If you think that these comics came straight out of a newspaper, there's a reason why it may seem so. For a lot of time, before the internet was even a thing, newspapers were the main medium for comics. More often than not, these comics didn't have much newspaper space to develop an arc or a plot, so they had to be very concise and punchy. This format became a standard across many newspapers, such as The New York Times and others.
It can be both hard and easy to summarize what Reuter's comic's main topic is. On one hand, each of them have unique characters, backgrounds and themes, so there's no real topic that ties them all together, hence they're hard to summarize. On the other hand, if one were to look a little bit more closely, one would see that there is in fact an underlying theme: all of them mock and poke fun at our modern society and contemporary standards of living. However, this common denominator is very subtle, and the reader is locked into the particulars of each panel.
But what is this modern life commentary all about, really? What makes these comics so modernly ironic? If they capture the zeitgeist, then what is that geist (ghost) which we claim they have caught? Well, for one, these illustrations gratuitously comment on the modern technologies that everyone uses and, sadly, abuses. Then there's certain hot button issues that the artist subtly invokes. And of course, all of these scenarios, no matter how magical and unseemly they may seem, are locked within the typical milieu of our everyday lives, and are very recognizable.
Our contemporary way of life is a topic that keeps on giving, you just have to take the best of it. Self-irony is one of the key features of our age, and it seems only fitting to illustrate modernity in a similar fashion, like in Chiara Cosentino's works. Other artists prefer to be more wholesome in the way they approach the issues of society and injustice, like in the case of Blobby & Friends, a comic which recently became one of my favorites. And sometimes our world is so plainly ridiculous that one doesn't really need to add anything else to make it absurd, like in these. And if you want to visit the first part of Matt Reuter's comic, you can do it by clicking this link.
