Tommy Siegel’s I Hope This Helps: Comics And Cures For 21st Century Panic springs right off the what-is-2020 press, and it couldn’t be more timely. To most, Siegel’s name will be justifiably unfamiliar. But both his comics and his music have impressive followings. Siegel is a singer, songwriter, and guitarist for theatrical pop-rock band Jukebox The Ghost, a band I personally love but won’t talk about anymore here beyond telling you to give them a listen. On a separate note, if I had a nickel for every time I reviewed a graphic novel or comic by a popular musician, I my total would now sit at $0.15 (here’s the first, here’s the second). During long road trips in the band’s tour van, Siegel reignited his love for cartooning. He garnered a hefty following after striking up a “500 cartoons in 500 days” project, and much of his playful cartoonery made its way into I Hope This Helps, his debut book.
The brunt of Siegel’s inaugural collection focuses on millennial life and the subtitular “21st century panic” that has indelibly weaved its way into our collective psyche. The result is a collection of comics and short written segments that feels undeniably “2020” in a way few things can. In fact, the final pages of the book acknowledge the march 2020 onset of the Covid-19 pandemic with a hesitantly hopeful message. The preceding chapters feature written portions in which Siegel rightfully laments the terrifying encroachment of social media into our lives. He does this as he (again rightfully) emphasizes its role in creating an audience for his work. These prose segments serve as a nice framework for the cartoons that comprise the majority of I Hope This Helps, though they’re easily skippable if you’re just here for a laugh.
And laugh you will. Or at least I hope you will. I certainly did. I Hope This Helps is, as you’ve likely intuited, neither a fantasy nor a sci-fi book. But it feels like escapism nonetheless. A mysterious quality for a book that viciously highlights societal problems like the electoral college, social media addiction, and the fearful juxtaposition of smartphone utility and command over our attention spans. It’s as if Siegel understands that non-escapism can itself be an escape. Holding a mirror up to the worst parts of ourselves can strike up a fit of chuckles and, in some convoluted way, make us forget those are our problems, our struggles. It’s a fun take on laughter-as-medicine that feels as true to our time as anything else I’ve read or consumed this year.
All that said, the comics about social-media-induced anxiety and excessive phone usage reach a point of diminishing returns. Siegel excels as a cartoonist when he gleefully skewers the needle-point specific aspects of millennial culture. A naked man with a Pringles-mascot head escapes a Pringles can. A dissection of Kombucha playfully tells us there’s “A live mushroom in every bottle.” A caped bloodsucker slogs away in a cubicle underneath a caption that says “Vampire Weekday.” These punchlines, which cast aside the social media and smartphone angle, sparked fits of genuine out-loud laughter as I flipped through them. And I mean laughs, not that exhale through the nose pseudo-laugh we all do when we experience something funny without anyone around. This isn’t to say that the commentaries on the collective millennial obsession with social media aren’t funny or worthwhile. It’s just that the wacky left-field jokes hit me harder.
After weeks of election-following, pandemic worrying, and The Social Dilemma-watching, Siegel’s cartoons felt like a two-hour detox. This book won’t solve all your problems, but it will shine a bright light on the frivolous torments of 21st century culture. I Hope This Helps is a welcome reprieve from the terrifying normal and a deep dive into the wacky and zany brain of an intensely relatable (and immensely talented) musician and cartoonist.
Rating: I Hope This Helps – 9.0/10
-Cole
