Book Review: My Space by Jerry Scott and Rick Kirkman (Baby Blues #24)

Stars: 5 out of 5

Pros: Lots of laughs at family life

Cons: None

The Bottom Line: 

Family dynamics

Between siblings and parents

Played for lots of laughs

A Luxury When Raising Kids

I first found the comic strip Baby Blues when it was only a couple years old.  At that time, the MacPherson family just had two kids, Zoe and Hammie.  My Space is the twenty-fourth collection of strips, and they now have baby Wren and Zoe and Hammie are in elementary school.  Obviously, time goes slower in their world than ours.  But that's okay because the strips are still so funny.

Each strip is almost always its own gag.  It's very rare to find something that carries over for several strips and even more rare to find anything beyond the most basic connection when they do.  True, there is a series about the kids in a fast food playground.  And we get to meet a new friend of Zoe's who lives with her great-grandmother.  But most of the time, these are one and done strips about the joys and trials (okay, mainly the trials) of raising kids.

What makes these strips so funny is how true to life they are.  I don't have kids of my own, but I was a kid once, so I still get most of the humor here.  Yes, it will appeal to all ages.  For example, in one strip, Zoe tries to tattle on Hammie for hitting her.  When Hammie denies it, Zoe confesses that she was preemptively tattling since she expected to get hit for eating his Halloween candy.  As Hammie and Wanda (the mom) turn against her, she exclaims, "Hey!  I'm the potential victim here!"

There are about seven months worth of strips here.  The weekday strips are in black and white, but the Sunday strips are in full color.  Over the course of the book, we get a summer, Halloween, Christmas, and New Years.  There's a discussion about the differences between boys and girls and several on how parents record the milestones in each child differently.  Hammie finds a new cause to champion - global worming.  Zoe learns that it is possible to be in favor of something and opposed to it at the same time.  And we get lots of sibling rivalry between Zoe and Hammie.

If you are a parent, you'll definitely love the humor in My Space.  Even if you don't have kids, you'll still find this Baby Blues collection to be pretty funny.