Meditations on the Grid

Gracefully illustrated comics full of keen observational humor and everyday absurdity from one of America’s finest contemporary cartoonists.

If you were paying attention to comics outside the mainstream in the 2000s and the 2010s, you likely came across the work of Jonathan Bennett. Appearing in places like Mome, Kramer’s Ergot, and The Believer, his comics are distinguished by a precise and captivating line, a Nicholson Baker-like quality of introspection, a keen eye for observational detail, and a deep, self-effacing humor.  

Meditations on the Grid collects the best of this period of Bennett’s work for the first time: stories about being young and in the city, passively competing for a box of records left out on the sidewalk, deciding how best to intervene in a mild case of avian cannibalism, musing about the best way to tell someone on the subway that their fly is open, and more of the routine absurdities that are encountered in everyday life. 

With a new illustrated afterword by the author, Meditations on the Grid confirms Bennett as one of the early twenty-first century’s great American cartoonists, a compatriot of the likes of Adrian Tomine, Julie Doucet, and Chris Ware.