Review by Ian Keogh

Jess Bradley’s Squid Bits has been running in weekly comic The Phoenix for a long, long time, yet while there have been almost a dozen Bunny vs. Monkey collections from the same comic, this is the first Squid Bits collection. It’s because the squid bits of the title are small filler strips, sometimes just a single panel, and it’s taken this long to collect enough of them for a volume the same size as other Phoenix collections.

The result is an almost impossibly dense selection of utterly bonkers moments, the longest of them only occupying a single page. Because fitting them all together on individual pages would otherwise leave white gaps, Bradley has constructed a new strip running throughout. The joke is of the strips actually being created by a squid, who doodles small animals in the margins, and in a moment of self-awareness the animals realise that if the squid stops drawing the comic they’ll cease to exist, so what can be done? They decide the best course of action is please the squid by each of them making a funny hat, and their individual attempts at doing so occupy what would otherwise be white spaces. Genius!

Bradley is obviously a talented cartoonist able to simplify her style down to essentials needed to convey nonsense such as the red panda repeatedly being a jerk, to accompany checklists of ridiculous items and daft horoscopes, and to illustrate the likes of ‘Stick Insect Romance’. The ideas keep coming and keep coming fast, and while always funny, can also hit sweet spot well above the usual high quality line. ‘Art Shark’ could be a Viz strip in another incarnation.

The only downside is possible ennui by attempting too many pages at once. In small doses in the comics Squid Bits delights every time, but the density of That’s a Nice Hat! might frazzle the parental brain. Youngsters need have no concern.