War and Peas: Hi, Earth by Elizabeth Pich & Jonathan Kunz

I almost missed that this is a War and Peas book - the series title is small on the cover, discreet, like a barely-credited third co-author. But it is: this is a somewhat themed, somewhat shorter collection of War and Peas comics on vaguely ecological, or sometimes just natural, themes.

There are eighty-eight comics in Hi, Earth. All of them previously published on their website, all of them by the team of Elizabeth Pich and Jonathan Kunz. (As I understand it, they co-write and then mostly trade off drawing - I haven't been able to detect a difference in drawing styles, which could be a defect in my eye.) Mostly 4-panel, though there are a few large single panels, some that run to six or eight, and a few New Yorker-style captioned drawings.

When I say the theme is "somewhat," that's because I'm not sure if these strips were specifically chosen to be in a rough theme, or if this is just what Pich & Kunz make jokes about anyway, so they leaned into calling it a theme. Not everything in the book is about plants and animals and climate change and icebergs, though a lot is. There's also strips about God and aliens - not together, as far as I can remember, mind you - which I find difficult to fit into that overall theme.

So this is basically just a new War and Peas collection. It was published on April 1, so it's still very new. The humor is snarky and modern and the tone is often depressive and the assumption is that humanity is, if not entirely doomed, at least going to go through a lot of bad shit. That's the tone and sense of War and Peas anyway, of course. Oh, and a decent number of the jokes are about either fucking or feces (flinging, eating - you know, the stuff animals get up to if you let them), which may trouble some of you.

I think the first War and Peas book (Funny Comics for Dirty Lovers) is a bigger, fuller menu of the Pich/Kunz work, with some recurring characters that don't show up here. If you're not familiar with the strip, and you have some kind of psychological block against just clicking the website link and reading a bunch of comics there - if so, no judgments, man, we all got shit going on - I'd recommend that book first.

But if you're a dedicated eco-warrior, with a fixie bike and a bottomless pit of scorn for SUVs and more recipes for soy whatever than you can get to before the next coven meeting, than maybe Hi, Earth is the place for you to discover War and Peas. You have your choice of the dead-tree version, which kills forests, or the digital version, which is complicit in the massively colonialist rare-earth trade, so struggle with your conscience and pick one.