Meditations on the Grid - by Jonathan Bennett (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Gracefully illustrated comics full of keen observational humor and everyday absurdity from one of America's finest contemporary cartoonists.

If you were paying attention to comics outside the mainstream in the 2000s and the 2010s, you likely came across the work of Jonathan Bennett. Appearing in places like Mome, Kramer's Ergot, and The Believer, his comics are distinguished by a precise and captivating line, a Nicholson Baker-like quality of introspection, a keen eye for observational detail, and a deep, self-effacing humor.

Meditations on the Grid collects the best of this period of Bennett's work for the first time: stories about being young and in the city, passively competing for a box of records left out on the sidewalk, deciding how best to intervene in a mild case of avian cannibalism, musing about the best way to tell someone on the subway that their fly is open, and more of the routine absurdities that are encountered in everyday life.

With a new illustrated afterword by the author, Meditations on the Grid confirms Bennett as one of the early twenty-first century's great American cartoonists, a compatriot of the likes of Adrian Tomine, Julie Doucet, and Chris Ware.

Review Quotes

"The criminally unsung Jonathan Bennett, who mysteriously disappeared into the sunset at the height of his prowess, returns with this killer compendium of his astonishingly accomplished comic stories." --Daniel Clowes

"Jonathan Bennett might be the best American cartoonist you've never heard of. Beneath the surface of these humble, anecdotal comics is a masterful sense of concision, wit, and design, as well as a fluency in the language of cartooning that could only come from a lifetime of study and practice. I've long admired and been inspired by Jonathan's work, and I'm thrilled to see these beautiful, idiosyncratic stories collected at last." --Adrian Tomine

"Jonathan Bennett has a wonderful sense of design--sober, tasteful, never flashy. He knows what to do with black, and he's inventive in how he uses the grid for narrative purposes. His stories carry the same honesty as his lines: you can see the man through the panels. His is a nerdish sensibility, grounded in careful observation--and it renders our modern world nearly classical." --Françoise Mouly, art editor of The New Yorker

About the Author

Jonathan Bennett is an cartoonist based in Cold Spring, NY. His work has appeared in Mome, Kramers Ergot, and The Believer, among other publications.