Dapper Caps & Pedal-Copters is the third collected volume of David Malki’s tremendously funny, dementedly complex clip art/steampunk comic Wondermark. Wondermark strips are made of collaged Victorian woodcuts along with snide, funny, weird dialog and commentary (there’s also a lot of ancillary footnotes and such).
Dapper Caps collects 75-odd pages of published strips, along with a gallery of rejected strips, a long color story about a steam-powered robot that can find anything for its owner (except fulfillment), and an entire kids book presented, upside-down, in a single lines on the bottom margin of each page.
Apart from being a doubtless royal pain in the ass to typeset, Dapper Caps is just plain wonderful. Malki adds a bunch of original prose to accompany the strips, some of it screamingly funny (I literally snarfed water out my nose at the stuff on p17). It’s just the perfect thing to settle down with on a summer Sunday and point out to your slightly puzzled loved ones.
