Things Are Looking Up (2023)

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Last year’s You Need This Book Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle helped celebrate 30 years of the undersea hi-jinks that is Jim Toomey’s Sherman’s Lagoon, a comic strip that still manages to feel fresh long after many of its contemporaries have sunk into the abyss. But it looks like there’s still more chuckles and guffaws to go around because Things Are Looking Up, the 28th collection of sharktastic daily and Sunday strips, is here in one easily buyable, lovable paper package.

Per my usual gripe, there’s nothing here to help curious comic fans know exactly what year these strips were first printed (my best guess is 2022), but it remains a small grouper, I mean gripe in an otherwise fun, fish-filled collection. What, you think only Stephan Pastis can make a bad pun?

The cast living in Kapupu Lagoon is all here and accounted for, including the comic’s namesake (and man-eating shark) Sherman, his reality TV-obsessed wife Megan, book nerd sea turtle Fillmore, actual nerd fish Ernest, and openly corrupt politician / crab (sounds like an oxymoron) Hawthorne, among many others (among family-friendly comic strips Sherman’s Lagoon has the highest mortality rate going). Why do underwater fish have living room ensembles and scarf cheesy pizza? Maybe they have a coupon, who knows.

Fans have come to expect from their daily doses of aquatic silliness and we’ve got a buffet of pop-culture skewering and other modern day distractions as Sherman and Company do their best to idolize the humans (i.e. hairless beach apes) while still wanting to devour them. Among them are the perils of making a competitive food delivery app (ChowHub), learning reality TV is harder than it looks, monetizing a mystical portal to nowhere, and even hosting a visit from the God of Seas, Poseidon, himself.

Did you know there are companies that sell bracelets that let you track sea creatures? Blissfully, there’s not a mention of a certain world-shuttering pandemic, meaning we’re free to learn interesting stuff like how ringed snake eels can mimic dangerous sea snakes, or that octopuses have terrible fashion sense and why it’s best to avoid scams like cryptocurrency. Even in a comic strip where anthropomorphic man-eating sharks play underwater miniature golf, NFTs still don’t make any sense.

Sherman’s Lagoon is famous for managing to add educational bits to the funny without making them feel like homework and this collection is (ahem) packed to the gills with them. October 23, 2022 was the 50th anniversary of the National Marine Sanctuary System, and Sherman, Ernest (and sometimes Hawthorne) celebrate by visiting several of them, including Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary, Mallows Bay National Marine Sanctuary, and the National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa, the largest of the bunch, taking in sights like “Big Momma”, one of the largest coral formations of its kind in the world, and the mysterious “yellow brick road” at the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in Hawaii. It turns out not all yellow roads lead to Oz, sadly.

Things Are Looking Up lives up to its name, giving fans of Jim Toomey’s now 30+ year-old comic strip another heaping helping of the funniest and most surreal underwater look at domestic life starring marine life. OK, so it’s the only underwater look at domestic life starring marine life, but it’s still pretty amazing to see a comic so thoroughly invested in actually being entertaining and educational at the same time, and Toomey manages to make it look easy.