Here’s a lesson for you youngsters who think, like me, that it’s sometimes a better idea to read the series as it’s put out in graphic novel form and not when it’s done in comic form. Once you read all the big books, it’s done. I guess it is for the people who read the comic too, but there have at least been a special or two put out since this series ended. All I want right now is to be able to read more of this wonderful series and there’s nothing left to be had, except for the specials that I missed. Reading this all in a row is the way to go, that much is obvious.
So what happened in the actual book? Well, everything got wrapped up in a nice little bundle. Or a messy giant bundle, but pretty much everything was wrapped up to some extent. Stinky was taken care of (literally, but I’m not telling you anything that you can’t tell from looking at the cover), Buddy and Lisa saw the light, Ma Bradley is happy again, George and Valerie both seem happy with their lot in life, even Babs seems to have things worked out. Combine that with the best ending of any comics series ever (and any fan of Sam Henderson knows exactly what I mean), and you have the best book of the series to end the whole damned thing. Which is horribly frustrating, because I don’t know if he has any plans to do a major series from here on out. He had a regular strip on suck.com (which you can probably still find in the archives) and in theory had a cartoon somewhere online, but I never saw it. Probably the best part of this book, though, is the four page sequence where a girl from the Starbucks next door comes over and flirts with him, turning his bachelor world upside down. It’s beautifully done and perfectly captures the confusion of trying to figure out exactly what the hell women are talking about when you’re single (in my world, at least).
As I’m done with this series, I feel obligated to say something. This is a series that everybody should read at some point, especially if you’re anywhere near the 20-something age group that is represented so flawlessly here. Maybe you can find some of these at a library or something if you’re totally broke, I don’t know. Some comic stores supposedly have deals set up where they’ll give you your money back for something like this that they believe in if you buy it and don’t like it. I started re-reading this series thinking that it was mediocre and I wasn’t going to like it that much, and ended up tearing through the whole thing much faster than I had intended. Going from giving it a 6 (on a scale from 1-10, and I really hate ratings systems so I’m not going to do this very often) to a 10 merely through re-reading it should say something about the quality of the work. I don’t know if I would have thought more of it at the time if I had been reading it issue by issue, but history has allowed me to correct that mistake by reading them all in a row. I must have at least thought something of them subconsciously if I insisted on getting all the books when they were coming out.
