Book Review: Jon Link and Mick Bunnage's Modern Toss

review by anna battista

If you are tired of practically everything in your life and are looking for something to cheer you up, you should definitely read the Modern Toss book: its authors, Jon Link and Mick Bunnage, first started doing illustrations and cartoons for the site shitflap.com and later published them on magazine Modern Toss. The first two issues of the mag have now been published in book format for the joy of all the Modern Toss fans.

Each page of this book is populated by psychotic, violent characters, whose absurdist dialogues are often studded with swearwords and obscenities. Leaf through the pages of Modern Toss and meet the many deranged characters (all drawn in a minimalist, almost childish style) created by Link and Bunnage: among the others, Mr Tourette, the master signwriter who always ends up writing obscenities on planes, vans, houses and balloons (the man who asks Mr Tourette to write "Peter's Coffee Shop" on his van, later finds "PETER'S BOLLOCKS" scribbled on it. "Oh no, this isn't what I wanted," he complains. "You're going to have to be a bit more fucking specific," Mr Tourette replies him); Prince Edward, Royal Entrepreneur, who tries hard to sell everything belonging to the royal family, teeth and hair included; the two astronauts perennially quarrelling on the moon about futile things and the two violent daytrippers, constantly planning trips to harm or kill someone or destroy something.

These one-page long cartoons are demented, crazy and obscene. But hardly anybody can resist to dialogues such as "Let's go to Ikea" "Fuck Ikea" or "Are you worried about genetic engineering?" "Yeah, it might extinct me". Link and Bunnage also worked on the animation series "Outdoor TV Watcher", taken from their cartoon of a little man with a big chainsaw destroying forests and messing up nature to make more space to watch his TV (a cartoon included in this book as well). What else to add about Modern Toss? Well, that it has already become a cult and hence it can't be missed!

{www.panmacmillan.com, www.moderntoss.com}

Issue 27, October 2004