Monkey Food: The Complete "i Was Seven in '75" Collection

Ellen Forney is one of the most talented comics artist around. She's sexually uninhibited without being creepy, fun-loving in an easy-going rather than frenetically determined way, imaginative, creative, insightful, sensitive, and wickedly funny. She has an amazing ability to convey oodles with just a few evocative strokes of her pen (the facial expressions on her characters are priceless), and her writing is fluid but compact in the way that her genre demands. I love her stuff. I came to Monkey Food late, by way of her I Love Led Zeppelin and Lust. Although I really like the two later books, Monkey Food is my hands-down favorite of the three. It's a fantastic mixture. Forney portrays her family with such warm affection that you ache to have grown up similarly. There are laugh-out-loud moments (something I rarely do when I'm reading) as she tells stories of zany moments from her childhood (the visit to the nudist camp was one of my favorites). And there's a nice satirical edge to a lot of the pieces (such as a comparison of "legal" vices such as booze and tobacco and illegal "vices" such as pot-smoking). Being raised on monkey food (read the story on Unitarianism to find out what it is) seems to have worked out pretty darn good for Ellen. And that works out well for the rest of us. I look forward to more from her.

I may be biased, since I, too, was seven in '75, but I found this collection to be quite entertaining. There are several true stories from Ms. Forney's childhood each told through a series of 1-page comics. Each one includes loads of small details from the 70s that will be familiar to most readers (from CB radios to Pop-Rocks to rainbows on everything to Judy Blume, and so on). Most of the amusement comes from the asides that the author makes while relating the stories (although they are all told from her childhood perspective) and from the pre-cynical view that most of the characters have of the world. My favorite stories are the nudist camp story and the forced book report on Judy Blume's Forever.Ms. Forney's artwork is mostly simple and pleasing, and she does include some more detailed drawings done from photographs of her childhood.

Ellen Forney's look at her childhood will make you laugh out loud as she lets you relive her (and your own!) best and worst moments... You can't ask for a better tribute to one's family than this.