Review by Ian Keogh

What We Mean By Yesterday collects the daily strips Benjamin Marra runs on Instagram, 549 of them to be precise. His introduction recommends reading one a day, using a piece of card to block sight of the following strip. It’s unlikely he’s serious about that.

The focus is a middle-aged teacher with anger issues amplified by a meth cigarette he’s passed in the staff room and the subsequent dissolute eighteen hours of his life. Marra has plenty of targets to hit along the way, but the remorseless succession of embarrassments he puts Bruce Barnes through prompts whether he has anyone in mind when creating the strip. There’s barely a situation Barnes can’t make worse due to his own intolerance or incompetence in a continuing series of incidents he largely brings on himself.

Despite the page count What We Mean By Yesterday is consumed relatively quickly as Marra sticks to four panels a page, frequently wordless, and with diversions that transmit as little more than time-saving devices to maintain a schedule. There are points to be made about toxic male attitudes and several funny moments such as bar thugs insisting on Coors Lite and Barnes’ ever increasing deterioration, but not enough to sustain the length of some sequences. A 33 page bar fight outlives its welcome, as does an extended hallucinogenic trip.

The art is far sketchier than Marra’s usual tightly inked pages, but still very appealing and good at delivering both scrapes and personality. The best drawing sometimes accompanies the most ridiculous scenes, such as Barnes dancing about in a luxuriously large bathroom.

Funny in places, What We Mean By Yesterday is surely best experienced in book form, as it’s hardly designed to keep folk reading day by day online.