120 Days of Simon TP Top Shelf Simon Gardenfors 1st print

Description

The 120 Days of Simon began in the spring of 2006, when Swedish cartoonist/rapper Simon Gardenfors left his home to spend four months on the road. The rules were simple: During the 120 days he wasn’t allowed to return to his home, or to spend more than two nights at the same place. The result was a wild trip through Sweden as Simon slept on strangers’ couches, ate mescaline, practiced free love, received a death threat, was beaten up, got adopted by a motorcycle gang, drank obscene amounts of alcohol, and sacrificed his underpants to the Nordic god Brage. And that’s just for starters! In art as in burlesque, ya gotta have a gimmick. The one Swedish comics creator Gärdenfors dreamed up was, as a friend drily put it, “Simon sublets his place . . . travels around and stays with people for 120 days. To get some ass.” He scrupulously kept a road diary and, after darkening his own doorway again, drew it up. Boiled it down, too, skipping whole days (too drab? embarrassing?), to produce a latter-day On the Road, via commuter-train rather than auto wheels, as full of kicks—loud music, drugs, and “ass”—as any trip Sal and Dean ever took. He even had some alternative religious experience (so there, dharma bums!) while putting on a TV crew. He was mugged, lost the sublet payments, risked losing his new love back home. But then the grant he’d applied for came through. Moralists should hate Gärdenfors as their forebears hated Kerouac, except that he renders himself, friends, and assailants as highly geometric, early-video game figures, so cute that they couldn’t be doing that, could they? Some gimmick! This book is in near mint condition and is a first printing!

Near mint, 1st print.