Vancouver’s Rod Filbrandt is set to launch his new book featuring the immortal Wombat, the "knight errant and holy fool" who graced the pages of Discorder and the Georgia Straight between the early ’80s and mid-’90s.

Wombat: The Collected Comic Strip (Anvil Press, $16) shows aspects of Filbrandt’s art getting slicker as the years go by, but his misfit hero—part punk, part Raymond Chandler reject—remains a bespectacled ball of sarcasm, bad nerves, and all-purpose rage (see page 49, where Mr. Dressup’s Casey and Finnegan are threatened with a shiv). Of course, the booze never stops flowing, and every hard-edged drink is a possible door to hallucinatory black magic—or at least to a "color fun" page inviting you to take your crayons to a black-and-white pillar of puke rushing from Wombat. It all adds up to a sharply funny portrait of a darker, less yoga-friendly time.

The launch party gets under way at 7 p.m. Thursday (June 24), in the back room of the Railway Club—a place where, back in the day, you may well have run across Wombat’s ilk.