I Hope This Helps: Comics and Cures for 21st Century Panic

by Tommy Siegel

I Hope This Helps offers an emergency dose of laughter in book form. Tommy Siegel’s debut essay and comics collection is the perfect pandemic gift—an uplifting, topical, and deeply funny view of millennial culture, phone addiction, and coping with the extreme weirdness of 21st-century life.

Tommy Siegel's debut book collection includes 200+ pages of comics, essays, and extremely helpful guides to coping with 21st-century panic. With comics titled “Choose your social anxiety coping mechanism” and “What your coffee drink of choice says about you,” I Hope This Helps offers clever and sardonic commentary on our social media-driven culture, as well as a series of devastatingly funny relationship comics starring his popular Candy Hearts characters.

Tommy Siegel’s comics began as doodles in the back of a van as a touring rock musician, and quickly earned a viral global fanbase and shout-outs from cultural heavyweights including Ringo Starr, Tim Heidecker, Vic Berger, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. With a perfect balance of absurd humor and insightful writing, I Hope This Helps outlines the journey from the author’s earliest "van doodles" all the way to the socially-distanced awkwardness of the present day.

• ISBN10: 1524860735
• ISBN13: 9781524860738
• Publish Date: 12 November 2020
• Publish Status: Transferred
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Andrews McMeel Publishing
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 208
• Language: English

Reviews

[Quirky Cat]

I received a copy of I Hope This Helps in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I Hope This Helps is a comic series focused on the absurd parts of life and anxiety. Created by Tommy Siegel, it's marketed as being the perfect escape from a world that has gotten far too real.

I'm going to be completely honest with you here: I think I would have liked this graphic novel more had the title and marketing been different. The title (and description) led me to believe that it was going to be a funny, quirky, and uplifting series of comics.

It wasn't. Sure, it was funny at times, and that's why I refuse to rate it lower than three stars, well, that and the artwork. But it also got pretty dark. Nothing about the jokes or comics in this would be defined as helping.

This comic series takes the time to make many comparisons between different generations, but mostly younger and older millennials. There are some good laughs to be found here, especially if you have a good sense of humor about yourself or the whole situation.

In short, I Hope This Help has a unique sense of humor, and is worth the read. Just don't go into it expecting it to actually try to help. The goal is to make people laugh, but not in the most expected ways possible.

Check out more reviews over at Quirky Cat's Fat Stacks