1970’s style line art of mostly glamorous women (who, by the way, I’ve seen Bogarted on various flyers, probably for Poplife about 2 years ago. And on that note, who used my Dino Felipe photo for a flyer? Miami!). Oh ya, Miller. The bite factor in his art arrives from the botched people skills we encounter awkwardly on a daily basis. And when we aren’t, we’re bitching and constructing bar anecdotes on a largely disconnected scale. By far the best page in this book is a groom telling his bride, “Girl, you’re every woman in the world to me. Even the black and Jewish ones. That’s why I hate you sometimes.” That’s in debate, right?

You probably already figured that this is cutesy and all graphic design fetishist – usually a big ugh. Skimming through it feels like Jimmy Carr sometimes. The pages have to be handled with tweezers because all fingerprints show. It’s a big, indifferent okay as a coffee table book. Not too much depth or scathing, but a reminder that people are stupid, which you need around. Lighthearted cynicism is always a hot seller. This is a more agreeable, interesting version of that clip art comic syndicated in Miami New Times, minus the liberal knives-in-eyes politics. Instead of war, there are concise depictions of cannibal babies and American health care. This is where his style’s nuisances are the strongest. This is to sociology’s progression what looking at early medical illustrations of bodies made before medicine, anatomy and physiology were understood is - a kind of bewildering wakeup call that we are an inch beyond square one.

And, hello vanity. Depicting people as vapid socialites made for billboard propaganda is almost not together clever, but it still forces you to enjoyably cringe as you turn the next crisp page. You’ll get some entertaining relief from Miller’s diabolical conspiracies involving the elderly as killing machines and other random situations soaked in carnage. Read it to your kids as you simultaneously dread having them around.

-Sticky Rice