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In Your Next Life You Will Be Together With All Of Your Friends

This book is one of the rare ones that is actually bigger than my scanner, so there’s actually a bit more to that cover around the edges. Just in case anybody was curious where that creek ends, I guess? Anyway, this is a collection of odds and ends covering roughly 20 years of Anders’ career and, once again with this sort of book, believe you me: no matter how much you sought out his work over the years, you don’t have all of the strips in here. They cover too wide of a range, and they come from some really obscure sources. Outside of that magnificent title, what’s in here? Stories include bookend strips asking “Why does graphic storytelling matter?” (with two very different answers, and also no answers at all), a graphic representation of how the choices you make ripple out to effect everything else, a gigantic and mesmerizing double page spread that I’ll leave entirely to the reader, a series of sketchbook pages dealing with a whitewater rafting trip (and, naturally, all the philosophical and mundane questions that came up), a sketch of some famous comic characters (that I didn’t recognize until his notes at the end of the book), Superman chatting with Dan Clowes, his redrawn page from an old issue of Fantastic Four (with his own dialogue), the inside of a head as the cosmos, his jam with Gabrielle Bell (they went back and forth in his sketchbook), his experiences with covid (and the death of George Floyd), and his interpretation of all of history, including the stuff that hasn’t happened yet. There’s also an insert of a holiday price list, and while this is one of those things I want to mostly leave to the reader as well, here’s one question: how much would you pay for the ability to walk through walls? Read this to find the answer! As always with Anders’ work, my saying “this part of the comic is about this thing!” barely scratches the surface of what he’s trying to do. The section where he details all of history (including some pretty specific details about his own life for that section) could be a comic all by itself, and his suggestion for a covid game to play with yourself could also be a mini, let alone the rest of the strip that dealt with everything else going on at the time. This guy is one of the best around, and he’s still making comics as of 2021, which is a damned good thing in this bleak mess of a world. $20