Louder Than Words, Actions Speak by Sergio Aragonés

Sergio Aragonés is one of the modern masters of comics; I freely admit that. He draws quickly, really well, and in a distinctive, inherently amusing cartoony style that's more flexible and subtle than it looks. It's hard to talk about his writing, since he usually works with Mark Evanier on anything that has actual words in it and so it's difficult to tell what's pure Aragonés and what Evanier adds to the mix.

I keep picking up his books, now and then: his drawing is just funny, and his pages filled with details. A lot of the time, it's been Groo comics, which I've been reading off and on since the late '80s when my kid brother was a big fan and I read anything in comics format that came anywhere near my eyes. And, let me be polite, Groo is a collection of a few running jokes - maybe a dozen at most, with some variations - assembled in slightly different configurations monthly for decades and then slightly less often more recently. And none of those jokes are what anyone might mistake for high-brow.

So, this time, I thought: let's try some pure Aragonés. Louder Than Words, Actions Speak is a big book - well over three hundred pages - of wordless single-page comics, nearly all of them in a multi-panel format. The jokes are somewhat older than I expected: this book came out in 2024, but it collects the 6-issue Louder Than Words series from 1997 and the six-issue Actions Speak series from 2001. So there are only a couple of cellphones here, and they're the kind with a stubby antenna at the top left and a scribble to show where the keypad is.

That's OK, because Aragonés is mostly using old joke setups anyway. There are lots of kids on skateboards, people at the beach, circuses and wrestling matches, angels and animals, priests and doctors, museums and aliens and cheerleaders, muggers and ghosts and Mexican bandits. The biggest group of cartoons are about dating, with jokes about condoms and family members hiding while the couple is making out and similarly durable funnies. I would be hard-pressed to find any surprising joke in the three hundred or so here, and it would be harder to find one that could be considered entirely original - but that's not what Aragonés is doing here.

Wordless jokes have to be at least somewhat familiar: they need to be understandable without words. So we get Tarzan or King Kong; we know exactly who they are. These are all, in the Year of Our Lord 2025, dad jokes - durable, dependable, slightly shop-worn; the kind you recognize quickly and can practically tell yourself. (Well, you could tell them yourself if you could draw like Aragonés, which, if so: that's impressive.)

So the material is very familiar. It's quite possible to do wordless jokes that are not quite this obvious, but Aragonés, I think, is from the Mexican equivalent of the Borscht Belt, where standard jokes grow on trees and the children grow up telling each other "take my wife, please!" at every turn. It's not a problem, exactly - it is what it is; he is the creator he is - but a reader has to accept it, and, preferably, be ready for it.

This book is definitely funny. But, no matter how old you are - I'm in my mid-fifties - it will feel slightly older than you are, and you need to be willing to go with that.