This is a collection of mostly rough drafts from the comics artist Liana Finck. I recommend checking out her work online and seeing the finished products posted around, and more specifically the comics that have been published in the New Yorker. This collection, like I said, is mostly from rough drafts, Instagram posts, Twitter, and other sources. So in some cases these are incredibly insightful moments, and in other cases these are half-formed.
Another thing that is clear from this collection is that a lot of the observations, maybe what Finck might call her “complaints” from the subtitle of the book, are not jokes so much as, often acerbic, critiques. Many of these could be shaped into more polished jokes, obviously, and many couldn’t.
So this is a sketch pad, and as such it’s very good at providing a look into a creative mind. But these are not exactly works in progress, so much as journaled ideas. As a whole collection, because of the nature of the book, they aren’t exactly cohesive, but they’re often incredibly sharp, and quite a bit more cutting than many of her published, which can often be quite cutting.
In the scheme of things, this feels like a rough entry point into her work and has a bit more of that completionist air to it, than a book that’s easy to take up and jump right in. All of which is to say, this is a rough collection (designed to be rough, obviously) by an artist whose other work is quite sharp.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Excuse-Me-Cartoons-Complaints-Notes/dp/1984801511/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=liana+finck&qid=1570019902&sr=8-1)