Last Kiss: Casual Fridays by John Lustig

I felt lazy yesterday, and wanted a book I could read quickly and then write something quickly here. I may have been too lazy, if that's possible. (I have my doubts.)

So I read John Lustig's Last Kiss: Casual Fridays. It's a short, digital-only collection of that strip from 2013 - much like Sex Day, which I read a couple of months ago. In fact, go see that earlier post for all the details of what Last Kiss is and how it works, if you're interested. The short version is: Lustig takes panels from mostly '50s romance comics, cleans them up and has them recolored in a modern style (I think by someone else), then adds snarky new captions. So it's a single-panel comic but entirely out of repurposed artwork, a quirky hybrid of Roy Lichtenstein and Wondermark.

As you can guess from the title of the other book and the cover of this one, the jokes are often directly sexual, but Lustig leans into other clichés as well - there's a big cluster of "women hate cooking" jokes in this book, for example. Since these are all single panels, the jokes need to be quick and tight - not a lot of room for nuance or wordplay.

I got this book - and the previous one before it - from my library app, which is how I'd recommend reading them; they may also be available from the subscription end of Kindle or other similar outlets. There is a retail price, if you're thinking about "owning" it, but, as a 68-page book, it's a higher per-page cost than I'd be comfortable with.