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.
English (US) · 