Tagged: Humor: Analysis Of

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 don’t read it.

But my library app – Hoopla , another silly name because everything Internetty is required to have a silly name – includes individual issues, all mixed in their general “Comics” section in a way that sometimes makes it hard to tell if something is a book or a floppy. (Well, they all have page counts: that’s a big clue. When I forget to check that, it’s entirely on me.) So I now can read floppy comics, at least some of them, about as regularly as I want.

I still haven’t really done it much.

But I did read the big collection of Fungirl  comics by Elizabeth Pich recently, and noticed there were two other newer “books” – both fairly short – and decided to give this one a go on a recent busy Saturday.

Fungirl: You Are Revolting  is 32 pages, so I’m pretty sure it was a floppy comic in its corruptible, mortal state. It calls itself a “one-shot,” which is mostly a floppy-comics term. (Books can be in a series, but rarely see the need to announce that they’re not.) And it, like the first book and all things Fungirl, is resolutely not for younger or more impressionable readers.

There’s one story here, following from the end of the big book. Becky, Fungirl’s roommate, is off at med school in another town, so Fungirl is looking for someone to rent Becky’s old room. Quirkily, Peter (Becky’s boyfriend) is both lampshaded as “not living here” – so he’s not going to take over the sublet – and also there all the time, including first thing in the morning in his sleeping clothes, looking like he is living there. But that’s the premise, so no complaints.

A potential roommate arrives, after a portentous dream of Fungirl’s. She’s dressed all in pink, Fungirl immediately lusts for her, she takes the room, and she never gives her name. The plot from there is mostly sex and jealousy: Peter is trying to quell his worries about Becky, away in a distant city with people who are not him, and Fungirl starts screwing New Girl, who is crazy, or has a big secret, or something like that.

It all escalates quickly, and New Girl is not what she seems. I’m not sure what she is – after the dream opening, the whole thing might even be a dream – but she is something, and Fungirl has to Stop Her. I won’t spoil the way Fungirl does stop her, but it’s both very on-brand and very adult.

Fungirl is still wild and wacky, her stories boundary-pushing and frantic. I’m glad to see there’s one more book: this is like nothing else and very funny in its demented, deeply female-centric way.

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

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 positive in a world that very much tends to the opposite direction, and a vague bit about the other characters.

But if there’s a serious Buni discourse going on, I’m unfamiliar with it. So, as I often do, I need to signpost here that I could be wrong, and that I know it.

Buni has been running – I think consistently three days a week – since 2010, written and drawn by Ryan Pagelow. Buni: Happiness Is a State of Mind  is the first, and I think only, collection of the strip so far: it came out in 2018. 

Buni is the main character – that happy-go-lucky guy on the cover. He’s a bunny – hence the name – in a world mostly of teddy bears. He’s also a happy, positive person in a world where pretty much everyone else hates and attacks and eats each other. (This is not the kind of world where sentients avoid predating on each other – rather the opposite, actually.) His main character notes are that he is almost always sunny, and that he has a unreciprocated (and never will be) crush on BuniGirl, who has a boyfriend.

(Here I might note that all names, besides Buni himself, need to be discovered outside of the comic itself, because of the whole “wordless” thing.)

This seems to collect the strip from the beginning, so we start with Buni himself, see him crushing on BuniGirl (and her instead spending time with the hulking fellow I guess we should call BuniBoyfriend or BuniRival?), see his father (BuniDad) arrive by breaking out of prison and immediately become a ray of gloom and nastiness in Buni’s world, and the two bunnies adopt a crippled dog, whom I understand is called either Dogi or BuniDog.

Most of the strips are one-offs, though, in which Buni finds happiness in an unusual way (imagining he’s riding a unicorn in a fantasyland while actually on a kiddie ride in a horrible alley), Buni finds his world is sadder and creepier than expected (the sushi restaurant serves body parts of the staff), or – and, as I noted before, this is more common than I expected – someone tries (and often succeeds) to eat another clearly-sentient person in the strip.

There’s a fun one, about halfway in, where BuniDad and the next-door neighbor (a bull) hate-eat members of each other’s species at each other, which is a pretty emblematic Buni strip. It’s about spite, and performative nastiness, on that level, with the title character himself floating above that like a visitor from some happier, sunnier, massively-licensed strip.

It’s an interesting combination, and making Buni central is really important: the world would be too much of a one-joke premise for a long-running strip otherwise. It sets up a gigantic, very central conflict that gives Pagelow a lot of room to work with, while also allowing strips that are just quirky odd bits about either Buni or other characters – this world is dark, but it’s cartoony dark, and not dark all the time everywhere.

So this is fun, and there’s more depth than you might expect for a wordless strip – or that you might realize, seeing one random strip once in a while float across your social feed. (That’s how I previously saw Buni: I’m not saying you are me, but I’m assuming it’s typical.) And if you’re looking for a comic strip way more centrally about cannibalism than you suspected was possible, it’s really your only choice.

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

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 and viewpoint and art style.

Also, her books are short and breezy, which means they’re easy to pick up on a day when you feel like reading funny cartoons and not like diving into a whole thing of a graphic novel.

So: I think I’ve read all of her books in the past year, and am now caught up. (They’re all short, so it’s not like it was difficult in any way – and, again, each one is fun and breezy and funny.) Cryptid Club , which came out about a month ago, was the most recent, and I just caught up with the fourth collection of her main “series” Sarah’s Scribbles, Oddball .

This book is very much like the previous Sarah’s Scribbles collections – Adulthood Is a Myth, Big Mushy Happy Lump and Herding Cats – with a little over a hundred single-page comics about a cartoon version of Sarah doing her daily-life thing, presumably just that big more awkwardly and amusingly than the real Andersen does. If you like any of them, you’ll like all of them. If you can’t stand any of them – I could characterize why you don’t like them, but humor is a taste, so it could be any reason – then you’ll probably dislike them all.

This one is the Pandemic Book: it was published in 2021 (though there’s at least one cartoon with a looming “2022” in it, so I think it came out late in ’21 and some of it was done right near deadline) and some of it deals with the expected “I hate having to go out in public and see human beings, but now I am forbidden to do that and have mixed feelings” stuff. But that’s a minor strain – it’s mostly the same kind of jokes, focusing on the Sarah character, who as always I hope is a really exaggerated-for-effect version of Andersen herself. (If any of us were the ways we try to amusingly portray ourselves, the world would be even wackier than it is.)

Anyway. I like this. I think it’s funny, and that Andersen is a big talent. I’m excited to see her do more tightly-themed books like Fangs and Cryptid Club, since I think those will give her more runway to do more complex jokes (and even story-like things, if she wants to), but her core funny comics are still swell, too. This is a good book for a day when you just want a pick-me-up.

[1] Assuming you’ve seen my posts about (in reverse chronological order) Cryptid Club , Herding Cats , Big Mushy Happy Lump , Fangs , and/or Adulthood Is a Myth .

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

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. But there have been three collections of the series, all of which seem to have come out after the last update to the Tumblr page.

My theory – which is mine, and what it is too – is that McNamee did this strip regularly in the mid-teens, and collected it mostly after it ended, and that there will be no more. But I’d be very happy if that theory were wrong.

(I also can’t find anything else by McNamee since the last Pie collection in 2020, so I hope he’s working on a bigger story that will come out very soon and make us all happy and laugh and rejoice.)

I’m thinking all this because I recently found the first collection, Goldilocks and the Infinite Bears , semi-randomly in my library’s digital-reading app and just read it. (The other two, unfortunately, are not also in the same app, so I’ll have to search for them elsewhere.)

So: yay! This is funny and neat, in a vaguely Tom-Guald-ian way – McNamee’s art style and his tone are both in the same vague space that Gauld has been working – and collects a hundred or so comics, mostly single-pagers (with a few epic two-pagers), mostly four-panel, and entirely about fairy-tale, folkloric, and other fictional creatures.

(Note: the Judeo-Christian God does show up a few times. I stand by my immediately previous statement.)

McNamee has a simplified, fun style that makes everything more amusing, and his writing is zippy and smart, too. I am happy that there are two more books to search out, and mildly optimistic that McNamee (who seems to still be pretty young – he references being in college in the Aughts) will do more Neat Stuff in the near future. If you, too, like funny comics about fairies, wizards, Godzilla, zombies, dragons, demons, Death, unicorns, Superman, and their ilk, you’ll want to check it out.

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

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 I’ve already written about Welcome to Parenting  and The Struggle Is Real  since March.

Gordon’s been doing this strip about a decade, and it’s entirely about his family life: he draws a family of ducks (viewpoint father, mother, older boy and younger girl) who match, as far as the reader can tell, his actual family, although the ducks have (very sporadically) had their own names, which don’t match Gordon’s family’s names. By the point of the strips in this 2019 book, the two kids were tweens: the obnoxious, demanding, argumentative years. (They’re all obnoxious years, as parents come to learn – it’s just different kinds of obnoxious as you go along.)

This one is more structured than the first two were, organized into a dozen thematic chapters, each one of which has a short intro by Gordon, laid out in a font that looks like the lettering in the strip so it’s “handwritten.” Those chapters loosely follow the kid-development timeline – at least as far as Gordon’s own kids have gotten – starting with “Babies” and running through things like “Food” and “School” on the way to “Growing Up Too Fast.” The intros are pretty close to the standard American “kids are wonderful and horrible” line of discussion, and don’t really add much: I’m sure Gordon means all of it and is being sincere and honest, but we’ve all seen this a million times before. His strips are more distinctive and original, since they have to be quick and precise and funny.

As someone who has assembled books and planned out publication schedules, I have suspicions about this book. In particular, I would bet a medium-sized sum of money that it includes all of the usable early strips that didn’t make it into the first two books, as a semi-housecleaning measure, along with some then-newer material. It was the “we have just enough for a third book, so we’re making a third book” kind of third book, is what I think. And the intros were partially an effort to hit the sentimentalist sweet spot of the market and partially a way to generate new content for the book fairly quickly. (I would not be surprised if Gordon knocked them all out over a weekend.)

So this is the least of the three books to date, but it’s still fun and funny. If you find it next to a cashwrap, or in a pop-up in your favorite online store, as your own kids are squabbling in the background, you will likely enjoy it only incrementally less than the first two. And that’s just fine.

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

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 later, Gordon’s book publisher, Andrews McMeel published a second collection of the Fowl Language strips, Fowl Language: The Struggle Is Real . (For those counting on their fingers, that would be in 2017.)

It’s not entirely clear if the books reprint all of the strips, or reprint them in order – Andrews McMeel has been doing comic strips in book form for a long time, so I trust they know how to do this right, but this is not a continuity strip in any way. The only real markers of time passing would be the age of the kids, and, well, they’re ducks to begin with. Gordon might well draw them as small hellions for another decade, even as they act like tweens and then teenagers, just because that’s funnier.

So this second book is very much like the first: the kids are mostly in the same life-stage (very young, in their very first school years, the years when they scream and run around for no reason all of the damn time), and the attitude and style are still the same time.

The format has settled down a bit: nearly everything here is that odd Internet main-comic-and-then-a-bonus-panel format, with the main comic on one page and the bonus panel, typically an afterthought or secondary punchline, on the next page. I read this digitally, so each page was on its own, but the book is laid out with the main comic on a left-hand (even-numbered) page and the bonus on the right, so Gordon is not trying to make it a similar “reveal” to how bonus panels work online.

Again, it’s the same kind of jokes and humor as the first book, and the kids are still in the same life-stage: small children are exhausting, demanding, and at least borderline insane, with demands and passions that appear and disappear in a second but are all-encompassing while they last. And the father character has to deal with them, and swears more than is typical for “funny-kid” humor.

It’s durable stuff , and Gordon has a good cartoonist’s eye to make it work, both in his precise writing and his expressive drawing. (He did make cartoons for Hallmark for nearly two decades; he might not have done public-facing stuff with his name on it, but he’s been doing humor in public for a long time and has the chops to prove it.)

Like any book of cartoons, you need to both want a book of cartoons (they’re fun and breezy and may seem expensive for the time you spend reading them) and want cartoons about this (if you’re aggressively child-free, this is not for you). But if you do, and if you do, Gordon, again, is good at this and makes a lot of jokes that land really well. I also still think there’s a potential (and maybe actual; I haven’t checked) merchandise empire in his single-image comics – lots of these would be great as posters or T-shirts or similar.

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

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 , Fowl Language: Welcome to Parenting , since it seemed to be the earliest of the three published so far. (Further exploration shows that to be true.) It collects about a hundred of those strips, which break down almost evenly into single panels (many of which would make great posters or response memes; Gordon is good at the crisp specific saying) and four-panel strips.

Gordon, as I understand it, sometimes cartoons about other things, but most of Fowl Language is about his kids. In the strips collected here – from the 2013-2016 time period – there were two of them, first a boy and then a girl, and they were very young, first babies and then toddlers and maybe up to preschoolers. You know: the loud, demanding, incoherent , psychopathic years.

My children are vastly older, which may make reading comics like this more distant but also makes them more entertaining – I can remember all of that, but the scars have mostly healed.

They are all from the point of view of the father, who is not exactly Gordon. His name is “Dickie,” but that comes up almost never. Well, and also he’s a duck, like the rest of the family – you might have noticed that. It’s a cute cartooning thing, and it ties well into the title, which also refers to the fact that Dickie is admittedly not the world’s best parent.

So this is somewhere in the humorous-parenting world alongside Ian Frazier’s “Cursing Mommy ” pieces and Guy Delisle’s “Bad Dad ” books. That’s good company to me, and Gordon can do both the funny and the sentimental. Also, to be clear, his sentiment is modern and inclusive, not the same old vague American glurge , with great comics on GTA games, gay marriage, and how kids can be assholes. (That’s not my language: that’s straight from the comic.)

I expected to like Fowl Language in larger doses, and I did. There are two more books: I might have to find them, and see how the duck-kids have grown up, and if Gordon is cartooning about pre-teen hell these days. I bet he’d be great at that, too.

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