Good Comics for Bad People by Zach M. Stafford

I seem to be unsystematically covering collections of all of the "standard" single-panel webcomics of the day - by "standard" I mean the ones that get shared and reposted widely, so random Internet users will say "oh, I recognize that guy's work" even if they don't know the name of the strip or the creator. And I immediately realize that my standard might not be everyone's, since social-media feeds are all algorithmic these days.

Well, it wasn't a conscious project to begin with. But I have read collections of Ryan Harby's untitled comics (Awkward Pause), Reza Farazmand's Poorly Drawn Lines (Hope It All Works Out!), Ben Zaehringer's Berkeley Mews (How Not to Get into Heaven), Jake Thompson's Jake Likes Onions (The Book of Onions), Jonathan Kunz and Elizabeth Pich's War and Peas (Funny Comics for Dirty Lovers), Christopher Grady's Lunarbaboon (The Daily Life of Parenthood), Jane Zei's Pigeon Gazette (Success is 90% Spite), Ryan Pagelow's Buni (Happiness Is a State of Mind), Alex Norris's Webcomic Name (Oh No), and Nathan W. Pyle's Strange Planet, plus multiple books by both Grant Snider and Sarah Andersen. I don't claim that's everything - it might not even be the bulk of it - but it is a big mass of funny stuff commonly shared online, at least.

So what haven't I seen yet? Well, Zach M. Stafford has been making comics under the name Extra Fabulous for a decade or so (the site itself is the modern-style endless scroll, with no dates and no "about me," to give that feeling of The Eternal Now, so my timeline is vague). And what I think was the first collection of that strip - or, at least, a big, fairly comprehensive collection of that strip - was published in 2023 as Good Comics for Bad People.

To center it a bit, Stafford is the one who draws his characters with one eye floating in the air near their faces. Oh, and the one obsessed with butts. Seriously, something like a third of the strips involve, as Cartman famously almost said, something going in or coming out of someone's ass. (OK, there's also a certain amount of oral contact going on as well, which is not necessarily penetrative. But, still: butts. Wall-to-wall butts.)

Stafford works in a four-panel format, I think exclusively - I can't find anything in the book or on his site in any other style. He also lays them out as 2x2, to better fit into a scrolling feed. The book presents one of these strips on each page, over two hundred in total, including a section at the end of two dozen "book exclusive comics."

Stafford's work is bright and cartoony, with bold confident lines and very expressive characters (even with their facial features floating off their heads). The jokes that aren't about butts - seriously, it's butts more often than you think - are a mixture of often dad-joke level wordplay and various "life is hell" bits, about dating and jobs and the other standard cartoon topics. But, really, expect butts.