When I was a kid, my dad had a couple of volumes of collections of The Far Side Gallery comics, and I… well, to be honest, when I first read them I was much too young to understand more than one in thirty of them, but eventually, I loved them. I was so envious of Gary Larson, and his ability to both draw and be funny at the same time, that I spent a significant amount of time in middle school pretending that I also had both those talents. (I very much did not.)
Fortunately for us, there are still some people who DO have both a quirky (some might say downright weird) sense of humor, and the skill to easily communicate it through a few well drawn panels and a short supply of words. One of those people is Jake Thompson, and his The Book of Onions, which is not, he assures readers from the first page, a cookbook or a story about actual vegetables, but is, instead, a modern day collection of off the wall comics, that echo the Galleries of my childhood in both style and substance.
I hadn’t actually heard of Jake Likes Onions (the site the comics were originally published at), but, in reading the book, I realized I’d seen quite a few of the comics in other Interwebby places over the last few years. I had in fact saved this astonishing realistic portrait of me to my computer quite some time ago:
(Except I shower this hot even in the summer. Always hot showers. Always.)
It’s a great collection of entertaining strips, and I’m gonna leave you with a couple more to prove my point.
Once again, my copy was supplied by NetGalley, in exchange for a review. Although, hey, here’s an idea for NetGalley: Maybe make images sharable, if you want people to write reviews about books that have lots of pictures? I mean it wasn’t too hard to figure out for webcomics, but it makes reviewing picture books a tad difficult sometimes.