Goats: Infinite Typewriters cover image is courtesy of barnesandnoble.com.

Cartoonist Jonathan Rosenberg began his comics strip, Goats, on the web back in 1997, making Rosenberg a webcomics pioneer.  He’s lasted long enough to experience the rising webcomics revolution and is perhaps one of the few to reap considerable financial rewards from the medium.

Goats: Infinite Typewriters is the first of a planned three-book set (Goats: The Infinite Pendergast Cycle) that will reprint about four and a half years worth of Goats comics.  Infinite Typewriters reprints material published on the Goats website from December 2003 to January 2006.  Apparently, this book also includes “newly revised and created material.”

Actually, none of that matters very much for potential new readers, who want to know if Goats: Infinite Typewriters is worth reading.  It is.  It’s quite funny.

Goats is science fiction ensemble comedy that travels through dimensions and across time with all the inventive absurdity of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  Goats has the kind of oddball cast that would be funny in practically any comics strip or comic book.  There are two humans: the suffering smart guy Jon and the dumb blonde Phillip, but the comic luminaries of this insanity are some devilishly smart funny animals: the evil chicken, Diablo; his son, the thuggish chick, Oliver; the evil and conniving goat, Toothgnip; and the dual personality cyborg, Fish/Fineas.

The material reprinted in Infinite Typewriters has been reconstituted and revamped to turn these two plus years of Goats into a graphic novel.  The overall arc of this story takes the cast from eating god and time travel to a Mayan hell and a planet of monkeys tapping on infinite typewriters.  The word “surreal” doesn’t do this book justice, nor does “sci-fi parody” really describe the humor here.  Goats is like Red Dwarf meets Monty Python’s Flying Circus with Seinfeld’s deft mix of sharp sarcasm and dry wit.  There’s so much funny, crazy stuff in here that I could enjoy Goats: Infinite Typewriters for weeks.

www.goats.com