Regular readers of Bookmunch will be familiar with Will McPhail at this point given how much we liked his debut graphic novel, In, released last year. We don’t like to lay too much store by anything we say here but we did say this:
“…if you are unfamiliar with his New Yorker cartoons, it’s worth spending a little time Googling to catch up – if his publisher Sceptre have any sense at all, they will be pulling together a Tom Gauld type collection of those lickety split…”
And hey presto, you’re welcome, here we are with a very neat little collection of the aforementioned New Yorker cartoons, as well as sundry other bits and pieces and – for the ultra-completist McPhail fans out there – new stuff too.
So what kind of things are we talking about here? Well, like the aforementioned Tom Gauld, this is a collection of standalone pieces, (for the most page) single page frames with a single caption, largely designed to make you chuckle. As the title goes some way to suggest, there are cartoons about love here (“it’s the only thing worth doing anything for,” McPhail tells us in the pithy intro) and there are cartoons about ‘vermin’ (we’re talking pigeons, rats, seagulls and… errr…. emus) as well as ‘lesser animals’ (sharks, seals, blackbirds, crabs, that kind of thing) – this latter obsession driven in no small part by McPhail’s time studying Zoology at university (a largely wasted time, if you discount the detail he affords animals in his cartoons).
But that’s not all, there are cartoons on what McPhail calls his ‘little opinions’, in which he wades into culture war waters (you’ll be pleased and probably not in the least bit surprised to discover that McPhail isn’t on the side of the idiots – if you need to understand who the idiots are, read this book and if you disagree, it’s your side), with a side order of nonsense (strange things that amused McPhail) and life in general. Whilst the hit rate of McPhail’s debut collection isn’t as high as the hit rate of Tom Gauld‘s most recent collection, Tom Gauld has, to be fair, been doing this a little longer than McPhail and so it’s an unfair comparison and it’s rude of us to make the point.
All told, Will McPhail is starting to feel like something of a new obsession to us and we look forward to more longer form works like In and more collections like this in the future.
Any Cop?: We will say this – if you are a fan, or know a fan, of either Tom Gauld or New Yorker cartoons in general, snap this up, for yourself or them. That way, we can help generate the kind of business that ensures we see more Will McPhail books in the future.
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