What if Team America: World Police had a graphic novel baby with The Far Side. All you’d have to do is give it a British accent, colorize it, sprinkle in more dark humor with climate change references and you’ve got Hi, Earth. It’s a bitingly funny graphic novel that will reward comic strip fans who thought they’d never see another series with revolving characters in disparate situations that are able to make you belly laugh in four panels. That’s a mouthful and if it’s too much then know that Hi, Earth is from the two that brought the very funny webcomics, War and Peas to your inbox.
Seriously, War and Peas: Hi, Earth is the rare sort of graphic novel humor that makes you think, and then makes you laugh harder. This is where readers don’t need to dig too much into the climate change topic that is prevalent in the collection. It is there with about one out of four strips using climate change as its foible. Hi, Earth doesn’t water down the severity of climate change and it doesn’t guilt people into feeling badly so that they do something different to delay or change it. Instead, the book makes you laugh, and laugh at it in such a variety of ways and punch lines that both eco-activists and climate change deniers will have issues with its content if they want to.
Namely, they’ll both feel a little guilty about laughing at it. There’s one panel with two fish talking and one of them says that with the rising sea levels they could put a Jacuzzi in the back. The other fish says that their mother could live with them in the back. The last panel shows the other fish on a skateboard in a protest with humans on land and a “Stop climate change” sign by its flipper.
There’s another one where the moon is seeing a doctor. The doctor says that the moon has humans, a dangerous tiny species that jumps around a lot. The moon questions where it could’ve gotten that from and goes home to tell his wife the bad news. The moon is married to Earth.
There are moments in Hi, Earth that some parents won’t find appropriate for high school audiences. One of the four-panel cartoons shows two trees having a conversation as one of them is about to be cut down. As the tree is falling the surviving tree mockingly tells the other one it’s going to a better place, where they’re going to bang on its dead body. The final panel shows a cartoon couple having sex with the tree’s ghost freaking out beside the wooden bed that it was made from.
It’s funny. The instances where foul language is used are also funny. Cursing can be funny. The graphic novel, as well as previous War and Peas cartoons (insofar as I can tell…) don’t use foul language as forbidden fruit to entice curious readers. Hi, Earth uses foul language to make its ironic statements, paired with illustrations, funnier. This is a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its part and sometimes it’s done with words you don’t want middle school students repeating.
What will amaze careful readers is the balance that War and Peas: Hi, Earth accomplishes in a very subtle manner. One page, from the dog’s perspective shows them thinking how the leash is to help the human from getting lost, with the final panel illustrating the dog saying “I’ll take care of you.” The page opposite that has four panels showing a conversation between a tree and a man with the tree scolding the man for writing on recycled paper that “has specks of human poop in it?!!” The emotions in this collection ebb and flow quickly to where readers won’t know if the next cartoon will make them think, laugh or a combination of both.
Our 15-year-old has read The Far Side, but he doesn’t seek it out as a source of relaxation. When I was his age that was my relaxation read. I’d visit Waldenbooks to see if there was a new collection of one-panel masterpieces. They were a minimalist’s paradise. It was the rare comic strip that was always funny, but never managed to make you laugh out loud. It’s not that kind of funny. Hi, Earth operates in that same vein, but eeks out the occasional bit of audible laughter because it operates to a slightly coarser degree.
Hi, Earth is a War and Peas collection of their webcomics. It’s by Jonathan Kunz and Elizabeth Pich and available on Andrews McMeel Publishing.
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