Mimi Pond

This is a trip -- I made the mistake of reading it on a kindle, which was very difficult -- however, I appreciate the woven storylines, the obsession of the author, the beauty of the drawings. I especially enjoyed how much of the graphics were playing with typefaces. I hadn't really heard of the Mitford sisters previously, with the exception of Diana Mosley, so this was a fascinating journey. It's also a really interesting dive into the range of beliefs one family can hold and how they show more either continue to have strong relationships or fail at it. It is a bunch of British aristocrats behaving in keeping with their time and class, which is a pretty narrow niche. show less

Remember when you were in your 20s and 30s, and your work friends were your entire world? When you weren't with them, life was flat, grey, and bland, and you couldn't wait to get back to them, even though, like as not, you hated your shit job.

In this massive graphic novel, Mimi Pond narrates and draws her time at a funky Oakland hangout, the Imperial Café. The main character, Lazlo, is the manager, maître 'd, and hero of the unstable crew of cooks and servers. The Imperial is an outpost of show more the gushing river of coke and heroin that subsumed both patrons and staff, and Pond's narration is transfixing.

The story ends with a horrible tragedy and with Mimi (Marge in the book) finally accumulating enough cash ($1200) to move to NYC at the urging of an editor at the National Lampoon magazine, to whom she's sold a few cartoons, and where I first encountered her about 40 years ago.

It's an even better sequel to her earlier graphic novel Over Easy, also set at the Imperial. We must celebrate successful women cartoonists, who fight to express and magnify the truth of our lives.

Lazlo: "There's nothing like the hopeless perfection of a passion for the wrong person." show less

The Mitford sisters were a mash-up of the Kardashians and the Kennedys playing Real Housewives of England in their English and French manors with World War II and the Cold War playing out in the background.

Mimi Pond does her best to communicate her enthusiasm for the siblings by occasionally injecting her childhood self into the narrative, but I could find little reason to care about this group of aristocratic debutantes and socialites. Some of them became writers of books, but not books show more that I've ever really heard of. And a scary percentage of them were pro-fascist worshippers of Hitler, so, you know, fuck them.

This book gets off to a shaky start as Pond seems to assume the reader will have familiarity with the family and fails to firmly establish their (in)significance before dumping us into their lives and jumping around in a scattershot fashion between the sisters and their confusing collection of nicknames. It doesn't help that the reading order of the captions gets a little murky a few too many times without borders to section the panels off from one another.

About the time I was settling into the groove of the book's style, I was also realizing just how unimportant these women were in the larger scheme of things despite Pond's protestations to the contrary.

The real drawback for me in the end though is that this is a thick monster that took forever to slog through at 30 to 60 minutes a day over the course of a week. I have nothing but regret for the time lost to what is essentially an overlong gossip column.

(Best of 2025 Project: I'm reading all the graphic novels that made it onto one or more of these lists:

• Washington Post 10 Best Graphic Novels of 2025
• Publishers Weekly 2025 Graphic Novel Critics Poll
• NPR's Books We Love 2025: Favorite Comics and Graphic Novels

This book made the WaPo and PW lists.) show less

Mimi Pond is one of the best cartoonists working today - but there's never been enough of her! Finally, a roman a clef tribute to her college life in Oakland in the period when hippies were waning and punks were on the rise. In 4 spectacular chapters, Margaret leaves home to attend art school in Oakland, and, more importantly, starts working at the Imperial Café, a hangout for everyone interesting in Oakland. Madge (her diner name) has to pay her extremely high dues as a dishwasher and only show more moves up to server when another of the girl gang departs. Most memorable is Lazlo Merengue, the boss. For Lazlo to hire you, you need to tell him a great joke.

The captions and drawings evoke a time in all of our lives when we were trying on and discarding new costumes and ideas. As the song says, we were "a million different people from one day to the next", and all of Madge's lives, and those of her co-workers and customers, are lyrically drawn and quoted and remembered. The most joyous part is a successful Poetry Night in which all comers are revealed to be bards in their own write.

If I had enough money, I'd buy the world Over Easy. show less