Sherman’s Lagoon 1991-2001
{4.5/5} “Sherman, I’m beginning to question my carnivorous lifestyle.”
Sherman’s Lagoon 1991-2001 Greatest Hits and Near Misses by Jim Toomey, published in 2002
Sherman is a shark. Megan is his girlfriend, Fillmore the turtle and Hawthorne the crab are his friends, and Ernest is a young fish who’s still in school. Sherman looks after his nephew for a while, runs into some aliens, becomes a rock star, and eats humans when he’s hungry. They meet vegetarian piranha and a fish that came from an aquarium.
Toomey gets a lot of mileage out of the basic dichotomy of the characters. They sometimes act like people — they think and talk. But they also act like animals — in particular, the sharks like to eat humans.
This comic strip is one of the best that’s not The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, or Bloom County. In other words, it’s on par with Dilbert and other strips that are funny most of the time.
This is the first Sherman’s Lagoon collection I’ve read.