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. 

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.