Nancy Wears Hats by Ernie Bushmiller

I don't entirely get the way Fantagraphics has been publishing their collections of Ernie Bushmiller's great classic Nancy strip - I'll admit that - but I totally dig their vibe, and I'll read 'em once I notice new ones exist.

I think Fanta is mostly working chronologically, though without the mania for completism that their massive Peanuts project had. They've published...I don't know, five or six? maybe more? books of Bushmiller, starting (I think) with Nancy Is Happy about a decade ago. That book had war-time strips, and the books since, as far as I can tell, each collect roughly two years of dailies.

So Nancy Wears Hats, which was published earlier this summer, collects many - it doesn't seem to be all; the description says "over 300" - strips from 1949-50.

Let me digress for the potted history lesson. The strip Fritzi Ritz, one of many jumping on the flapper bandwagon (Blondie is the only thing left standing in that field), was started in 1922 by Larry Whittington. A twenty-year-old Bushmiller took it over three years later and did mostly flapperesque gags for the next decade, but then invented a niece for Fritzi in 1933. Nancy gradually took over the Fritzi Ritz strip, as Bushmiller gradually added different supporting characters and dropped the showgirl and office gags associated with Fritzi, with the strip finally changing names in 1938. Bushmiller wrote and drew Nancy until his death in 1982; it was continued by other hands since then and is still running, recently rejuvenated by the pseudonymous Olivia Jaimes. Bushmiller is beloved in comics circles for his simplicity: he drew cleanly and made precise gags that famously are easier to read than not to. His best period is generally considered to be the '50s, but it seems more to be that he took a few years first to turn Fritzi into Nancy, and then to tune Nancy to his preferred pure-gag level. I don't think there's a generally-recognized decline at the end of his run.

So: this book is full of fun Bushmiller gags, from the beginning of his best period. If you've been reading the Bushmiller reruns on GoComics - and why wouldn't you? - it might be a bit of déjà vu, since they're right in the middle of this period right now. (I guess that means everyone agrees this is peak Bushmiller.)

There are a few short "continuities" here - a week or maybe two of gags on the same theme or starting from the same premise - but Nancy was never a continuity strip. It was about the gags, and there's a flood of fun gags here: some timeless, some very 1949. I like the latter, since they're often still funny, in their own way, and I find that kind of thing fascinating - your mileage may vary.

I think Bushmiller got his drawing a bit simpler than this in the immediately subsequent years; there's some places where his drawing is more detailed - not fussy, but more lines, drawing things that later Bushmiller probably would simplify to make the gag sharper - than at his very peak. But this is a big batch of fine funny strips from a master.

Safely Endangered Comics by Chris McCoy

I haven't seen any official figures, and I don't know who would produce them, but the webcomics field seems to be at least as broad and potentially remunerative as newspaper comics at this point. Although "about as good as a thing that has been publicly shrinking and dying for a generation" is not necessarily a positive, I admit. And webcomics have their own financial pressures, as the ad market online has sharpened and tightened.

I guess what I'm saying is: I'm still finding "new" webcomics that have been collected into books. Things that are reasonably popular, have been running for a few years, have a style I'm pretty sure I've seen on social media here and there, have a profile that I hope means the creator is getting something like a living wage from it.

For instance: Safely Endangered! By the British creator Chris McCoy, it runs on McCoy's website to this very day, had a run on Webtoon in the mid-teens, and a bunch of the strips were collected as Safely Endangered Comics in 2019 by Andrews McMeel, the American strip-format-comics goliath.

The book collects a hundred and forty strips from the earlier years of Safely Endangered - it's been running almost as long since then as when the book came out - and they're modern, crisp, often-NSFW, standalone gags, usually in a four-panel format. McCoy draws people consistently as those bright-colored outlines, like on the cover, somewhat in the Mr. Lovenstein mode. There's a lot of jokes about sex and death and superheroes, and it's the kind of strip where people will say "fuck" and "holy shit" when appropriate - that's what I mean.

I find this is a distinctive style of humor: McCoy isn't making the same gags as War and Peas or Lovenstein or Poorly Drawn Lines or several others, but he's working in the same general territory, the same way all newspaper gag-a-day family strips are roughly similar to each other. It just means "gag-a-day webcomic" is basically a genre these days, and we can predict a lot of what that implies about any specific strip.

These are often-sarcastic comics, with video game and Marvel-movie references - not overly geeky, but set in a modern media landscape, aimed at an online audience that will know and recognize the things McCoy is making jokes about. If you like comics like that - and a lot of us do - this book is out there for a sample, and McCoy is still plugging away at Safely Endangered, with what looks like new comics twice a week.

Last Kiss: Sex Day by John Lustig

I try not to be a gatekeeper. I have standards and expectations - and, like everyone else, some tropes and styles and story-structures I like better than others. But I like to think I can take the how and what as it comes.

So I haven't mentioned the syndicated comic "strip" Last Kiss here before, as far as I can tell. But I've been aware of it, and read it here and there, and I'm definitely not against it. (I'm sure some people are - repurposing of art brings out a lot of thoughts and emotions in some people.)

The deal of Last Kiss is that John Lustig takes panels from mostly '50s romance comics - a lot of Dick Giordano and Vince Colletta, I think, a lot of people who can't be exactly credited seventy years later - edits them a bit, has them recolored, and adds new, humorous dialogue and captions. It's all juxtaposition humor, with those clean-cut young men in crew cuts and young ladies in classy gowns talking about Gangnam style or whatever. Last Kiss has been running for quite some time - I want to say something like twenty years, in CBG and as a few issues in comics format and mostly on GoComics - but there's a deep well of original material to work from, and I don't think Lustig pushes out lots of material at any one time.

Last Kiss: Sex Day is a mildly themed - sex is the theme, though that's at least an underlying theme a lot of the time in Last Kiss, since it starts with romance comics to begin with - collection of the strip from 2013, a short book of about sixty pages. As far as I can tell, it's only available digitally, which is just fine for this kind of frivolous exercise.

Last Kiss is all individual panels, and they're presented one to a page here, with an occasional second page to show what the art looked like in its original form and with its original dialogue. (Lustig's is always funnier, but often vastly less weird.) It's sarcastic, it's at least mildly "weren't those old people totally squaresville" humor, and it's all in the same territory of jokes. So this is a good length, and an amusing package: if you like the idea of Last Kiss, and don't mind some mildly risqué humor, Sex Day is a fine sampler.

How to Be a Motorist by Heath Robinson and K.R.G. Browne

Humor can often date oddly - what one generation thinks is screamingly funny can fall flat with their children. Or worse, the cultural references shift or disappear, so the kids or grandkids are left wondering what was supposed to be funny.

Heath Robinson was a British illustrator and cartoonist in the first half of the twentieth century, specializing in over-complicated contraptions and odd combinations of items to do everyday things. (My understanding is that he had a solid career before that, and fell into the overcomplication line during The Great War, but I could easily be wrong.) At one point, the comparison was that Robinson was to UK illustration what Rube Goldberg was to US illustration - though I think both of them are half-forgotten these days, another two generations on.

So Robinson did a lot of illustrations and drawings, for magazines, for newspapers, probably for other outlets. They piled up, and fell into categories at least some of the time. Someone, possibly Robinson himself, thought it would be a jolly good thing to gather up those drawings and put them into a form people could continue to buy, so they could make him some more money.

And so there was a series of at least four short humorous "How to" books, with Robinson illustrations surrounded by new text by K.R.G. Browne. One of them was 1939's How to Be a Motorist, and I found a copy of that cheap recently, and read the thing.

It's a time capsule, necessarily. It's about the automobiles of 1939, which are somewhat different from those of eighty-five years later, and about the roads and rules of 1939 Britain, which are also somewhat different from the roads and rules near me, and are probably pretty different even from contemporary Britain. Browne says repeatedly that cars are more dependable and less dependent on the specialized knowledge of their operators than they used to be, which is true as far as it goes, but it went a lot father after that.

This is a book that very clearly started as a stack of drawings, which was organized into a sequence by Robinson or Browne or both, and then Browne wrote words to connect them all into a generally coherent narrative. It's also got a slightly musty tone to it, with Browne repeatedly referring to "my friend Mr. Heath Robinson" as if we might have forgotten why we bought the book. (It's always "Mr. Heath Robinson," too - stiff upper lip and all that.)

I was happy to find that it was still amusing, and that the problems of 1939 motoring are not vastly different - at least in exaggerated parody form - from those of today. Browne is working in a slightly stiffer mode than I'd prefer, but he was a British guy born in 1895, so one has to make allowances. This is a light silly book, just as much now as it was in 1939, but it's still generally funny.

I will say that the small format makes Robinson's drawings more cramped than I might have preferred - a bigger art-book style presentation is probably a stronger choice for Robinson appreciation, and, assuming I do go back to check out more Robinson, I'll probably head in that direction next time.

The Midnight Examiner by William Kotzwinkle

Eras have zeitgeists - some artistic works are more purely of their time than others. That doesn't mean they necessarily get outdated more quickly when the zeitgeist shifts, but they embody the world they were made in, and have to be seen in that context.

I don't know if William Kotzwinkle works in that mode more often than most writers - I've only read a few of his books. But The Fan Man is a book that could only have come out of the early '70s, all congealed counterculture and past-its-sell-by-date enthusiasm. And The Bear Went Over the Mountain is from a completely different era twenty years later, a satire of quintessentially '90s go-go capitalism and the "what's next?" school of publishing.

So I came to 1989's The Midnight Examiner - thirty-some years late, obviously - somewhat expecting it would be more 1980s than other books.

I was not disappointed.

This is a loose, short, oddball novel about the employees of Chameleon Publications, a New York-based publisher of all kinds of low-end magazines for readers who are not overly thoughtful or intelligent. The title publication is a weekly newspaper, along the lines of that era's National Enquirer or Weekly World News, but most of what Chameleon does is narrowcast to very specific audiences: Young Nurse Romance, Brides Tell All, Beauty Secrets, Real Detective. And it's employees are similar odd and quirky: we see them all through the viewpoint of the editor in chief, Howard Halliday, who edits things as disparate as Macho Man (which sounds something like Soldier of Fortune, only far more for wannabes) and the very softcore Knockers and Bottoms (which airbrushes scanty underwear onto its nude photos in anticipation of a potential swing to the puritanical in society).

The front half of the novel is mostly a tour of this world, and an examination of all of the Chameleon oddballs - there are a number of them, and they are all quite odd. It's fun and full of quirky details and amusing moments, but the reader may wonder if there's any substantial plot coming. That hits in the back half of the novel.

To simplify substantially, there's a model, Mitzi Mouse, who poses for a lot of photos for these magazines, and also does some porn for a local mafioso. She gets into an altercation with the mafioso and flees to the protection of Chameleon, whose editorial staff are more comprehensively - though very, very weirdly - armed than you would expect. The initial attack is thwarted, and those goons deposited with a local voodoo queen - she advertises in Chameleon publications - to be reprogrammed and set free. But the mafioso then kidnaps Mitzi and one of the female Chameleon editors - the very one Howard has been trying to get to date him - and so the whole staff gathers, with the aid of a kleptomaniac Egyptian cabbie and his electronics-device fence preteen daughter, to assault the mafioso's palatial Long Island home. This leads to a long infiltrating-the-enemy-headquarters section, with shocking reversals, threats of and actual acts of violence, lots of running about and sneaking through oversized air ducts, and so forth, before coming to an appropriately magazine-ish and happy ending.

A lot of Midnight Examiner is too much; that's the point. The names are silly, the action is weird, the whole thing is a cartoon. Kotzwinkle is not going for psychological realism at any point in this novel: this is a novel version of the overheated stories from tabloids like the ones Chameleon publishes.

You might have needed to be there - to see this kind of publication, to live in a world where these sort of half-baked ideas came out regularly on newsstands rather than hitting you in face with random little on-line pop-ups - to really appreciate Midnight Examiner. It's about and set entirely in a media landscape that's inescapably gone, where there was good money - well, at least money - from hacking out generic goofy ideas to a specific audience over and over again for as long as you could stand it.

But, if you know where it's going and can appreciate the vibe, Midnight Examiner is a nice slab of very 80s wacky fun, silly names and all. Kotzwinkle's writing is amusing and zippy throughout; he doesn't exactly take it all seriously but he does play it straight. This is the story he's telling here, and he's going to tell it the way it deserves.

Cyanide & Happiness: Punching Zoo by Kris, Rob, Matt & Dave

When I read the big 20th anniversary Cyanide & Happiness book a couple months back, I noted that I didn't think the strip had ended, but that I hadn't seen it in a long time. Well, the library app I use has a bunch of C&H books, so I figured I'd read at least one more.

I picked Punching Zoo, because it seemed to be the oldest one there - there are some new anniversary editions of older books, too, but this was the actual 2014 collection, still available in the same format, as it was when Boom! Box published it a decade ago. Back in 2014, all four founding cartoonists were still involved: Kris Wilson, Rob DenBlyker, Matt Melvin, and Dave McElfatrick. Sometime between then and now, Melvin dropped out of the mix - I have no idea when or how, if it was big and splashy or quiet and barely noticeable.

Punching Zoo collects 119 Cyanide & Happiness strips as they originally appeared online, each one signed by the creator, so you can tell which of the four did that one. (They also have slightly different art styles, so, if you paid attention, you could probably figure them all out even without the credits.) Also included were thirty then-new exclusive strips - they might have appeared online later; I'm not about to comb through the C&H archives to check - and a "Chew Your Own Adventure" story called The Hot Date that takes up the last forty-one pages of the book.

Cyanide & Happiness has a distinctive tone and style - it's one small step up from stick figures, with often inappropriately smiling characters in a usually blank landscape, and it's nearly always Internet-mediated "sick" humor. Some strips occasionally dip into potentially-offensive material, but C&H stakes out its territory as offensive material, and roams freely through all of the subsectors of that land. Some jokes are about sex, some about death, some about poop or suicide or religion - but every strip is likely to offend someone. That was the original point, and in 2014, they were still solidly in that mode - from the 20th anniversary book, I think they've broadened slightly (only slightly) since then, under the weight of publishing so many different jokes and needing them to be at least slightly different from each other.

I don't want to say all Cyanide & Happiness books are basically the same, except the way any strip collection - Dennis the Menace, Marmaduke, The Born Loser - are basically the same. But if you know the typical jokes and style, you know what you'll get, and you read the book to get it. That's the case here. The additional material means you get a big chunk of material you can't find on the website, but it's all the same kind of thing with the same sensibility. You probably don't need multiple C&H books within a short period, unless you're a huge fan of this style of humor. But one of 'em, once in a while, can be fun and amusing.

Leave It to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse

Psmith was one of the first and now probably the least-known of P.G. Wodehouse's series characters [1]: he appeared in four novels, and is part of Wodehouse's transition from his original style of school stories into the wider comedic novels of his mature period.

Leave It to Psmith is the fourth, last, and best of those novels: it appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1923 as a serial and then soon afterward in book form. It is also a Blandings Castle novel; even this early, Wodehouse was mixing and matching his series, as if they all lived in the same, consistent world. It's actually only the second Blandings novel, after the 1915 Something Fresh; it's early enough that Lord Emsworth is still obsessed with flowers rather than pigs.

We originally met Psmith in school, where he quickly overshadowed the supposed hero, Mike Jackson. He's tall, thin, well-dressed, and gifted with both an unstoppable flow of patter and an unassailable belief in his ability to handle anything at all. (The reader can see why Wodehouse dropped him so early: a character who can accomplish anything can become difficult to handle in the main role, and works better as a supporting act, as with Jeeves or Uncle Fred.) The two middle Psmith books - Psmith in the City and Psmith, Journalist - were transitional books, mixing comedy and thriller plots. Leave It is basically mature Wodehouse, with some guns and criminals but treating them in a comic way.

Psmith is a young man looking out for his next adventure here; he has been working for a relative in a business involving fish - actual, cold, dead fish, which Psmith has come to realize he does not like at all - and is now ready to do just about anything else:

LEAVE IT TO PSMITH!
Psmith Will Help You
Psmith Is Ready For Anything
DO YOU WANT
Someone To Manage Your Affairs?
Someone To Handle Your Business?
Someone To Take The Dog For A Run?
Someone To Assassinate Your Aunt?
PSMITH WILL DO IT
CRIME NOT OBJECTED TO
Whatever Job You Have To Offer
(Provided It Has Nothing To Do With Fish)
LEAVE IT TO PSMITH!

That's the advertisement he places in a major London newspaper. It draws the attention of Lord Emsworth's dim son Freddie, who - as so often is the case in Wodehouse - desires to help his uncle steal his (the uncle's) wife's necklace and use that to support his (still the uncle's) stepdaughter. The stepdaughter, to make it even more complex, is married to Mike Jackson, Psmith's old school chum.

Freddie travels to London, to meet Psmith, at the same time Emsworth is heading up to meet a famous Canadian poet and bring that poet to stay at Blandings for an extended visit - Lady Constance, Emsworth's sister and the current owner of the necklace to be stolen, is very fond of literary figures and have been inflicting a series on them on Blandings for several years.

Of course this all leads to Psmith coming to Blandings as an impostor, pretending to be that Canadian poet. And he has fallen in love with the young woman just hired to catalog the Blandings library. And there are other, more sinister figures, looking to steal the necklace as well.

This is mature-period Wodehouse, so it's complex and witty and full of wonderful writing - his later books were still fun and wonderfully written, but the plots tended to thin down a bit. Here Wodehouse is still on the way up, adding in complication after complication and delighting in the chaos it creates.

Wodehouse's books are not serious in any way, and are wonderful precisely because of that. They create their own world, and explore all the permutations of that stranger, sillier, more entertaining and lovely world - this is one of the earliest of his best books, and a good place to start for readers who haven't discovered Wodehouse yet. It's also a good place to dive in for people who have only read Jeeves and Wooster - Blandings has another half-dozen novels basically as good as this, even if the prior Psmith books are odder and quirkier.

[1] With an asterisk on both counts for Ukridge, who was slightly earlier and even more obscure now.

War and Peas: Hi, Earth by Elizabeth Pich & Jonathan Kunz

I almost missed that this is a War and Peas book - the series title is small on the cover, discreet, like a barely-credited third co-author. But it is: this is a somewhat themed, somewhat shorter collection of War and Peas comics on vaguely ecological, or sometimes just natural, themes.

There are eighty-eight comics in Hi, Earth. All of them previously published on their website, all of them by the team of Elizabeth Pich and Jonathan Kunz. (As I understand it, they co-write and then mostly trade off drawing - I haven't been able to detect a difference in drawing styles, which could be a defect in my eye.) Mostly 4-panel, though there are a few large single panels, some that run to six or eight, and a few New Yorker-style captioned drawings.

When I say the theme is "somewhat," that's because I'm not sure if these strips were specifically chosen to be in a rough theme, or if this is just what Pich & Kunz make jokes about anyway, so they leaned into calling it a theme. Not everything in the book is about plants and animals and climate change and icebergs, though a lot is. There's also strips about God and aliens - not together, as far as I can remember, mind you - which I find difficult to fit into that overall theme.

So this is basically just a new War and Peas collection. It was published on April 1, so it's still very new. The humor is snarky and modern and the tone is often depressive and the assumption is that humanity is, if not entirely doomed, at least going to go through a lot of bad shit. That's the tone and sense of War and Peas anyway, of course. Oh, and a decent number of the jokes are about either fucking or feces (flinging, eating - you know, the stuff animals get up to if you let them), which may trouble some of you.

I think the first War and Peas book (Funny Comics for Dirty Lovers) is a bigger, fuller menu of the Pich/Kunz work, with some recurring characters that don't show up here. If you're not familiar with the strip, and you have some kind of psychological block against just clicking the website link and reading a bunch of comics there - if so, no judgments, man, we all got shit going on - I'd recommend that book first.

But if you're a dedicated eco-warrior, with a fixie bike and a bottomless pit of scorn for SUVs and more recipes for soy whatever than you can get to before the next coven meeting, than maybe Hi, Earth is the place for you to discover War and Peas. You have your choice of the dead-tree version, which kills forests, or the digital version, which is complicit in the massively colonialist rare-earth trade, so struggle with your conscience and pick one.

Bogart Creek, Vol. 3 by Derek Evernden

There's not a whole lot I can say about this 2022 collection of Derek Evernden's Bogart Creek strip that I didn't already say about the 2019 Vol. 1 or the 2020 Vol. 2. Evernden is a Canadian cartoonist and illustrator - he grew up near the eponymous creek in Ontario, and now lives out on the rolling prairies of Alberta - and his strip is a dark (very dark) and often morbid single-panel with jokes that aren't as Canadian as you might expect. 

(For one random example, near the front of the book, that I just flipped to: Booty Call of Cthulhu. I'll let you imagine the drawing - or, better yet, get this or one of his other books. You can even buy them direct from the author.)

So what distinguishes Bogart Creek, Vol. 3 from its two predecessors is mostly that it has 132 new and different single-panel gags. Evernden doesn't have continuing characters, or even common situations all that much - Bogart Creek is fairly pure single-panel, very much in the post-Far Side mode, so every gag stands all by itself. That makes for fine reading, since Evernden is possessed of an impressively capacious imagination for mayhem and irony.

But, unless I start quoting some of my favorite gags, it doesn't leave a reviewer a lot of room. This is funny, it's very dark most of the time, and Vol. 3 is consistently as good as the previous books. If you like dark humor and single-panel cartoons, check out one of the Bogart Creek collections.

Just Act Normal by John McNamee

Three years ago, when I saw the first collection of John McNamee's Pie Comics - it's called Goldilocks and the Infinite Bears; it's funny; you should read it - I thought the strip might have ended, and was mildly sad that only the first of the strip's three collections were available in my library's app.

Well, sometime over those three years, a second Pie Comics collection popped up there - yclept Just Act Normal - and I just noticed and read it. In possibly even better news, McNamee has started posting to Tumblr again, with a half-dozen new cartoons this year after a six-year silence.

So the TL;DR for those of you with short attention spans: McNamee is quirky and funny, he's got a great semi-stick-figure style - a little in the Tom Gauld vein, which is high praise - and there's the promise of more stuff from him, too. This book is good; the first book is good. (I can't figure out what the third book's title is, and suspect it may be a mirage - on the other hand, the book I read, which clearly has Just Act Normal on its pages, has Book Learnin' as a header/title in the Hoopla app, so maybe that's the title of his third book?)

McNamee has the kind of art that's instantly readable and is much harder to do than it looks. (The fewer the lines, the tougher it is.) And his jokes are wry, sarcastic, modern, and true - he got his start at The Onion, which gives you a sense of the comic sensibility and tradition he mostly works in.

There are no continuing characters; it's mostly four-panel bits, different every time. You can jump in anywhere. So you might as well.

Space Circus by Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier

This is not Groo. But it is Groo-adjacent, I suppose: more work by the same people, with something of the same tone and sense of humor, aimed at a mostly young audience and telling a...let me say dependable story for them.

The book of Space Circus only came out at the end of the last year, but it collects a four-issue series from 2000 (for the first time, as far as I can tell). I have no idea why it took that long; maybe they just forgot about it for a while.

The story is written by Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier - I suspect it's something like their Groo working relationship, where Aragones could have done all of it, but Evanier polishes up the writing to make it all better throughout - and drawn by Aragones. Lettering is by Stan Sakai and colors by Tom Luth.

It's a story about running away to join the circus, basically - though this kid, Todd Cooper, does it accidentally and it's, as you might guess from the title, not an ordinary circus. It is in fact a galaxy-traveling space circus, the Doodah Brothers’ Astral Traveling Entertainment and Fun Brigade, which landed unexpectedly on Earth to make repairs after a run-in with pirates.

The pirate leader hates circuses, for the usual trauma-in-childhood-from-not-getting-to-go-to-the-circus reasons, and has a fiendish plan to take over the circus and use it to plunder the fat starships and worlds inside the otherwise impregnable Shield that protects Secured Space. All legitimate starships have a whoositz that lets them pass instantly through the Shield, which pirate ships can never, ever obtain...but pirates can steal entire other ships, which seems to slightly defeat the impregnability.

Anyway, pirates chase mostly oblivious circus. Circus picks up an Earth kid, who means well and is enthusiastic about helping out but whose lack of space knowledge leads him to make a series of unfortunate, large, and humorous blunders. Pirates manage to trick the circus to a planet where they can steal the circus ship, leaving the circus behind and using their vessel to plunder civilized worlds as if they were the circus.

And, of course, the kid is instrumental in the plan to use the pirate ship to chase the pirates, get back the circus ship, and bring the miscreants to justice. All that, and he's home in time for dinner, with his meatloaf not even having gotten cold, because of handwaved time dilation. And he has, of course, Learned a Lesson About Life - not to spend so much time on videogames, actually, and I am not joking here - as required by the form.

There are other characters, mostly of the goofy variety: that pirate captain, his affection-starved henchmen, the two-headed circus owner, various good-hearted circus folks. They all do pretty much exactly what you would expect of them: this is a fairly short story, so it only has time to hit the high points in its plot, and that plot will not be a surprise to anyone this side of third grade.

Aragones, as always, has a detailed, cartoony, energetic style, crammed with details and interest, which breaks out regularly into spectacular two-page spreads. He's not the kind of artist that the comics world thinks of as a superstar, but he can draw pretty much anything - as long as it's in his style - and do it well. I tend to think he spends his efforts on stories that are...again, let me say something like reliable or familiar here, but it's made for a good long successful career for him, and this is a pleasant, fun-looking book that can entertain pretty much any person able to read the words.

My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

My Man Jeeves is the first-published collection of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories - in fact, it's so early (1919) that half of the eight stories in it aren't actually about Jeeves and Wooster, but feature a proto-Bertie character named Reggie Pepper.

It is also, along with all of the material in it, solidly in the public domain. So although I read the Overlook Collector's Wodehouse edition from 2006 - I'm still planning to gather all of them, even though the first two or three dozen I bought and read and put lovingly on a shelf were destroyed by a flood in 2011 - this book, and some variations on it, are widely available in other forms.

For example, I recently read a still short but substantially longer book, Enter Jeeves, that contains fifteen stories - almost twice as many as My Man Jeeves - including all seven Reggie Pepper tales and the first eight Jeeves.

The two books have slightly different titles and texts for a few of those stories - I believe this is the difference between American and British texts; I noted that Enter Jeeves seems to use mostly American texts but is not entirely consistent - which can be slightly confusing. But everything in My Man Jeeves is in Enter Jeeves, though slightly differently presented.

So I can recommend either book, but definitely not both of them. Enter is probably cheaper, and definitely longer. My Man is more "authentic," and was assembled by the young Wodehouse himself, if that matters. I was going to recommend The World of Jeeves as an even better choice for Jeeves stories - larger, more comprehensive, with a jaunty cover - but I see it's firmly out of print and rather pricey these days, so it's no longer as convenient as it was when I found it in the early Nineties. There's probably some similar book out there: the idea of an omnibus of all the Jeeves short stories is an obvious one, so I imagine someone has done it recently.

Anyway, the Jeeves stories are among the best humorous fiction by anyone anywhere. The first few are a bit more sartorially-focused than the best of the series, but still energetic and full of Bertie's great voice. The Reggie Pepper stories are perhaps one step down from that, but still solidly amusing Wodehouse, and fascinating as an object lesson of how a writer works his way into the best version of an idea.

Sharky Malarkey: A Sketchshark Collection by Megan Nicole Dong

As far as I can tell, this 2018 book is the only collection of the "Sketchshark" comic - more than that, it's creator Megan Nicole Dong's only book to date, and "Sketchshark" was the title of her (long-abandoned) Blogspot site and maybe the original title of the (only mildly abandoned) related Tumblr, which now uses the book's title.

On the other hand, she's got a day-job in animation as a director and storyboard artist (including what looks like three shows this decade, one upcoming for 2027), which probably takes most of her artistic energy and drawing time the last bunch of years.

Sharky Malarkey feels like one of those "throw in everything to fill up a book" collections, divided into chapters with somewhat different kinds of cartoons. There's a twenty-page introduction, which I think was new for the book, in which the creator is picked up for a rideshare by her shark character (Bruce), incorporating what may have been a few separate individual strips about Dong's life and cat. That's the only major autobio material; Dong doesn't seem to be the kind of creator who wants to talk about herself.

The first chapter, Malarky, has a bunch of general cartoons  - people on phones, anxiety issues, other life issues and relatable content, and a bunch of comics about butts. (Millennial cartoonists cartoon as much about butts as Boomer-era cartoonists did about tits - though the millennials are more gender-balanced, both the cartoonists and the butts they draw.)

Then we get the Bruce-centric chapter, There's a Shark in Los Angeles. Bruce is shallow, self-obsessed, and a minor celebrity (at least in his own head). The fact that he is in Los Angeles is definitely not random, and I wouldn't be surprised if Dong started doing this character when she began looking for work in Hollywood. (The book includes some pieces - older, I assume - in which the main character is still in art school, too.)

Next up is Ladythings, which somewhat heads back to the general humor of the first chapter - but focused on physical or cultural issues that are female-coded. (Often in weird ways, because Dong is a cartoonist and they have goofy ideas; there's a short sequence about prehensile boobs, for example.)

Then comes The Animal + Plants Channel, which is pretty random. For most cartoonists, a chapter about animals would imply pets - dogs and/or cats, depending - but Dong's work is wilder than that, with a lot of squirrels and horses, plus whales and a few returns of Bruce. And, yes, there are strips about plants as well.

Fifth is A Toad Makes New Friends in the Forest, which starts out as a picture-book-style story and morphs over into more traditional comics as it goes. It's also an unsubtle racial allegory, and runs into the final section, Some Sort of End, in which Bruce returns for one last time to lead the big kids-movie all-singing, all-dancing ending. (Dong spent most of the first decade of her career making animation for kids - I'm not sure she's entirely moved beyond that now - and is deeply familiar with the story beats and particular bits of laziness of that genre.)

Dong has an organic, appealing style, with bright colors enclosed by confident black lines all basically the same weight. And her humor is quirky and specific - the jokes and ideas and setups in Sharky Malarkey aren't derivative, or ever obvious. It would be nice if she had time and energy and enthusiasm to make more comics like this, since her work is so distinctive, but it looks like animation has been taking her creative energy since the book came out - and probably paying much better. But time is long and Hollywood is fickle; who knows what will happen next? Maybe she'll make more cartoons and be a massive success at something unexpected. 

Mr. Lovenstein Presents: Feelings by J.L. Westover

I like to link to webcomics when I can, though these days, it's weirdly difficult. A lot of creators seem to just post on their normal social media, since that's where all of the algorithm-driven traffic goes anyway, and running an ad-supported site is basically a hellscape mostly left to the hardy souls who have been doing it for twenty years and have built up calluses in the right places.

So I'm going to talk about Mr. Lovenstein, and that Tapas link seems to be reasonably relevant. But I have no idea if that's the real home of the strip currently, or if you should just follow the creator, J.L. Westover, on Instagram or somewhere.

The good news is that the Mr. Lovenstein strip is being collected into books, which are slightly easier to point to. (Still: digital or print? Local store or chain or Internet behemoth? As usual, I pick the link that's most convenient to me.) And one of them is what I just read: Mr. Lovenstein Presents: Feelings, published last fall by the Skybound arm of the mighty Image comics empire. (There was a time when I could remember which Image studio was connected with which original creator, but that was over twenty years ago. I dunno what else Skybound does these days, but, from the indicia, it seems to be the Robert Kirkman shop.)

This is another one of those roughly-ubiquitous strips: you've seen Westover's brightly-colored lumpy figures (and the occasional animal) on the Internet here and there, shared by random contacts and friends, even if you've never made an effort to read the strip itself. (I never did, until this book.)

Westover is a generation or so younger than me, so I don't know if he meant his characters to visually rhyme with the old Mr. Men and Little Miss books for kids. (And other readers might disagree that there's that much visual similarity, but it seems pretty obvious to me.)  They are cartoony, with fat rounded lines and simplified features - the kind of precise cartooning that looks simple but is unforgiving, where every line needs to be just right. And his comics are all individual gags, with some recurring styles of characters but no obvious continuing characters. These were Internet comics, so they all have "bonus panels" - have to get people to click through to the actual home of the strip - one or two additional, black and white, beats after the main (usually color) three or four-panel comic. Bonus panel comics have an odd rhythm, like a newspaper strip that always has its main punchline in panel 3 and a muted follow-up at the end, but adding jokes to a book of jokes is generally a good thing, so I won't complain about it more.

This particular collection focuses, as the title says, on feelings - and, in the Mr. Lovenstein context (and just a general funny-comics context) that means big feelings: crying, being upset by the world or by specific things, the desire to be loved and appreciated, some actual love or affection but not much, and a tiny little bit of actual happiness. Westover's characters are tormented and unhappy, most of the time, but in funny ways, and ways I think are relatable, especially to people closer to his age than mine.

I find the concept of doing themed collections of a webcomic a little gimmicky - the previous Mr. Lovenstein collection was Failure, and it looks like they'll continue in that vein - but I also remember legions of Garfield Eats Lasagna and Peanuts Baseball Gags and Jeffy Wanders Aimlessly Through the Neighborhood books, so it's not a new thing, or an unreasonable thing, or a surprising thing. It's just a little gimmicky, and sometimes you need a gimmick to stand out.

Mr. Lovenstein is, from the comics collected here, more emotionally honest than many gag strips - in that these-young-people-are-always-talking-about-their-mental-health way some people my age like to complain about incessantly - and it's also pretty funny a lot of the time. And Westover is a fine cartoonist.

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.

Cyanide & Happiness: Twenty Years Wasted by Kris, Rob & Dave

I'm sure there have been other Cyanide & Happiness books. It would be really unlikely that a fairly popular strip would run for fifteen years without any kind of a collection being printed on dead trees. But I haven't seen or noticed a C&H collection since the one-two punch of Cyanide & Happiness and Ice Cream & Sadness back in 2010.

On the other hand, I've been reading the web mostly via RSS feeds since at least that far back, and, as we all know, feeds can die quietly and mysteriously, while the underlying content keeps going, so we think something is gone - or, more often, don't notice or think about it - when it definitely isn't. And I'm pretty sure that I had C&H in my feeds, maybe multiple times, but I can't remember seeing it recently. So I think there was yet another case of linkrot, either deliberate (they want to drive people to their website, where other items can be purchased) or random (which can never been discounted).

But I noticed this book - Cyanide & Happiness: Twenty Years Wasted, a big anniversary collection of the strip published in mid-December, just too late for Xmas shipping. It's credited to "Kris, Rob & Dave" - Wilson, DenBleyker, and McElfatrick, respectively, the "Matt" who was part of C&H back in the early days seems to have dropped out long ago and gets one vague reference in this book but no explanation - and is the traditional "annotated collection of the best stuff" that strips often bring out for a big round anniversary.

And that's great, since that kind of book works better for webcomics than a traditional reprint anthology does, anyway. Remember: the point of a webcomic is that it's always accessible, online, 24/7/265. You can always just go there and read the entire archives, without buying a book. This book has fewer strips than if they were just packed in like cordwood, and getting the three creators to annotate them and laying that all out was clearly more work, but it makes a better, more distinctive, useful package. I don't want to say all webcomic collections should be in this style, but maybe all of the gag-a-day strips should seriously consider it.

Cyanide & Happiness has one of the weirder and odder origin stories, even for a webcomic. The four guys were all teens in 2005, hanging out on a webforum but hugely physically separated in real life - McElfratrick is Irish, for one example - and one of them did a quick crude comic in this style, and it snowballed from there. (They've also created a lot of animation over the years, and at least one card game - all with the same art style and deliberately offensive humor.) It looks like they spent some years in the same place: Dallas, as a suitable random American city. But that ended, for either pandemic or getting-older and lives-getting-more-complicated reasons, and they're once again physically separated, making comics and animation randomly in basements and back rooms wherever they happen to live now.

So each C&H strip is credited to one of the guys, because that guy did that strip. And their styles are somewhat discernable - or maybe were more so in the early days. But it's all the same kind of thing, and they riff off each other, with random theme weeks - usually either specifically Depressing comics or something tasteless - thrown in willy-nilly to pull them together.

These are jokes about farts and drinks and violence and sex and dicks and so on - the subject matter was mostly formed when they were teen boys, so C&H is still largely about the things that make teen boys laugh. (There were a lot of shitposts in the early days. Maybe still a few even now.) I thought it was mostly successful back in 2010, when I saw the early strips, and this big collection still seems mostly successful now - it's crude, it's tasteless, it's dumb, but there's always been a strong current of that kind of humor in America. (Think Truly Tasteless Jokes or 101 Uses for a Dead Cat or the one about how to fit five elephants into a Volkswagen.)

If you like that style of humor, you've probably seen Cyanide & Happiness sometime in the past twenty years. (Maybe not. Maybe you are a teen boy right now, and this is all new.) This is probably the best single book to experience the strip: it's got examples from all of the eras of the strip (such as they are), lots of annotations and added jokes, photos of the C&H guys doing various things at comics conventions over the past two decades, and similar stuff. Or, you know, you could just hit the website and read the archives, as I referenced way back at the beginning of this post. That's always an option for a webcomic; don't forget it.

Bogart Creek, Vol.2 by Derek Evernden

Bogart Creek may be yet another thing I discovered only after it ended; it looks like creator Derek Evernden stopped posting it on Instagram and Reddit a year or so ago. On the other hand, he's published three books, the website is still there, and there's a Patreon, so maybe he just managed to paywall it and actually make some money from his cartooning.

(As you know {Bob}, cartoonists used to be able to get publications to pay for their cartoons regularly - many of them making decent livings and a few making actual fortunes. Since techbros demolished print media and advertising, replacing them with outlets that only bring profit to them, cartoonists have found that making any income from drawing funny pictures has been much more complicated and difficult - much like everything else the techbros touch.)

Bogart Creek, Vol.2 is the middle of the three books to date, published in early 2021, a little more than a year after the first book. And, like I said the first time, it's a single-panel comic in the Far Side mold, with no recurring characters or themes. It is cheerfully gory, mostly dark humor with lots of severed limbs, murderous folks (both crazed killers and gangsters, as on facing pages as I'm poking through for examples as I write this), sharks, aliens, and media references.

Now, I don't want to oversell the darkness - it's probably only about a quarter of the strips that feature a murder or other violent death, and, in many of those cases, the violent death hasn't quite happened at the moment of the strip. But there's no fluffy bunnies frolicking happily in a field - the lighter jokes are the media references and amusing wordplay and funny juxtapositions. And Evernden draws a bloody splat, or those severed limbs, a lot more often than most cartoonists - even the supposedly "dark" ones.

I like this stuff, and I think people who enjoy dark single panels will agree with me. The cover shows his visual inventiveness pretty well - that's the caliber of his non-gory gags, and the gory ones are equally well constructed but substantially darker. If that sounds appealing, there's three books of his work available, plus a fair bit floating around online for free as a teaser.

Only What's Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and the Art of Peanuts by Chip Kidd

Chip Kidd is one of the premier book designers of our day, and a big proponent of comics as an art form. He also has a tendency to get...let me say "fussy"...in his designs - he came of professional age in the go-go Nineties, and that can be seen in his work sometimes. He also seems to be fascinated by the physicality of original art, and I've occasionally complained that tendency is not a good match for books that mean to reprint stories.

Art books want to show art, as clearly as possible, shot from the originals - it should mimic the experience of visiting a gallery. But most books with comics in them are not art books - they're books for reading those comics. And, so, most of the time, versions of the art where you can see the color of the underlying paper or blue lines or lumps of Wite-Out or erasures are not what the audience wants or needs.

The good news is that this book here is an art book, which means Kidd's instincts and strengths are perfectly aligned with the purpose of the book. (See up top, for the original cover of the book, as an example of what Kidd does when he has his head. The current cover of the book - much more conventional, and much more useful for anyone trying to figure out what it is, is below.)

You can see the color of the underlying paper and some tracing lines and big swoops of Wite-Out and some erasures and loose sketches in Only What's Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and the Art of Peanuts - and that's the point of the book. It's a sampling of the collection of the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, and the purpose is to show a much larger audience what it would be like to visit that museum and see a whole bunch of Peanuts originals and other Schulz drawings, full-size, up on walls with good light.

Only What's Necessary has a lot of words up front, mostly about how wonderful Schulz was and how awesome his museum is now. I assume anyone reading this book will already believe all of that, but I suppose a book does need to have words in it, and these are appropriate. Contributors include Jean Schulz, the artist's widow and head of that museum, Jeff Kinney, the "Wimpy Kid" creator, and Paige Braddock, cartoonist and creative head of the arm of the Schulz media empire that manages licensed properties (and, way back at the beginning of her tenure, the strip itself).

But the main purpose of the book is not the words - or, at least, not the words by other people. We do want to see Schulz's captions and dialogue, and to try to untangle his crabbed script on sketches. (Though I have to admit I had very little luck at that.) The art was photographed by Geoff Spear, who has worked with Kidd on a lot of these projects. It's the kind of work that doesn't get noticed much by readers like me (maybe like you, too), but the art is crisp and clear, and all of those artifacts of drawing are as clear in the photos as I can imagine them being.

Kidd doesn't have a formal organizational principle for the book - it's roughly chronological by phases of Schulz's career, which is all it needs. The focus is mostly on the strips themselves, as it should be, but there's a lot of ancillary materials - comic books and magazine covers, games and toys - as well as abandoned strips, a few early drawings, and just a couple basically complete strips that never made it into newspapers.

So this is a book with a lot of impressive Schulz art in it, presented well and often blown up to make it easier to see the little details. I probably didn't take as much time lingering over every page as some readers would, but I enjoyed it a lot, and was reminded yet again of the paradoxical truth of cartooning: it's harder to make fewer lines; the simplest drawings are the most focused and precise.

You need to be seriously interested in a creator to go for an art book of their work - otherwise you just read the work. But if you've dug into a lot of Peanuts, and in particular if you like the way Schulz drew and would like to draw more like that yourself, this is a book with a lot of examples and (potentially) lessons to teach.

Barking by Tom Holt

This is a very random Tom Holt book: he's done one something like this pretty much every year for the past forty, and this is the one from 2007. I came to it because I found it randomly and cheaply a few months ago, and I'd read his When It's a Jar equally randomly early in 2024 and liked it.

Barking is...just fine. I found it somewhat less interesting than Jar, though it's a perfectly cromulent humorous fantasy that does everything it needs to do and tells a pleasant story well. I may need to check to see which Holt books are generally considered best and read those first: anyone who does so many books in the same genre is going to have a lot at about the same level of ambition and a few above or below that.

(I might have been hoping for more, since the books by Holt's alter ego, K.J. Parker, have all - at least the ones I've read - been spiky, interesting, smart things. But Holt is much more crowd-pleasing than Parker is, and I get the sense that his books have, not so much a formula, but maybe a recipe to make sure they have the things his audience wants.)

Anyway, Barking is about a lawyer named Duncan Hughes. He works at a horrible London firm doing tedious work, and is what I think is the usual early-thirties sad-sack Holt protagonist, with a failed marriage behind him and nothing whatsoever interesting in his life. But he lives in a Tom Holt world, so he's thrown into supernatural doings.

His old pack of schoolmates have formed a highly successful firm, and their leader, Luke Ferris, is suddenly trying to recruit him, really hard.

I don't want to say all of Holt's books get schematic, but this one definitely does. You see, both werewolves and vampires are real, and both of them run law firms. As far as we see, the werewolves are all men and the vampires are all women, and they are mortal enemies in a very British, fair-play kind of way, not so much trying to kill each other (both groups are very very very resistant to harm) as trying to get one over on the others. Oddly, this doesn't seem to come out in legal ways - Holt doesn't talk about major litigation or complex M&A work to confound the other side.

(Holt himself was a lawyer in Somerset. I don't want to cast aspersions on his knowledge of the field he worked in in his own country, but none of these big high-powered London law firms feel big or high-powered; they seem to be organized like a minor city's second-tier solicitors, and do that kind of work. And none of the lawyers seem to actually be experts in their practice areas the way I'd expect.)

So the werewolves/men are eternally feuding with vampires/women - we also learn that there are other packs of werewolves (one is made up of dentists, so maybe it's just these two firms of lawyers? There's a lot that's vague and half-explained in this world, to keep it light and amusing.) Holt is otherwise resolutely heterosexual here - there's not an inkling that all these furry men who spend all day every day with each other, bonding and running in the woods and doing all sorts of physical activity together, are more than just mates. Although...Luke does very very strongly warn Duncan away from "their sort," and that seems to mean women as much as it does vampires, inasmuch as the book makes any distinction between the two, which is not a whole lot.

There are further complications, of course. But that's the beginning: Duncan becomes a werewolf, becomes a partner in a better firm, turns into a dog in the moonlight to chase foxes with his pack, is warned to avoid vampires because they have cooties, that sort of thing.

He of course has A Destiny because he Is Special. There is a unicorn that signposts this and keeps showing up throughout the novel, which leads into the main plot, which I won't go into great detail about. Of course Duncan wins free in the end, conquers all enemies, and wins the appropriate gorgeous female (who otherwise barely shows up in the book and doesn't have an appreciable personality) as his trophy.

Again, I found this pleasant and entertaining but also facile and obvious. And these lawyers are working at a much lower, duller level than I expected, from doing marketing to actual high-powered lawyers for the past decade. So I may be back for more Tom Holt, but I expect to be substantially pickier the next time.

The Close to Home 30th Anniversary Treasury by John McPherson

Most cartoonists try to make their characters look attractive. Oh, sure, you get a Basil Wolverton now and then, but they're rare.

John McPherson is another one of those exceptions: his characters are lumpy, malformed, with underslung jaws and bulbous noses, frizzy tufts of unruly hair, spindly limbs, and round little coke-bottle glasses a lot of the time. He's not trying to make them look pretty and falling short; he's making a world of funny-looking people doing funny things. (The scenery and props in that world are amusingly malformed a lot of the time, as well.)

McPherson's been drawing like that for a while. His syndicated strip Close To Home has been running since 1992.

Actually, looking at this book, his characters have gotten slightly less lumpy and rumpled over the years - they have eyeballs a lot of the time now, and look more like Muppets than like the products of a particularly demented clay-molding class most days. His newer style is more supple, but I have a fondness for the crazy goofballs of his early work. 

The Close to Home 30th Anniversary Treasury is a new book this year, and does exactly what it says it does: collect 750 or so Close to Home strips from the entire life of the strip. Nothing is dated, but it seems to be mostly in chronological order. (Close to Home is a single panel, one of the many followers of The Far Side that launched in the late '80s and early '90s when Gary Larson rejuvenated that form and showed there was room for "weird" or "sick" humor on the comics page. So there are no continuing characters or stories to date it.)

McPherson has an introduction where he notes that the strips were chosen by mostly him, with input from friends, family members, and his Andrews McMeel editors. I do wonder if any of those people read the book all the way through, since there's a couple times where McPherson reused a gag and they chose to include both versions in the book. (Everyone who does this many cartoons reuses gags - or does variations - but when you're assembling a book, you want to avoid pointing that out to the paying customers.)

There's not a lot to say about a very miscellaneous collections of comics from thirty years of a strip. McPherson's strip was always in the Far Side mold, which gave it latitude to be closer to the line of sick or offensive than a continuity strip. He has a lot more jokes about illness than most newspaper cartoonists, and the Grim Reaper shows up quite a bit as well. He's not quite as edgy as a modern online cartoonist, but it's closer to that end of the comics spectrum than to Garfield, for example. (This is a good thing. The Garfield end is dull and bland and tedious.)

This is a big book with lots of random strips, full of lumpy people being tormented by the terrors of everyday life. I liked the lumpiness, I liked the randomness, I liked the torments McPherson puts his characters through, and I think he's pretty funny the vast majority of the time. And I do really like seeing a cartoonist unafraid to draw like this for so long so prominently.