Columbia Journal cartoonist Brad Yung publishes The Complete Stay as you are. and Lessons I'm Going To Teach My Kids Too Late, a collection of 101 standalone stories about parenting

The Complete Stay as you are. By Brad Yung

Three Ocean Press    Vancouver       2019

32.95            281pp

And

Lessons I’m Going To Teach My Kids Too Late By Brad Yung

Three Ocean Press    Vancouver       2019

19.95 CAD      214pp.

Review by Jim Lipkovits

For over ten years the followers of the Columbia Journal read Stay as you are. in every issue.  From 2004 to 2014 we followed the philosophical lives of his nameless gen X characters.   The strip radiated  an aura of healthy doses of pessimism equally with optimism sitting atop a foundation of irony.  Identity-less gen-Xers who tried to make sense of their times kept the focus on keeping faith, whatever that was.  Stay as you are. (SAYA) was a true underground underdog, a seminal alternative Vancouver comic strip.  Back when people still had telephone land lines SAYA was appearing in Geist Magazine, The Westender, Comic Release Magazine, The Carbondale Times, Ricepaper Magazine, Adbusters, and of course, the Columbia Journal.

The Complete Stay as you are. faithfully honours the memories of a simpler, ironic, complicated time. The strip took a unique look at the culture from the late 90s into the 2010s. Apparently another reviewer may have once called Yung the world’s first meta-ironist – if that’s true he should probably apologize. But he won’t. ( quite possibly a Yungianism.)

Somehow, Brad finds himself now in 2019  in Nanaimo with his son and daughter reminiscing about the past and pondering the future. He’s a father of two. Staying as you are is no longer an option. He has published his entire comic strip work as The Complete Stay as you are.   and contemporaneously  written a sequel to the  gen-X life.  Lessons I’m Going To Teach My Kids Too Late  is his collection of 101 standalone stories about parenting or being parented in the second decade of the twenty-first century. As a useful guidebook, his Lessons falls somewhere between Spock, Dr. Spock and Dr.Seuss for young 21^st Century families. 

Ideally, Lessons and Stay would be companions in your libraries, wherever they may be stacked, especially if you grew up between 1980 and the present – assuming you are still growing up and now with children.  These two books from one of our best drawers of comics and hewers of irony are  to be highly recommended for these times. Trying to raise a family in this now hellish Trumpian universe demands nerves of irony. Good Luck with that!