The little world of Liz Climo, the cutest comics I have read.

Are you all already familiar with the work of Liz Climo? If not, she draws rather funny comics featuring cute animals engaged in conversation and/or more elaborate social situations, delivering jokes in a very effective, deadpan manner. Many of the jokes are basic ones derived from the species of the animal in question.

If you are not familiar with Liz Climo, you can familiarize yourself with her work quite quickly. You can read her comics on the internet. Or you can read her new-ish book, a collection of 148 of her cartoons. That's the cover of her book up there.

When I checked it out from the library, I had every intention of writing a review of it, but I'm finding it somewhat challenging to do, particularly because Climo's comics are so short, sweet and simple that it's difficult to discuss any of them without ruining them, and it's far easier to simply point at examples and say, "Look at this comic" then to "review" them. I mean, if you read one, you'll get it; that's how universal most of the humor is.

So instead, I just thought I'd post scans of a few examples, none of which are among the better ones in the collection (that third one's not funny at all, really), but all of which feature jokes referencing comic book characters.

I really like the way Climo draws animals. They're not quite realistic, but they're not exactly cartoonish or exaggerated either; they look like super-stripped down drawings of real animals drawn from life. Except for when they're doing extremely human things, which is often.

I also like that she chooses interesting animals to draw. Not just the ones you see on the cover, but also, in one instance, a capybara. I think capybara's are inherently funny, and the choice of a capybara is kind of funny because it appears in a strip that has no reason to have a capybara in it. It could literally be any other animal at all, as the joke in that strip is being generated by the presence of a badger.

I like the way she draws their eyes as little dots, too. You can't get much more deadpan than having no expression or animation at all...not even a pupil. It also helps them look like normal dumb animals, which makes it funnier still when they evince complex human emotions or reactions.

Anyway, online or in print, Liz Climos's comics are worth seeking out. She draws good, and she tells funny jokes.