TWENTY-FIVE artists take readers on a charter ride on Le Bateau Ivre in Drunk: A Comic About Bar Stories, a small-press, limited-edition book. Reprints include Ivan Brunetti's keen itty-bitty bestiary of beastly drunks, and his two-page autobiographical story of extreme self-loathing—extreme even by the standards of adult comics, which means five floors below Dostoevsky's underground.

Five fine reprinted pages by Kim Deitch feature Waldo the Cat, megrim of a drunk and disorderly pioneering animator disgusted by the cuteness of the animation world of the 1930s. Some of the most bizarre outsider art ever seen is the drawings of Norman Pettingill, full of visions of North Woods revelry: crowded bucket-of-blood taverns where grimacing taxidermed animals giving the eye to huge-bottomed hags. Jay Pink's scary narrative of drinkers he has known includes a confession to being accessory after the fact in one drunken murder—fiction, hopefully.

Evan Dent's "Hot Dog Millionaire" illustrates a low-ball dirty joke, of the sort people enjoy when they're in their cups. What makes it stick, though, is not the vile story, but Dent's strange figures—humanoid dogs or bears, devoid of fur and of any touch of cuteness. Jay Bailey, Chad Brown, Sean Russell and Erin Stellmon take the smart road of reporting the strange dialogue one might here anywhere the neon glows and the drunkards ramble. The introduction is by renowned Las Vegas tavernaut Jarrett Keane.

DRUNK: A COMIC ABOUT BAR STORIES; $25; order from www.vegasdrunk.com

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