Friday, November 24, 2023

Oh No by Alex Norris

This book is very nearly a parody of itself, which is delightful and lovely. It's also a collection of quick-reading webcomics with a bite, which is also quite spiffy.

Oh No is a collection of webcomic name - there's a part of me that wishes that creator Alex Norris used the "real" name for the book, but that's probably much too arch for any conceivable room - named as the thing that ever reader already knows it by and assumes it's titled to begin with. (As a sidebar, not only am I really happy there exists a webcomic called webcomic name, but Norris's strip is about as perfect as anything under that name could be.)

You've seen these online, sometime since Norris started the strip in 2016: three panels, generally of brightly-colored blobby forms that are generally to be taken as humans, in which a situation is set up, complicated, and then knocked down by the inevitable punchline. It's a formalist joke, I guess: a reaction to all of the "relatable comics" that were popular at the time, distilling them down to the essence: here is a thing, here is more about the thing, ironic conclusion!

The book collects about a hundred and twenty-five of those strips, on various topics and ideas, from the first three years of webcomic name. (The book appeared in 2019. Linear time being what it is, it cannot include strips created after that.)

If you like those "oh, no" comics - and, let's be real, that's what you call them - you might as well check out the book. It's the same thing, just more of it, and we all know Americans can't get enough of more. (Note: Alex Norris is not American. This does not alter my point, but I say it because otherwise someone will attempt to win Internet Points by saying it first. No. All the Internet Points are mine, here on my very 2007-style blog.)

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