Canadian Tami Knight started drawing cartoons about climbers when the glaciers were a lot larger and seems to have been on the scene for years with her whacky brand of humour enlivening the pages of Alpinist and other North American climbing magazines and being responsible for unrestrained giggling emanating from lavatories from Vancouver to Sydney.
From the Foreword by Jon Krakauer, "In 1981, Knight started to draw cartoons inspired by the absurdities of climbing. She found a wealth of material simply by observing the fanatical, oddball climbers she hung out with. In her cartoons, they were depicted as rats with long tails, beady eyes, and pointy noses. The rats were usually wearing climbing harnesses and chalk bags, but no clothing. Like Knight’s real-life friends, the rats were dirty, smelly, constantly broke, totally obsessed with climbing, and excessively fond of beer and single malt Scotch whisky. Many of the rats were surprisingly charming…
Knight had found her calling. She saw herself as the climbing tribe’s court jester, keeping inflated egos in check with affectionate ridicule. Her demented cartoons became a hugely popular feature in the most widely-read climbing magazines of the day. For North American climbers, she was our Charles M. Schulz, our Gary Larson, our very own R. Crumb.
Over the decades, Knight published six books of climbing cartoons. In this book, her seventh, almost every cartoon she’s created since 1981 has been collected in a single magnificent volume that provides a grimy window into our peculiar, alarmingly-addictive sport."
Actually that's not quite true, for some reason nothing from Tami Knight Returns is included, and that slim book contained some of her best stuff, and very few cartoons from her surreal Everest: The Ultimate Hump made the cut - probably the greatest commentary on the sad circus that the highest peak in the world has become ever written.
But heck, there's enough in here to keep a Tami fan amused for hours, so in the words of the author "C’mon in and enjoy Knight’s rats and humans as they get up to mountains of mischief! This book may even help you re-work yer primal scream!"
Written and illustrated by Tami Knight - many of the cartoons are now in colour too.
Available in Hardback and Paperback, 29cm x 22.5cm, quite a lot of pages (they're not numbered).
Published 2024 by Tellwell.
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-77962-266-2.
ISBN (hardback): 978-1-77962-267-9.
PS Vol III is just Ms Knight's little joke - there never was a Vol I or II.