So it looks like I discovered Sarah Andersen’s comics in late 2021, and read all of her books within roughly a year: Adulthood Is a Myth , Fangs , Big Mushy Happy Lump , Herding Cats , Cryptid Club , and Oddball . That’s always fun – discovering a new creator and reading all the…
Matt Kindt has been making stories about spies since the beginning of his career – but he’s found a new take this time. Spy Superb has a title that echoes his early success Super Spy (and its loose Lost Dossiers follow-up), and that is definitely intentional – but Kindt is substantially less serious this time out than…
It’s not quite tripping myself up, but…I sometimes specifically pick really short books to read so that I can have something to write about here the next day. (More often when I’m doing a Book-A-Day run, but at other times, too. Like right now.) But then I usually find that the really short books don’t…
I’ve gotten out of the habit of reading individual comics issues – because I first got out of the habit of buying them. There were a lot of factors there, but an already-ebbing stream turned to nothing after the 2011 flood destroyed all of my existing floppies. Since then, if it’s not in book form, I basically…
This strip isn’t exactly new to me – I’ve seen a bunch of Buni cartoons over the years, all over the place – but it’s not one I ever made an effort to read regularly. So I’m coming at it as a mostly-uninformed reader: I know it’s wordless, that the title character is happy and…
The modern era of comics is built for short attention spans, all miniseries and limited runs and hot new creators, emphasizing new “jump-on issues” and trying to ignore that vastly more people are jumping off, every chance they get. Some of that is effect, some of it is cause; it’s been a spiral since the…
So I kinda like Sarah Andersen’s cartoons, as discerning readers may have noticed [1]: she writes funny, she draws funny, and she has a quirky sensibility that means she tells goofy “I am an introvert” jokes that are familiar and relatable but not obvious. Just really good at the being-funny-in-public thing, with a distinct sensibility…
Some comic strips are vastly more likely to be posted in specific places than others. Even decades later, Far Sides cling proudly to doors in various STEM-related departments in universities throughout the nation. Dilbert – probably mostly older ones, if we’re honest – lives on fabric-covered cube walls, most often in a position where the worker can…
Discovering something creative that you like is fun. Learning that it’s over is sad. But what if you’re not sure if it’s over or not? Pie Comics was (is?) a strip by John McNamee. It used to be on GoComics . It used to update regularly on Tumblr . The Tumblr page mentions a website that doesn’t resolve….
If there’s only three books of something, and you read the first two and enjoy them, you’re gonna come back and hit the third one. It’s just one of those things. I may not have anything new to say about Winging It , the third book collecting Brian Gordon’s online comic strip Fowl Language, since…
If something works, you do it again. Brian Gordon’s Fowl Language comics – originally appearing online starting in 2013, and ramping up after he lost his cartooning-for-Hallmark-Cards job a couple of years later – were a hit online, and then a hit in their first book form, Fowl Language: Welcome to Parenting. So, a year…
Sometimes there are things that you know you like, but you realize you’ve never really dug into. Brian Gordon’s comics strip Fowl Language is like that for me: I realized I’ve been seeing it randomly probably since it started (2013, I think), but never actually tried to read it. So I did. I grabbed this book ,…
