The Book of Onions by Jake Thompson

Continuing my streak of reading books of webcomics that I don't realize have recently ended - see, oh, about half-a-dozen posts over the past two or three months - I just found and read the 2018 collection of Jake Likes Onions.

And, as sure as night follows day, when I googled that strip to find the best link for this review, I discovered that the last strip was about a year ago. I'd claim that I'm killing these webcomics, but since it's happening well before I read the book, it would need to be a very wibble-wobbly timey-wimey mechanism to be my fault.

Whatever is actually happening, it feels like there was a die-off event that hit a lot of the things I like (or would like, since it seems to have hit before I was paying attention). So let me just shake my fist futilely at the indifferent cosmos and then move on.

Shake, Shake.

The Book of Onions collects a hundred and twenty "Jake Likes Onions" strips, which originally appeared digitally. They're all by Jake Thompson, who I gather is an onion aficionado. Let me quote the text from the first strip, to give you a sense of the tone, but it should be familiar from similar webcomics:

He was a city boy from the streets of New York
She was a country girl from Arkansas
But it was 1802 and they did not have the means to travel
The End

Mildly cynical, more than a little smartass, full of references and curses - it's smart humor for people with a fairly wide knowledge base and a liking for often-dark humor. The kind of thing that would never in a million years make it into a newspaper: that kind of strip. Consistently a four-panel grid, with a title/caption that often serves as the punchline, or an additional punch-line.

Thompson has a slightly fussy style, with lots of little lines and tones, though his figures are usually very simplified - he uses wide, nearly empty faces with small features, like smiley faces come to life and having found nothing to smile about.

Jake Likes Onions is another one of those strips you've probably seen examples of if you spend much time on social media - it's been shared and cropped and reused a lot, mostly in ways that don't lead back to Thompson's site and don't give him any credit. That's the way the world seems to work now, and did I mention that this strip, like so many others, seems to have ended? There may be a lesson there: if you enjoy things, you need to find ways to support and pay for them, or they go away.

That's all a shame: Jake Likes Onions was consistently funny, with a clear point of view, an art style that was adaptable to lots of different gags, and a wide enough frame of reference to keep being fresh. Maybe it will come back; maybe Thompson will do something else. But this book does exist, at least - the strips aren't just going to bit-rot if and when the hosting fees for the site run out.