Well, This Is Me is the first collection of his work, gathering about a hundred and fifty cartoons plus three new interstitial pieces (Introduction, Interlude, and Epilogue) in which a cartoon Perlman talks about his work in an deliberately humorous over-intellectual style to another character who gets fed up with that.
Back when I was a wee lad, cartoon collections like this just shoveled the cartoons in willy-nilly, and didn't show any evidence of organization. You got two hundred Charles Addams cartoons, in whatever order they were in after the editor dropped the file three or four times, and you liked it. Nowadays - my theory is because desktop publishing makes it easy to move things around, but that explanation is a good thirty years old now - cartoon collections tend to have thematic chapters, as if we all think "OK, I want to read a bunch of Peter Arno cartoons right now, but only if they are all about animals."
Whatever the reason for it, that's what Perlman does: there are four major sections. The first one is titled "Well, This is Work" and the others cover Play, Love, and Life. They are vague, and a really argumentative reader could probably find a few to insist they should really be in another category. But the categories are broad enough that we don't get, say, ten doctor's-office cartoons in a row.
Perlman is smart and funny and has both amusing wordplay and amiably dumpy people in his cartoons: he's good at all of the pieces of the cartooning gestalt. He writes funny and he draws funny. There are a dozen or more cartoons here that I let out audible noises while reading - maybe not a full guffaw, but some variety of quick laugh. And there are about as many cartoons where I thought the idea and the specific wording was brilliant - some of these are the same cartoons as the forced-me-to-make-noise ones, I guess.
Anyway: funny, smart, amusing. If you like New Yorker-style single-panel cartoons at all, you'll like this book.
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