Wombat

''Wombat'' is a cartoon strip from Vancouver artist Rod Filbrandt and the precursor to his long-lived and much loved strip, ''Dry Shave''. In ''Wombat: The Collected Comic Strip'' the reader witnesses the development of a cartoon strip and the characters that fill its frames, from its nascent, raw stages, when it first ran in Discorder-a UBC Campus paper- in the late 1980s, on through numerous growth spurts, to the amazingly polished strides of the early 1990s, and finally to its sad and noirish end in 1994. One can easily see where the artist is going with his extensive cast of louts, drunkards, grifters, drifters, and wannabes of every stripe. You can almost smell the cast of ''Dry Shave'' through the blue smoke and beer mist. "In the mid-''90s underground, there was a hard-drinking, heavy-smoking private eye who went on seedy, hallucinatory journeys in black-and-white - navigating hellish terrains and nastier people. It was written and drawn by Vancouver cartoonist Rod Filbrandt, and the character was named Wombat. An incredibly stylish and unique series ..." - Fast Forward Weekly (Calgary) "Running from the mid ''80s until 1994, ''Wombat'' showcased Rod Filbrandt''s wry and jaded views on modern society and his incredible growth and progression as a cartoonist. ... a great representation of the formative years of one of the best cartoonists this country has produced." - Broken Pencil