Aunt Mary's Kitchen and Other Stories

Spacecraft appear over the highway, housewives get sucked through windows, visions of a Hindu goddess manifest in an oyster bar, and people grow bigger instead of dying in these dynamically illustrated, wonderfully off-kilter comics by a prominent National Lampoon contributor.

For decades, M.K. Brown has been a quiet but potent force in American comics. From the pages of magazines such as National Lampoon, Young Lust, and Arcade to her Dr. N!Godatu animated shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show, Brown crafts her work with an assured line and an untamable sense of humor that’s unlike anything else. 

Gathered here are some of her funniest and dreamiest cartoons, full of surreal scenarios (“What To Do When Cars Won’t Start in Dreams,” “Presidents Who Won’t Stop Growing”) and absurd characters (Earl D. Porker: Social Worker, Mercury: Messenger of God, Mr. Science), many captured in Brown’s signature gorgeous watercolors. 

Also collected here for the first time is the entire run of Aunt Mary’s Kitchen, her National Lampoon strip that begins with an explanation of how to make shepherd’s pie before veering into a visit to the emergency room, encounters with homemade fig bar–thieving doctors, Stevie Wonder on TV, and an alien abduction. 

Aunt Mary’s Kitchen and Other Stories also includes an interview with Brown, who talks about her years cartooning in Canada, Connecticut, and California, among other places. Together, this work confirms Brown as one of the most strikingly original voices in American comics, an artist whose incomparable vision reveals to us the absurdity in the everyday.