Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies not only pays homage to American comic strips, it goes one better - it's a strip in novel form. Like the funnies, this novel teems with comic grotesqueries, the bizarre and the far-fetched, criminals of all persuasions, tricky twists of irony, and many an amazing adventure. In New York City, 1936, the legendary cartoonist Walter Geebus - self-confessed forger, back-stabber, misanthrope, and hot-goods passer - is hospitalized with a mysterious ailment. Was the old bastard poisoned - again? Although Geebus is stricken, possibly forever, his popular comic strip about an orphan boy and his smart-aleck talking dog must go on, as it has every day for the last forty years in hundreds of newspapers. But who can ghost the great Geebus and satisfy millions of avid readers who turn each morning to "Derby Dugan" for comic relief in hard times? The frantic search for a replacement begins. . Narrated by the cynical Al Bready, Walter's scriptwriter and a lightning-fast author of pulp fiction, Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies conjures up a world of colorful characters. There's Howard Blum, surly and mysterious, a supremely talented comic artist with a secret past that he'll do anything to conceal; Clark Kamen, a former bootlegger, now the proprietor of a burgeoning comic-book company employing (make that exploiting) a small army of hungry boys; and Jewel Rogers, Clark Kamen's girl Friday, a woman with the world's most paralyzingly beautiful smile. Al Bready's New York City of 1936 is a wondrous and electric place, a tabloid town of swank nightclubs, seedy hotels, and cozy brothels; an Art Deco metropolis rife with gangsters, tycoons, gossip mongers, and dazed men and women waiting on long breadlines.