Crabbily Ever After (2024)

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Crabbily Ever After, the 29th collection of Jim Toomey’s Sherman’s Lagoon comic strips, proves there’s plenty of aquatic antics left for his anthropomorphic undersea troupe of fish, sharks, and crustaceans, at least in print. For a strip now well into its 30th (!) decade, few cartoonists have made success look as effortlessly as Toomey, or comics so purchasable as they collections. I’m just saying.

As expected from these compilations, sadly, there’s nothing indicating when any of the comics were first published in newspapers (remember those?), so it’s all fish and no chips once again. Last year’s Things Are Looking Up focused on the year 2022, so let’s say this one focuses on daily and Sunday funnies from 2023 and go with that.

Longtime Sherman’s Lagoon fans will rejoice at seeing all their favorites return, including the strip’s namesake Sherman, the dimwitted but affable great white shark, and Megan, his loving but wine-obsessed wife. Joining them on their daily journey of yucks, puns, and guffaws are Fillmore, the loveless bibliophilic turtle, nerd fish Ernest, and Hawthorne, the crooked crab who never met a scam he didn’t like. There’s plenty of other fish in this sea, but we’ve got another mainstay with Marina, the hacker elite dumbo octopus with skills to rival Ernest.

It’s antics as usual as the gang helps Hawthorne start his own streaming service (Crabflix), learn the unihemispheric (one eye open) sleep patterns of dolphins, or get totally fleeced by an adorable (and Australian accented) striped pajama squid. Even the ever attention-grabbing Elon Musk makes an appearance (as does SpongeBob SquarePants). In a comic strip that’s as much about lampooning the lifestyles of hairless beach apes (humans) as it is about devouring each other, there’s something for everyone in the Kapupu Lagoon.

Sherman’s Lagoon is famous for its occasional dips into the realm of educational comics (and without making them tedious), and here we follow our heroes as they journey to the Hudson Canyon off the coast of New York, a possible candidate for designation as a national marine sanctuary. Thrill as they set off to the South Pole to help save the krill from being overfished, or attempt to locate the mysterious and magical island of Hy-Brasil.

Whether you still read the funnies in newspapers or get your daily giggles online from websites or social media, Crabbily Ever After delivers the goods with another healthy helping of daily and Sunday comics as only Sherman’s Lagoon can. It’s nice to know that, even after 30+ years in syndication, there are talented folk like Jim Toomey still dedicated to the broad art of sight gags and an honest chuckle. With man-eating sharks, of course.