Jones, Toby – Memory Foam #1

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Memory Foam #1

What an f’ed up nose.  Sorry, I shouldn’t start off with something so meaningless to the quality of the book, but it’s just sitting there.  These are autobiographical stories from about a year of Toby’s life (7/08-8/09), dealing with all sorts of things, so if you’re a hater of all thing autobiographical you should wander off somewhere else.  As for me, I’m always up for some angst. Stories include Toby wondering if he has always been this much of a hermit or it’s more of a recent thing (and using the lyrics of Frank Black’s “Hang On To Your Ego” to illustrate his point at the end was brilliant), the desire to kill a mouse versus everybody else thinking it’s barbaric, a series of short strips dealing with the sickness and death of the mother of his girlfriend (and his own ineffectiveness in dealing with it; I love how this subject was dealt with using a series of three panel strips, which are generally reserved for “jokey” topics), how his master plan to hide in dorkiness in college to get girls was ruined when he met a girl who was equally dorky, handwriting analysis, a hilarious primer on how to deal with “your” Toby model, his top 10 video games (and getting a fancy new PSP just so he could mod it to play old games), dessert over job hunting, and trying to find a decent job but ending up (briefly) with the notorious Kirby salespeople. So let me just get my autobio checklist over here… it’s insightful, funny, revealing, and it looks much better than you might suspect from that cover.  Yep, I’d say it’s a winner.  Toby was also nice enough to send along the most recent issue (there are only 2 so far), and I look forward to seeing if he kept it up with the second issue or became a totally unreadable hack.  No, I can’t remember the last time that happened either, but it’s best to keep an eye out for these things…