Comedy

How do I begin to describe the surreal, gut-bustingly funny, and all-too relatable humor of cartoonist Nick Sumida?  A storyboard artist on the Nickelodeon children’s show Harvey Beaks, Sumida’s personal comics (collected under the title Snackies) are certainly targeted towards a very different demographic.  The polar opposite of the idyllic and sweet Harvey Beaks, Sumida’s absurdist autobiographical comics are wrought with anxiety, self-deprecation, and nightmarish charm.

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Anyone who’s spent time in a foreign country can tell you that culture shock is a real thing.  While perhaps not as romantic and alienating as moody cinema might have you believe, there’s a never-ending adjustment period in which you find yourself faced with situations you never would have considered before your arrival (ask anyone who’s had to use a Japanese squat toilet).

Nowhere is this more obvious than the adorable and irreverent comics of Mary Cagle, who has for the past two years been chronicling her time as an English teacher in a small-town Japanese primary school under the title Let’s Speak English. Cagle, who in addition to teaching also works as an illustrator, writer, and colorist on a multitude of comics, illustrates Let’s Speak English in the traditional Japanese comic format called 4-koma (ie: four black and white panels stacked atop each other) and makes full use of the medium to tell short, witty, and only slightly embarrassing stories of her daily interactions with her students, coworkers, and neighbors.

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If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you combined the rollicking, fantastical aesthetic of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, the subtle homespun creepiness of Roald Dahl, and all the zany characters and bad decisions of a college road trip movie, then you need look no further than Prague Race.

From the delightfully twisted mind of Finnish cartoonist Petra Erika Nordlund, Prague Race is the story of three friends (eccentric slacker Leona, neurotic rich kid Colin, and affable powerhouse Miko) who are unexpectedly thrown into a world of magic, danger, and intrigue when they cross paths with a group of interdimensional smugglers and their ambulatory pet shark (whose name is, I kid you not, Fishsticks).

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