REVIEW: Save Yourself, Mammal! – An SMBC Collection

Save Yourself Mammal! – An SMBC Collection

Written and drawn by Zach Weiner

$18.00 / 88 pages / Full-color

Breadpig

Suggested for nerdy readers

 

 

Some time ago I wrote about Mr. Zach Weiner’s (it’s ok to laugh) webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC) as my favorite webcomic that regularly dealt with science. So imagine my delight when I got my copy Save, Yourself Mammal!, which collects some of Weiner’s favorite strips over the past 10 years. Now anyone who’s been doing a webcomic for 10 years deserves applause for that alone, but to actually sift through and pick out your own favorites must have been a herculean task, so kudos to him for that. But it is worth your time and money to read a collection you could still get online for free? In a word: yes.

 

If that word didn’t convince you feel free to keep reading, but I warn you that I had a hard time finding anything to dislike so it’s going to be a bit of a lovefest. Furthermore, I will be posting images of a few of my favorites from within the collection of favorites, and those are sure to be more convincing than any words I could type.

You should buy this book for the same reason you should buy a beloved band’s “Best of” album. Sure you liked the albums well enough, but you downloaded them all or copied them from friends so you should probably make sure the creator gets a bit of coin for the effort, and it’s nice having the “best” work available in one convenient place. Will you agree with every single choice? Of course not, but the aggregate product is a delight regardless.

I’ve been reading Weiner’s comic for some time now (i.e. 1/10^th as long as he’s been making it) but I have hardly spent the time it would take to go through the entire series from the beginning. This meant that the first portion of my reading experience was novel; these were strips I’d never read before so everything was new and freshly funny to me. The strips in the comic are printed sans dates so you begin the book with strips from before your time and end with familiar friends and punch-lines half remembered with the transition somewhere in the fuzzy middle.

Also, Mr. Weiner being a clever and considerate chap, has created a minigame the reader can play while reading. I found the game too distracting during my first read, but during my second reading it was a lot of fun and playfully mixes up the order in which the comics are consumed.

 

But don’t leave it to me to convince you, the product is but pixels away. Click your pointer-thingy on any of the images linked and be TRANSPORTED to SMBC land (in a new window of course, as you should never willingly leave iFanboy) where you can discover the goodness your own self and shell out your own shekels to get those pixels in print.

 

Now all I have to do is sit back and wait another 10 years for the next collection.

 

Story: 5 / Art: 3 / Overall: 4

(Out of 5)

 

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Ryan Haupt has met Zach Weiner so could probably get away with calling him Zach. He decided not to for comedic purposes. Hear Zach’s wife Kelly (a scientist) on Ryan’s podcast Science… sort of.