The Non Sequitur Guide to Finance by Wiley Miller

I was going to say that Wiley Miller's strip Non Sequitur appears in my paper, and I've been reading it for a decade or two, but that I've never read a book of his collected cartoons.

I was going to say that, but then I searched the Antick Musings archives, and found a post way back in the depths, circa 2006, in which I was less than pleased with the then-new Color Treasury book. I see my opinion has somewhat shifted - or maybe I'm now resigned to the multi-panel Miller and find his continuity work at least less cloying than so many other daily cartoonists.

I've now read another collection of Non Sequitur, which is, quirkily enough, from only a few years after that Color Treasury. The Non Sequitur Guide to Finance is a digital-only short collection from 2012, featuring only the old-style single panels that I claimed in that 2006 post were massively superior to the longer multi-panel work Miller had been shifting to in the early Aughts.

As you can guess from the timing, this is largely comics about finance bros, the 2008 crash, and related topics. It's in no way a neutral look at finance; it's from a moment in time when that sector of the economy had just massively shit the bed and ruined the lives of many of the rest of us. On the other hand, many of us are cynical towards finance even in the best of times - I spent a number of years after that crash in a finance-adjacent space, and got my share of cynicism then.

Looking at this book, I think I do still really like Miller's black-and-white, single-panel work best. It gives him the opportunity to make stronger images, with a tighter focus. (I particularly like his very toothy dogs, of which he had a lot in this era.) His people are lumpy and grumpy, which is excellent for something editorial-cartoon-adjacent like the work in this book. And he's good at the stark, specific single image, which is required by the single-panel form.

So this is a short book, and possibly an outdated one - the next crash will be caused by the AI morons, and is chugging down the tracks right now - but its heart is in the right place, and it's saying things (in a cynical, humorous, not-entirely-fair way, like so many cartoons) that a lot of people have forgotten since 2008 or 2012.