Manx Media Graphic Novels by Steve Lafler

"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

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!

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.

Steve Lafler is the cartoonist behind BugHouse, Baja and Scalawag, a trio of graphic novels about bugs on drugs playing be-bop jazz, and the seminal indie comic book series Dog Boy, featuring a lad with a canine head on a zen-trickster rampage through Reagan-era America.

"…the story itself is all too sympathetic and cannot be put down. Highly recommended." -- Michael J. Carson, Midwest Book Review

Listen to an interview on KPFA 94.1 FM Berkeley with Steve Lafler

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.

Graphic Novels & Comic Books