Fante Bukowski

Picture a man in a dimly lit motel room, a six-pack of cheap beer at his elbow, hammering away at a typewriter with the fevered conviction of a literary messiah. His name is Fante Bukowski—at least, that’s what he calls himself—and he is writing the Great American Novel. The only trouble is, he is spectacularly, almost transcendently, talentless. But don’t expect that inconvenient truth to slow him down.

About the Series

Noah Van Sciver’s Eisner-nominated trilogy—Fante Bukowski (2015), Fante Bukowski Two (2017), and Fante Bukowski Three: A Perfect Failure (2018)—trains its unsparing eye on a self-styled literary genius hurtling through one cringe-detonated disaster after another. Born Kelly Perkins but reborn as a fusion of his idols John Fante and Charles Bukowski, our hero consorts with the debased and the downtrodden, torch-sings through romantic relationships, ghostwrites a teen celebrity’s memoirs, manages to set a motel on fire, and all the while remains shimmeringly, delusionally certain that fame and adoration are just one more poem away.

Published by Fantagraphics, the series draws deep from the well of Van Sciver’s own early years as a struggling cartoonist in Denver—the hunger, the humiliation, the willingness to press a minicomic into the hands of anyone who made eye contact. “I was a ‘struggling, unappreciated’ cartoonist in my early 20s,” Van Sciver confessed to The Comics Journal, “and did and thought a lot of things that I’m deeply ashamed of now.” That raw autobiographical nerve is what gives the series its peculiar, queasy power: you’re howling at Fante, yes, but you’re also wincing in recognition, because somewhere in his grandiosity you see the ghost of your own most embarrassing ambitions.

The entire glorious trainwreck was collected in The Complete Works of Fante Bukowski (2020), a 464-page hardcover that lovingly apes the Library of America format—complete with bonus material, a foreword by novelist Ryan Boudinot, visual tributes from two dozen cartoonists (including Box Brown, Ed Piskor, and Simon Hanselmann), and a facsimile of the long-lost “6 Poems.” It earned a well-deserved 2021 Eisner Award nomination for Best Humor Publication.

Writing in The Comics Journal, Leonard Pierce declared the collection “a must-own for anyone who’s serious about comics right now,” singling out its “deftness, skill, craft, and cheerily desperate resonance.” The AV Club praised how “Van Sciver has established himself as a thoughtful cartoonist with a talent for exploring the complexities of the human condition with a pointed sense of humor.” It’s that razor-sharp blend of compassion and cruelty that makes Fante Bukowski so much more than a simple satire—it’s a love letter to the beautiful, heartbreaking delusion of anyone who has ever dared to make art.

Perfect for fans of the literary takedowns of The Rejection Collection, the cringe-comedy of The Office (if it were set in a dive bar), and anyone who has ever sat through a painfully earnest open-mic poetry reading and felt their soul gently depart their body.