So this isn’t really a “novel” book. More like a compilation of comic strips. Still, it has pages, two covers and a spine so I’ll consider it a book for the purposes of these little reviews.

I remember back when I was in Jr. high school every morning I would bring in our newspaper, sit down at the kitchen table with some Earth Grains donuts and read the comic page before going off to school. Bloom County was my favorite. The exploits of Opus the penguin and the rest of the gang in Bloom County kept me thoroughly entertained and laughing for a long time.

Then Berkely Breathed decided to stop making Bloom County. I wondered what would become of my mornings before school. Our newspaper replaced Bloom County with some new cartoon that I was immediately suspicious of. How could anything replace my beloved Bloom County? After a few weeks I was began to warm up to this new comic strip about a boy named Calvin and his tiger Hobbes.

Then sometime during my college years Bill Watterson decided to stop making Calvin and Hobbes. By this time I was living on my own and didn’t get a daily newspaper anymore but I read the books and looked for it in the newspaper whenever I happened to be near one. Now what was I going to do? First Bloom County and then Calvin and Hobbes. There is no way a worthy successor could step up a second time.

Then one day when I was cruising around on the Internet on my 14.4 dial-up connection I ran across this Dilbert character. Not only was this a worthy successor but it was a comic strip I could relate to. I had recently graduated from college and was working in an environment not unlike Dilbert’s. Also, I didn’t have to buy a newspaper to read this comic! Scott Adams posted every single strip on his web site a week after it appeared in newspapers.

Dilbert continues to be a good comic even if it has lost some of the wit and magic from it’s early years. A few years ago I stumbled across an online comic strip called User Friendly. Like Dilbert its cast is mainly tech workers but unlike Dilbert the comic is exclusively online and targets a very specific audience: UNIX geeks. User Friendly may never achieve mass popularity like Dilbert but among UNIX aficionados it’s highly revered. A comic written just for “us”. Sometimes you have to know UNIX to understand the jokes and sometimes it’s written broad enough for anyone to laugh at. It’s usually the first site I look at every day as I eat my breakfast at work which kind of reminds me of those years in high school reading Bloom County.

Check out the userfriendly.org website and read it for yourself. The entire User Friendly archives are online. Here’s a few selection from the Root of All Evil compilation.