I follow The Oatmeal (Matthew Inman) on Instagram and he recently annouced he had a new book coming out which inspired me to read some of his other works, I’ve only read How to Tell if You’re Cat is Plotting to Kill You. My local library had My Dog: The Paradox: A Lovable Discourse about Man’s Best Friend and Why Grizzly Bears Should Wear Underpants available so I took a break from more strenuous literature and spent an evening reading adult comics.
My Dog: The Paradox, a lovely ode to Man’s Best Friend (specifically Matthew’s dog, Rambo), is so short it hardly qualifies as anything more than a Sunday comic strip but its brevity doesn’t make it any less sweet and funny.
Grizzly Bears is a bit longer with a less narrow focus. I’ve only recently started following The Oatmeal on social media and I don’t frequent his website so most of these were pretty new to me- I don’t think the same could be said to someone who has followed Inman for years- despite being published 4 years ago.
‘What We Should Have Been Taught in Our Senior Year of High School’ as well as the difference between i.e and e.g are among my favorite of Inman’s educational/ informational cartoons. If the language wasn’t so harsh I’d advocate for it to be required reading in junior high!
It’s not all educational but it is all funny! Inman takes observations about ordinary activities and somehow makes them extraordinarily funny.