Sorry I Ruined Your Childhood by Ben Zaehringer

I'm reading a bunch of collections of webcomics lately, for no obvious reason. More specifically: books of webcomics I don't regularly read, to get a concentrated burst of new gag-a-day stuff.

Well, let's not be precious here: there's no mystery. I've always liked the rhythms of a gag-a-day strip. I'm of the age that grew up with newspaper dailies - they used to be printed larger, they used to be more varied within a paper and between papers, they used to be mostly by their actual creators who were mostly still alive. That field has gotten stonier and duller over the last three decades, obviously. The only newspaper strip that I currently read in reprint collections is Will Henry's Wallace the Brave - which I highly recommend, by the way.

Luckily, newspapers aren't the only home for gag-a-day. Webcomics platforms might be poorly capitalized, sometimes fly-by-night, difficult to discover or navigate, and vastly less ubiquitous than newspapers used to be, but they exist, and the barrier for entry is far lower. (Is that the mantra of the Internet Age? "Sure, it's crappier in almost every aspect of the experience, but everyone can and already does it!")

That's how I got to Sorry I Ruined Your Childhood, at least. It's the first collection of Ben Zaehringer's Berkeley Mews strip, which can be found on GoComics. (One of the two big platforms for newspaper-style comics, and the more-easily-accessible one at that.) It was published in 2019, by Andrews McMeel, who sometimes seem to be keeping the lights on for gag-a-day comics in book form all by themselves.

Childhood collects 137 strips - my guess is that these are the first 137 strips of Berkeley Mews, maybe even in roughly original-publication order, but Zaehringer has no continuing characters or situations, so he could easily have arranged these in a different order on purpose. Most commonly, they're three equal-sized panels, like late Peanuts, but Zaehringer also does strips as vertical tiers or four panels pretty regularly. That's the one clear advantage of a webcomic: a JPG file on a page doesn't have to fit any size or configuration constraints; HTML will adjust around whatever size and shape it is.

Zaehringer draws round-headed people, often in bright colors, usually without hair - he can and does draw in other styles for specific gags, especially references (Zelda, Mario, Disney movies, etc.), but he's got a standard style for the general gags. The title implies that these are mostly comics about cultural references from his childhood (mostly the '90s), but that's not really the case. I didn't do a count, but it's only maybe a third of the comics that are references like that - and, even there, I'm probably including vaguer things like "Santa" and "God on a cloud creating the Earth."

The bottom line is: I like Zaehringer's gags. They're funny, they're well-constructed, and he's a varied enough artist to switch up his style to sell each gag the way it needs to be sold. He's a bit like a more prolific, but not quite as protean, Perry Bible Fellowship. I'm looking forward to catching up with this strip.