Anthology edited by Jim Medway

Self Published

(Garden Funnies #2 cover: “A Captive Audience” by Gary Northfield.)

Garden Funnies is a lovely all-ages anthology edited by Jim Medway featuring a host of talented folk. It’s Limited to 200 copies and is 22 pages of all-ages horticultural humour with a very fitting green look to all the pages and rather natty rounded corners to boot! (A simple thing, but very effective.)

Molly was most pleased to get her copy in the post and, on finishing it, described it as:

“It was all really good and very funny and I enjoyed all of the different characters, especially the funny fruit and veg. I liked Watermelon Boy because it was very funny, especially the part where he slipped and cracked his bottom but didn’t like The Olive Tree as much because nothing seemed to happen. I’d like to see Garden Funnies #1 and hope Jim does a third.”

Like so much children’s work, the simplicity on show shouldn’t be confused with blandness, far from it; Garden Funnies has ideas firing off all over the place; three panel gag strips on one page leading to robot animal detectives looking for carrot thieves, silly, surreal and fun nonsense strips to low key autobiography about a family growing their own Olives in their family’s tradition. There’s even some very cleverly done humour in my favourite strip here; Duncan Bourne’s The Blumes where sentient plants get drunk on plant food and get amorous only to have their hopes of love dashed:

(Duncan Bourne’s The Blumes – two pages of sentient plant gags and some very nice art indeed.)

The strips are mostly very gentle things as you might expect, but even in all of this vegetable themed crop of tales there’s ample opportunity for some good laughs and the quality is very high throughout:

(Lizz Lunney’s Watermelon Boy – just the sort of surreal fun we’ve come to expect from Lizz.)

And I’ll leave you with some very salient advice for these summer months from Francesca Cassavetti:

Garden Funnies is lovely summer reading, full of ideas, full of laughs, plenty for children and even something for the grown ups to chuckle at whilst enjoying this very strong all-ages anthology.

The full contributor list: Jim Medway, Lizz Lunney, Duncan Bourne, Francesca Cassavetti, Alex Potts, Ed Syder, Steve Tillotson and Adam & Hilary Steel.

Garden Funnies is available from Jim Medway’s website and store.

Richard Bruton.