I first "met" Mimi Pond when she first started appearing in the <em>National Lampoon</em>. In those days, I sought out all the cartoon magazines that I could, such as <em>Punch</em> and <em>The New Yorker</em>. It was the next step up from <em>Mad Magazine</em> and I got to recognize her cartoons, the way I recoganized Shary Flenniken, who did <em>Trots and Bonnie</em> in the same publication.
Since then, I have followed her work, as best I could, and was happily surprised when she published her memoir of her time working as a waitress through, or rather after art college <em><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18490689-over-easy" target="_blank">Over Easy</a></em>.
I didn't know there was more to tell, until she came out with this latest, the second part of her story, of her time as a waitress, while she tried to establish herself as a cartoonist. This wraps up her story nicely, and shows that the world of restaurants, and easy drugs, and what happens to all the people in the first book.
You don't have to have read the first book to understand what is going on, in fact it has been three years since the first book came out, and I didn't bother to reread it before I dived back into it, although, once I did finish it, I went back to reread <em>Over Easy</em> again.
If you have liked Mimi Pond in the past, if you have read her other books, well, this is really nothing like them, although the humor is there. Here she is examining a time in her life, where she is running around, with what we used to call a "bad crowd". She is young, on her own, and trying to escape Oakland, after having escaped San Diego, to get her career on track to being a cartoonish.
It is a hefty book, coming in at nearly 500 pages, but the story needs those pages to be there, to see what was happening, to tell her version of what happened, thought as she says, she has moved things around, to make a better story.
Would recommend this to everyone, to those who want to be cartoonists, to those who have been in the service industry, to those who have eaten at restaurants, and to those who know how Oakland was in the '70s.
- Hardcover: 448 pages
- Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly (8 August 2017)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1770462821
- ISBN-13: 978-1770462823
- Product Dimensions: 16.1 x 4.4 x 21.3 cm
- Boxed-product Weight: 1.2 Kg
- Average Customer Review: Be the first to review this item
