Small Peculiar

This is one of those comics that’s a response to a specific thing I noticed that may or may not stick in anyone else’s craw, which means I don’t know if anyone else will understand what I’m getting at. In this particular case the thing that sticks in my craw is the disproportionate emphasis placed on Jane Austen by the designers of literature-themed T-shirts. Looking solely at T-shirt catalogs, you’d think she and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley were the only women ever to write novels. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, you’ve got Poe and Kafka and Lovecraft and Shakespeare and Melville and (inevitably) Bukowski and Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson and Hemingway and Vonnegut—most of the authors you can reasonably expect a white male American college student to have heard of. And I like Poe and Kafka and Lovecraft (sometimes) and Shakespeare and Melville (except his poetry, which was dreadful), and I appreciate the shirt that says STRANGER DANGER underneath a picture of Camus, but American women have read more than six books, haven’t they? Also P.S. not all writers are white, but that’s a different comic.