This Might Not Be Pretty

by Jan Eliot and TurtleMe

Book Overview

This Might Not Be Pretty is the seventh collection of the comic strip Stone Soup. Stone Soup is a syndicated comic strip by cartoonist Jan Eliot. It appears daily in 200 newspapers in the United... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0967410266
• ISBN13: 9780967410265
• Release Date: September 2008
• Publisher: Four Panel Press
• Length: 190 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 8.3" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

hilarious!

This is an hilarious look at life that reflects everyday situations and attitudes. there was a depiction of each of my family members in this humor book.

Great fun

There's nothing like Stone Soup to make life not just funnier, but to be sure you know that your life could be worse!

One of my favorite comic strips - it's hard to wait for the next volume!

I can't remember how I first heard about the Stone Soup comic strip - it wasn't in my local paper. But however it was, I'm glad I heard about it! I bought the first book, and then the next one, and the next... Some of the things I like about it include the fact that the kids aren't too cutesy or eerily precocious - they generally talk and act their age. The dog is a bit anthropomorphized, but not to the point of talking to humans. And although Val, the widowed mother of two girls, is the main character, all the characters are well thought out and get plenty of space and dialog. Val's boyfriend the motorcycle cop is a continuing theme. While Val's sister married Wally next door after only a couple of years, Val and her cop aren't rushing into things; in fact, in this volume, Val and Phil don't see each other for a while. The strip ages slower than real time - unlike, say, "For Better or For Worse" where the characters' lives pretty much aged in real time, in Stone Soup, the characters have only aged somewhere between one and two years since the first volume. Some people like one kind of timeframe over the other; I like either, if it's well done, and this is. (I mean, it's certainly not Peanuts, where the kids aged only about 4 years over the whole 50+ years of the strip!) Some of my favorite bits are the ones that take place at Val's work. Her coworkers are a mixed bunch, and allow Eliot to sneak in some characters that wouldn't otherwise fit directly into the family setting. This volume includes the annual summer camping trip, something we get in every volume; it also includes Holly and Alix helping build a house for charity, Val buying a new car, and the middle school takeover of the new college football locker room. It's a great family strip - not too sappy, not too moralistic, just real enough and just crazy enough.

Praise for Jan Eliot and Stone Soup

Three great cartoonists recently offered great endorsements for Jan Eliot and Stone Soup books. "Reading Stone Soup is like an evening spent sharing stories with good friends until you've laughed yourself back to a reasonable perspective on life." ---Jim Borgman, cocreator of Zits "Having two daughters, and spending the last twenty years in a house full of girls and women (even our dogs), I have witnessed the truth of Stone Soup firsthand... Jan Eliot is a genius". ---Rick Kirkman, cocreator of Baby Blues "Jan ELiot has reached a plane of genuinosinormity (my word, dibs) with her characters and stories that's rare and elusive." ---Jerry Scott, cocreator of Zits