You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack (2013)

by Tom Gauld

Tom Gauld is a Scottish illustrator and cartoonist who everyone that is on the internet has probably encountered through his weekly Cultural Cartoons for The Guardian or the ones he creates for New Scientist Magazine. You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack is an earlier collection of his work for The Guardian and The New York Times Magazine and it’s full of short joyous comic strips that often present witty takes on classic literary tropes, artistic concepts, and historical narratives.

His humour is not to everyone’s liking (at least judging from some of the top Goodreads reviews), but then again that’s often the case with humour, right? There’s a bit of British bluntness, occasional obscurity and loads of Shakespear jokes. Often the classic punchline is doesn’t even exist in the cartoon, but most of the strips are amusing nevertheless in their peculiarity, which has become almost a trademark of the author together with his style of drawing.

Still, the book is an amusing collection — it did give me some good chuckles on several occasions, which was rather embarrassing as I was reading it in the public library. Oh well.