I laughed out loud numerous times while reading, and all I have to do sometimes is recall a certain chapter or moment and it will get me laughing all over again. Her observations and idiosyncrasies are so weirdly specific a lot of the time, yet I found many of them wholly relatable.
The combination of writing and art has made this book one of the funniest reading experiences I’ve had in a long time. Most impactful from this story, however, was the distressed bewilderment on the animals’ faces throughout, capturing the feeling more than just words could have, to hilarious effect. I have a lizard that I’ve stuffed into a small Jack-o-Lantern poncho on Halloween for the past few years and Brosh made me very self-conscious of how strange this must be for her (the lizard). The way she so precisely analyzes what we subject pets to was hilarious in how it deconstructed these behaviours, which I could instantly relate to as a pet owner myself. One of the essays that most comes to mind when I think about the expressiveness of her art is “The Kangaroo Pig Gets Drunk”, which considers how bewildered the animals in our lives must be by the things we subject them to. I love that she still portrays herself as what looks to me like a two-foot-tall, vaguely human piece of macaroni, in contrast to the people drawn around her. It is still brilliantly abstract and deliberately crude looking, though, as she is known for, so don’t worry. Many characters and settings are drawn with more shape and detail than I remember in the last book. It has been a while since I read her first book, but it appeared to me that her drawing ability has improved since then. Images (with speech bubbles) and blocks of text complement each other in a way that appreciably conveys complex ideas and/or feelings to the reader both precisely and quickly.īrosh’s art continues to be fantastically evocative, with a more refined quality to it this time around. Illustrated essays can of course be considered comic books, we should not consider them too narrowly, I only wish to emphasize how unique this book is as a comic.
It’s a unique marriage of illustrations and text that makes the label “illustrated essays” feel most accurate as a classification. I struggled a little with putting this book under the heading of “comic book review”, (though I did do this with its predecessor) because its format is not what you’d typically expect from a comic book. Contained within is an all-new collection of illustrated essays about her childhood, the misadventures of her quirky animals, observations on life, dissection of her flaws, explorations of grief, and so much more. Solutions and Others Problems is the newest book by Allie Brosh, the long-awaited follow-up to her 2013 book Hyperbole and a Half, which was based on her blog of the same name.
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