Oddball by Sarah Andersen

So I kinda like Sarah Andersen's cartoons, as discerning readers may have noticed [1]: she writes funny, she draws funny, and she has a quirky sensibility that means she tells goofy "I am an introvert" jokes that are familiar and relatable but not obvious. Just really good at the being-funny-in-public thing, with a distinct sensibility and viewpoint and art style.

Also, her books are short and breezy, which means they're easy to pick up on a day when you feel like reading funny cartoons and not like diving into a whole thing of a graphic novel.

So: I think I've read all of her books in the past year, and am now caught up. (They're all short, so it's not like it was difficult in any way - and, again, each one is fun and breezy and funny.) Cryptid Club, which came out about a month ago, was the most recent, and I just caught up with the fourth collection of her main "series" Sarah's Scribbles, Oddball.

This book is very much like the previous Sarah's Scribbles collections - Adulthood Is a Myth, Big Mushy Happy Lump and Herding Cats - with a little over a hundred single-page comics about a cartoon version of Sarah doing her daily-life thing, presumably just that bit more awkwardly and amusingly than the real Andersen does. If you like any of them, you'll like all of them. If you can't stand any of them - I could characterize why you don't like them, but humor is a taste, so it could be any reason - then you'll probably dislike them all.

This one is the Pandemic Book: it was published in 2021 (though there's at least one cartoon with a looming "2022" in it, so I think it came out late in '21 and some of it was done right near deadline) and some of it deals with the expected "I hate having to go out in public and see human beings, but now I am forbidden to do that and have mixed feelings" stuff. But that's a minor strain - it's mostly the same kind of jokes, focusing on the Sarah character, who as always I hope is a really exaggerated-for-effect version of Andersen herself. (If any of us were the ways we try to amusingly portray ourselves, the world would be even wackier than it is.)

Anyway. I like this. I think it's funny, and that Andersen is a big talent. I'm excited to see her do more tightly-themed books like Fangs and Cryptid Club, since I think those will give her more runway to do more complex jokes (and even story-like things, if she wants to), but her core funny comics are still swell, too. This is a good book for a day when you just want a pick-me-up.

[1] Assuming you've seen my posts about (in reverse chronological order) Cryptid Club, Herding Cats, Big Mushy Happy Lump, Fangs, and/or Adulthood Is a Myth.