Trashed

by Derf Backderf

Overview

2016 Eisner Award Winner for Best Lettering

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781613128657
Publisher:	Abrams, Harry N., Inc.
Publication date:	11/03/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	123 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Derf Backderf is the bestselling author of My Friend Dahmer and the recipient of the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for political cartooning. His weekly comic strip, The City, appeared in more than one hundred newspapers over the past twenty-two years. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/29/2015
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. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

The microcosm of Backderf’s humor-rich, coming-of-age story expands toward larger social and cultural themes, including the idea that ‘we all contribute to the staggering, never-ending accumulation of waste on this planet.’

Shelf Awareness (starred review)

Fun, funny, gross and engrossing.

The New York Journal of Books

More than anything else, the book is funny, very funny. At times, it’s a laugh-out-loud kind of funny rarely found in graphic novels. It might even make you think.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer online

It’s all far more entertaining than it sounds, thanks to the likeability of J.B. and his at-loose-ends roommates . . . and Derf’s slightly off-kilter, pleasantly ungainly drawings.

Booklist

Intriguing, hilarious, and stinky.

Entertainment Weekly

Trashed is both entertaining and unnerving.

The A.V. Club

It’s all far more entertaining than it sounds, thanks to the likeability of J.B. and his at-loose-ends roommates . . . and Derf’s slightly off-kilter, pleasantly ungainly drawings.

Booklist

09/15/2015
A dead cat. A headless deer. A dismembered car. A piano. A phone booth. People throw the darnedest things out, and together with the ever-present maggots and "diaper bombs," these artifacts wind up inside Betty, J.B.'s garbage truck. And from there, alas, into landfill. The setting and characters of J.B. and colleagues at the "Village Service Department" are fictional, but their misadventures were inspired by the cartoonist's actual post-high school job as a garbageman in the rural Midwest. A dead opossum and bags of dog droppings, for example, make excellent weapons against random adversaries. Such messy and hilarious antics are tempered with nonfiction interludes describing the history and scale of human garbage. Indeed, a family of four dumps nearly 1,500 bags a year. VERDICT Backderf's (My Friend Dahmer) detailed and grimy art is perfect for this raucous piece of infotainment about the crappiest of necessary crap jobs. His intentionally tasteless yet informative approach may not persuade readers to use less "stuff," but it might encourage them to bag their trash more neatly. For high schoolers and adults hospitable to tales about the underside of life.—M.C.

Library Journal