Description
248 pages, 6 x 9 inches, BW
Written by Stephen Beaupre, drawn by Steve Lafler
Is it a career, or a series of really lame jobs? Stephen Beaupre (author) and Steve Lafler (cartoonist) pose this timeless question in Forty
Hour Man, a hilarious saga of one working stiff’s three-decade journey into the minimum wage heart of the American Dream. It’s all here – from scrubbing a steakhouse floor with a toothbrush to going bust in the Internet boom. Every bad boss. Every crazy co-worker. All the more shocking because it’s true!
Bio, Beaupre
Stephen Beaupre is a writer, editor, and unrepentant amateur musician. He is best known to comic aficionados as the former co-publisher of the Cat-Head Comics imprint and editor of Buzzard, the 90’s preeminent comic anthology. Post-comic pursuits include Beyond the Fringe, a long-running humor column featured in Worcester Magazine, and hard time in the Internet trench as writer/editor for popular online destinations such as Angelfire, Tripod, and Monster. He is inordinately fond of pancakes.
Bio, Lafler
Ever the maverick marching to his own beat, comics auteur Steve Lafler has several graphic novels to his credit, including “Crazy for You” from Fantagraphics (2026), “Death Plays a Mean Harmonica”, a fictional report on his years living in Oaxaca, Mexico, and “Bug House From the Top’” an imagined history of bebop jazz realized with an all-insect cast. Lafler enjoyed long runs of his improvised Dog Boy comic magazine, and the jaunty, unhinged Buzzard anthology.
Now back in print! Here is praise for the first edition from 2006:
“Lafler wields a most appealing, cartoony style, half The Simpsons,
half Peter Bagge’s Bradleys, and Beaupre is the lower-middle-class
working-stiff spokesman par excellence. An awful lotta guys will
identify.”
- Ray Olson, Booklist
“…the story itself is all too sympathetic and cannot be put down. Highly
recommended.” — Michael J. Carson, Midwest Book Review
From the Boston Sunday Globe, 11/26/06 By
Carlo Wolff
In “40 Hour Man,” Beaupre, of Hudson, and Lafler
(like Sacco, a resident of Portland ) examine the
lower rungs of the working class. Follow Beaupre as
he evolves from stock clerk to “content developer.”
Crack up when Lafler draws buddy Beaupre as a
faux-knowledgeable clerk at the renamed Boston
record store Raspberries. Rejoice that the funny
Beaupre now writes online content for monster.com,
the Internet job placement site. In the tradition of
“American Splendor,” “40 Hour Man” captures the
black humor that can beat back the numbing of the
soul that accompanies mindless work.
