Just to take away the suspense up front: when I see a new comic by Ted May, I’m instantly happy. It’s like getting a new King Cat in the mail (but in an entirely different sense, if you can work your head around that). This is a series of short and longish pieces about a variety of topics, which would have been the definition of a mini comic back in the day, but at least a few of Ted’s rejected titles (helpfully provided at the back of the book) refer to this as a graphic novels, so what do I know? Stories in here include an awkward conversation in a bathroom, a crowd gathering because of a house without its blinds drawn, the best day of a young man’s life turning ugly in a hurry, the hilarity and terror of openly cheating, two older married men telling the truth at a wedding, a young man who is perhaps overexcited by football ordering a pizza, a man with the unfortunate habit of choking on his food testing his luck, and a conversation at a cancelled meeting (the people in the meeting were not told that it was cancelled) thinking back to a quiet moment where he opened a window and smelled the fresh air. Less madcap hilarity that I may have been expecting, but that’s on me, not Ted, and there’s still plenty of funny stuff in here. The sheer banality of the last story of the office meeting was damned funny if you have any experience at all in that sort of setting, and the herd-like American quality of gathering in front of a window just because other people were gathering there was pretty damned funny too. Above all nobody does facial expressions like Ted, as you can probably tell at least a little by that cover if you’ve never read his other comics. And why would you have not read any of his other comics? Do you just hate comics? Baffling. Anyway, as always, this is well worth checking out, whether it’s a comic or a graphic novel or some entirely new thing that we’re now calling comics. $5
