Girl Juice

This technicolor tour de farce from Nate (Hell Phone) reads like the TV show Girls drawn by Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley. The narrative circles around a group of young housemates and the mundane wackiness of their everyday lives. There are the wannabe influencer whose unsponsored makeup videos are becoming increasingly not worth it and her girlfriend (who ironically plays the straight man in gags). Then there’s the aspiring cartoonist who can’t quite shake the aftereffects of a formative sexual experience involving a clown. Finally, the undeniable star is Bunny, a porn-obsessed, dubiously religious, über-confident coquette with a “dog-daughter” and a penchant for punctuating every scene with scandalous punch lines, as when she tells a maybe-date, “I don’t believe in safe words becus silly words make me ugly-laugh & take me out of it.” Bunny is at once ditzy and droll, a Samantha Jones for the “WAP” era; readers will be in giddy thrall to her next retort. Most of the volume, which first published as web comics, centers on Bunny’s numerous sexistential crises and how her endlessly forgiving friends attempt to pick up the pieces. Despite the episodic format, the laugh-a-minute pace—fueled by deadpan dialogue and eye-popping art—never flags. Nate’s fans will flip for this extra sexed-up compilation of her idiosyncratic wit. (May)