Trashed
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4.1 • 7 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Every week we pile our garbage on the curb and it disappears—like magic! The reality is anything but, of course. Trashed, Derf Backderf’s follow-up to the critically acclaimed, award-winning international bestseller My Friend Dahmer, is an ode to the crap job of all crap jobs—garbage collector. Anyone who has ever been trapped in a soul-sucking gig will relate to this tale. Trashed follows the raucous escapades of three 20-something friends as they clean the streets of pile after pile of stinking garbage, while battling annoying small-town bureaucrats, bizarre townfolk, sweltering summer heat, and frigid winter storms. Trashed is fiction, but is inspired by Derf’s own experiences as a garbageman. Interspersed are nonfiction pages that detail what our garbage is and where it goes. The answers will stun you. Hop on the garbage truck named Betty and ride along with Derf on a journey into the vast, secret world of garbage. Trashed is a hilarious, stomach-churning tale that will leave you laughing and wincing in disbelief.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After the gut-wrenching psychological investigation/memoir My Friend Dahmer, indie comic stalwart Backderf returns to the scabrous humor and pointed commentary of his earlier work with a loose scattering of stories about the garbage men in a small, decaying Ohio town. A onetime garbage man himself, Backderf has a clear affinity for these hardworking stiffs and their travails. If they're not getting hassled by their uptight boss, they're dealing with the daily challenges of the sanitation business: liquefied garbage frozen solid in their cans, swarms of maggots, corpse-waking smells, biblical weather, the puzzle of how to get an upright piano weighing several hundred pounds into a garbage truck. The blocky grotesquerie of Backderf's art is well-suited to the material, and the episodic, slackerish narrative is spiked here and there by brief lessons on the history of the garbage truck, the ecology of the landfill, and an answer to the question of whether rich or poor neighborhoods generate the most trash (hint: it's not the poor). A downbeat but entertaining ode to the odiferous realities of getting by.
