Sloppiness and meticulousness share the stage in Bill Plympton’s book.

Sloppy Seconds
by Bill Plympton

And how… This is, the author asserts in the preface, “The bottom of the barrel… the dregs.” He shouldn’t be so hard on himself: a lot of gold has leached its way down. The Oscar-winning animator of Your Face and Plymptoons began his career as a cartoonist in New York in the 1970s, and his work for National Lampoon, Playboy and Screw magazines fills much of this recent book. If you didn’t know Plympton dabbled in the dirty stuff, rent I Married a Strange Person before sampling this; there’s a lot of sexually frank and extremely funny material here, including depictions of Yuppie Love, the pleasure/pain principle as illustrated by porcupines, and a game of Adult Musical Chairs that’s guaranteed to stick in the memory.

Plympton’s trademark surrealist whimsy is on display throughout, with body parts assuming the properties of Silly Putty as they stretch and suffer cookie-cutter holes. The keen-eyed will see many of the cartoons that inspired the moving-picture Plymptoons, including Human Crash Tests and the man with open pores.

What’s most interesting about Sloppy Seconds is not the contrast of family-friendly versus ah-whooooga! but slapdash versus meticulous. Doodles that dropped on the author like Satori and were scratched out pronto before evaporating share the pages with some painstakingly detailed, gorgeously classy graphic design. In particular, the series of seven caricatures of cars and their owners that closes the book is captivating eye candy, drawn in the all-but-extinct early ’70s style of ultra-clean lines and pointilist dotted fills.

Sloppy Seconds, as well as the author’s other cartoon collections We Eat Tonight!, Tube Strips and The Sleazy Cartoons of Bill Plympton, are available at the author’s Website (www.plymptoons.com).