Out to Lunch: Cartoons with an Appetite for the Ridiculous

This book, Out to Lunch - Cartoons with an Appetite for the Ridiculous by Rich Diesslin contains over 170 of his favorite Out to Lunch cartoons. The idiom “Out to Lunch” (OTL) means crazy or out of touch with the reality, so that seemed a fitting strip name for Rich's single-panel general comic. OTL cartoons have been around for more than a decade in various forms and various media including newspapers, magazines, on the internet at the-cartoonist.com and on merchandise. If you haven’t heard of them before, that’s not surprising since the plethora of media outlets still only reach a limited audience. Hopefully you’ll see them more and more in the future and you can find them weekly at the-cartoonist.com. Polly Keener, cartoonist and creator of the Hamster Alley cartoon strip sums it up this way: “Rich displays a quirky Gary Larson-esque sense of humor in lots of fun, often animal-centered, cartoons. But, of course, there are funny people, humorous holidays and all manner of other toons, too. In Out to Lunch, he makes the viewer think a bit. Sometimes, his humor can be very subtle, but keep looking until you have that satisfying “Aha!” moment. He manages to pack a lot into his drawings and keep the wording to a minimum – a real achievement. Many cartoonists consider a “sight gag,” where all or most of the humor is purely visual, the most accomplished type of cartoon humor of all. Out to Lunch offers a whole smorgasbord of cartoons and all neatly classified in the Table of Contents (rare in cartoon books) so you can find your favorite topics fast.” Rich is also the cartoonist of two other comic panels - a scout cartoon called Knots or Not and a biblical cartoon called the Cartoon Gospels.