Jitterati, by Grant Buist, reviewed by Martin Doyle

THIS is more than a book review. Partly because the book is more than a book: it comes with a wonderful CD.  
Such an “added aspect” is almost what you’d expect from the complex and intriguing creativity of Grant Buist. If he were an animal, the Zoo would spend months trying to identify exactly what he was and even longer building a suitable enclosure to contain him.  
But how do you wall in such off-the-wall brilliance? If I had to, I’d call him a New-Wave-metro-astute-but-lateral comic-strip photographer, artist, humorist, social diarist and political commentator packed into one tight unit every week.  And that would be the quick version.
His Jitterati strip, which appears every week in Capital Times, is an acquired taste for some, manna from heaven for others. He is best understood in comparison with other New Zealand cartoonists.  
Almost to a man, they are smug white conservatives whose cartoons nearly exclusively feature pakeha males, with rare appearances of women (who are either Tits-and-Bums or bitter old harridans, and no exceptions), fat-lipped Maoris (usually gang members), never Samoans, and once a year an Asian with slit eyes in a coolie hat; their prevailing intellectual baggage is ploddy “1950s-cow cockie”.  
Buist’s art is a full-frontal assault on all that, and on all fronts.  He sets his cast of characters in ‘Wellington this week’, and the language and humour are young, sophisticated and wacky. Buist’s cartoon techniques are slick, and delivered in a quaint melange of his own colour photography as background with professionally-drawn figures.  
The Jitterati characters are male, female, straight, gay, Maori, Pakeha, Asian, intelligent, ordinary, socially engaged, witty, cultured, and street-savvy.. In this he is unique and the book is more than good.