting, this is worth it. Put it on your coffee table, and watch your friends faces as they partake of the demented deliciousness.

I've been following PBF for several years online, so seeing it in a collection was exciting. The art is varied and talented and always perfectly reflective of the sarcastic, irreverent, sick humor PBF is known for. Not recommended for children or people lacking a good immature sense of fun.

As addictive and wonderful as Perry Bible Fellowship is on the internet, reading it in this book is even better. The artwork looks beautiful in print, and although there aren't a lot of new comics, I could read this book over and over again without getting tired of it. Awesome work!

It's so nice to be able to hold these beautifully drawn cartoons in your hands; to have these lavishly illustrated beauties finally printed on quality paper. I stumbled on PBF from the XKCD Web site, and haven't been the same since. Though I have read most of these cartoons online, they still had me laughing out loud. And as dark and twisted as these cartoons are, some of the artwork is really wonderful. I love that the author uses so many cartooning styles -- they set moods, create contexts, and make the strips even funnier. While some of them can be racy or downright sick at times, they often poigniantly touch on vulnerabilities universal to the human experience.

Thank you, Nicholas, for providing an awesome collection of your strips. I bought two so that my girlfriend has to read her own dang copy. Collect this book now!
Dan the drama teacher.

I really enjoyed spending hours my time scrolling through all the comics on the PBF website, laughing out loud, but now its so much easier to go through the strips and laugh and show them to friends and see their delight. I would recommend ordering a whole bunch and placing them throughout the house, so that you're never too far away from a good intelligent laugh.

Gurewitch perhaps is representative of the future of the comic strip. His comics are aware of their form and their place in the history of the strip, but reject the simplification seen in a lot of newspaper comics (simplified for time constraints and to appear bold and graphic despite the cheap printing process). The book is amazing even just for how unbelievably meticulously wrought every single work is, but even more amazing for how painfully funny it is. His dark humor often makes you feel like a participant in some horrific crime. This book will surely be a comic classic.. even the quality of the binding and cover are made with a nostalgic, '80s or '90s cheap board game feel.

The comics are mixed chronologically in a way that makes for a dynamic visual presentation, but that sometimes gives the feeling that this is the only PBF book that will ever be made. This book is really not a "comprehensive" PBF, because Gurewitch is still making comics that are even more impressive than some of the ones included in this book. I wish this book had more in it (text, comics), but I am really satisfied with it as a whole. It belongs in the library of every lover of comics.

Simply put - one of the most well drawn, witty, and hilarious short comic strips available online (and for those lucky enough, in print too). This comic really carries on the legacy of the Far Side and honestly does it one better. Buy it and you won't be disappointed!

PBF is unlike any other comic out there and I'm really happy it has finally been collected into a book! The art swings between beautifully-polished and incredibly simplistic. The ocassional homage to another style (the Edward Gorey-inspired "The Throbblefoot Aquarium" is one of my favorites) is also refreshing and impressive. The art really compliments the odd but brilliant jokes imbedded in each comic. Some are obvious. Others take a while to sink in - I'm not proud of the fact that it took me over a week to "get" one PBF comic. Five stars for wit, writing, and art. PBF is currently delivering what Gary Larson's "The Far Side" brought to the late 80's, just not for as wide an audience.

As noted by others - NOT for children, unless your kids are just that much cooler than their peers.

Don't get me wrong - I LOVE Nick's work and I've been a fan of his for years. He's my favourite comic artist and I have a lot of respect and admiration for his artwork and his humour. Also, I waited months for this book to not only come out but to get to me from being on backorder.

But, I was under the impression that the book was going to be, well, the Trial of Colonel Sweeto (a character from a past strip). I'm really thrilled for Nick that he's put out a hard copy of all his strips, which heretofore were only available to me via his webpage, but I genuinely thought this book was going to be about Sweeto's trial, as the cover so tantalizingly indicates. And, I was excited about that, and I thought, this is going to be hilarious. But there's no trial of Sweeto in this. This book is a hardcopy of all his comics with very few extras.

I'm sorry Nick, i have to give you three stars - You can't just put a title like that on a book and make people wait four months and then have the content be something completely different. I'm disappointed, and really sorry to say so, too.

Let me say first off that Nicholas Gurewitch is an amazing writer and artist, and his work is spectacular. Some previously black & white strips were colored for this book, and they look great.

My only problem with this book is that there really aren't a lot of extras. There are a couple pages of "lost comics" and that's it. I was hoping for some commentary, some extra comics exclusive to the book. At the end of the book I was a little underwhelmed.

But don't be put off from buying this book. It's still an excellent piece of work.

I love intelligent humor- it probably doesn't hurt that my husband is a comedian and this style of humor is right up his alley. It also doesn't hurt that this book is full of 3-4 panel strips that will have you laughing out loud. An added plus is that the art-style constantly changes throughout the book. Some strips are very line-heavy, with great attention to detail, while others could have been drawn by a 6 year old.

And, it's very funny. And only for adults. No kids. Seriously. =)

1st: NOT FOR CHILDREN

2nd: Definitely for adults. :D The PBF is such a great comic, zooming from one source of humour to the next. If you're a fan of laughing, then this is for you.

He never panders to the audience, & you may need to read a few to get all of the humour, but each of them is funny right away.

As an added bonus for that fans, there are some "deleted scenes" as it were, and some of the comics that he has removed from the website are in this collection.

Physically, this is a very well bound book, with a pleasant page feel, and would look great on anyone's coffee table, nightstand, or bookshelf.