You Need This Book Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle (2022)

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Not since last year’s Adventures in Aquaculture have fish fans around the world been able to catch up with Jim Toomey’s satirical look at life in the underwater Kapupu Lagoon and its cast of anthropomorphic denizens. That’s right: Sherman’s Lagoon is back with volume 27 of colorized daily and Sunday funnies, faithfully collected in that familiar paper square (or digitally delivered if that’s your thing) with You Need This Book Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle. Does a fish need a bicycle? Who knows, but Sherman’s Lagoon fans definitely need this book!

While there’s nothing listed inside its pages indicating the timetable when these strips were first published, chronologically they seem to be culled from 2020 – a year most of us would rather forget. Given everything that’s happened I’m a little surprised that only a single pandemic-related joke made its way into the comic, especially given how ecologically disastrous used facial masks have been for the oceans.

Every good comic strip needs a solid cast and Sherman’s Lagoon casts its net wide: there’s the titular Sherman, the man-eating, yet lovable shark, his wife Megan, Fillmore the loveless sea turtle, and the dastardly, yet innovative Hawthorne the crab, along several others. Yes, they’re aquatic, but that doesn’t mean they can’t Netflix with the best of them. It’s pretty incredible to see how the characters have changed and evolved over the strip’s astonishing 30 years

Per usual, much of this volume is packed to the gills with enough gags and pop-culture riffs to fill a 120 page book (imagine that). On the menu are bits where the gang visits London’s notorious ‘fatberg’ (look it up), transform into humans (i.e. hairless beach apes) to go camping only to be captured by hungry aliens, take to the skies in Elon Musk’s absconded flying machine, and get to explore the mysterious underwater ‘twilight zone’ (aka mesopelagic zone). Who needs Harry Potter’s Hogwarts when you’ve got Hawthorne’s cheap imitation Crabwarts?

One of the gentler joys of Sherman’s Lagoon is how often you’ll actually learn something about our underwater world. Ever heard of an animal called the ‘wandering meatloaf’? Did you know that freshwater electric eels hunt in packs but seawater eels don’t? Talk about your eel envy. Here the big lesson is the story of the giant isopods at the Toba Aquarium in Japan who hadn’t, um, pooped in over two years. The news was celebrated across the land when the incontinent crustaceans’ crisis finally ‘passed’ – truly a storyline you’d never see in Garfield.

You Need This Book Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle doesn’t rock the boat but it doesn’t need to. Three decades in, Jim Toomey’s farcical fish funnies are as fresh as ever, clever enough to inspire puns from jealous writers yet gentle enough for all-age readers. As newspaper comic strips continue to fade into the depths of history it’s inspiring to see a gag-driven still dedicated to an honest chuckle. Congrats on 30 years and here’s to many, many more.