Rube Goldberg: Inventions

 From the faculty room book exchange shelf at my school.

Title: Rube Goldberg: Inventions
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Date: 2000
Writer: Maynard Frank Wolfe, Rube Goldberg
Artist: Rube Goldberg

Rube Goldberg is one of those artists that many people have an idea of their work without ever having actually seen any of it. At a D&D game recently, I elaborated on the "Dwarves are art deco and and elves are art nouveau" meme by adding, "and gnomes are Rube Goldberg". My crew of geeks got exactly what I meant, even though they'd probably never read an actual Rube Goldberg comic strip. Goldberg is iconic. The classic "Rube Goldberg Machine" is a device that does a simple task in the most complicated manner possible, and it has become a fixture of school competitions around the world.

Goldberg wrote and drew his The Inventions of Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts strip for an incredible fifty years from 1914 to 1964. He was a prolific artist with many other published comic strip, some of which rivaled his Inventions in longevity.

This book provides a nice biography of Goldberg, introduces his early and non-Inventions work, and the gives a wide selection of the Inventions cartoons grouped around general themes.

While the style gets a little repetitive, there are some brilliant details, featuring fantastical animals, pop culture and political satire, and just utter ridiculousness to be found throughout the drawings.

Goldberg's references to concepts like suicide and homelessness come of as a bit insensitive by current standards, but a lot of the political humor on topics like the stock market are still spot-on.

This was a nice overview and a good introduction to the works of a artist who is well known by reputation, but not actually read as often as when his work was a fixture of the newspapers.

Rating: 7/10