Shannon Wheeler: I Thought You Would Be Funnier

Shannon Wheeler is a good, solid cartoonist in the tradition of, well, magazine cartooning. Previously, he's created a satirical superhero called Too Much Coffee Man, and contributed cartoons to The Onion and The New Yorker. This book contains cartoons rejected by The New Yorker. Are these rejects bad? No, they're usually pretty funny, and in some cases really funny. Wheeler works within an established cartoon tradition, using dry wit and often taking established or ordinary situations and putting a new, slightly absurd slant on them – like relationships, pets, at the doctor's office etc. For example, you have one cartoon showing a psychoanalyst sitting beside an empty couch and asking "How long have you felt like an imaginary patient?". It's amusing and worth a chuckle, if not quite laugh-out loud funny.

And that's my only problem with this 116-page (one cartoon per page) hardcover collection – it's funny, but it's not $17.99 funny. (On the other hand, the Boom! Studios website has the softcover version at $19.99, which seems outright bizarre.)

Cartoonist Dan Piraro has written the foreword, and I'll have to put his books ahead of this one in my cartoons books-buying priorities. It's worth reading, Wheeler is good, but at this price, it's not worth the money it costs to buy it IMO. (Of course, I've already bought it, so that insight comes a bit late for me.)

Another review of the book here.