BOOKS 2 SCREEN PICK
The Customer is Always Wrong by Mimi Pond (Drawn & Quarterly, 2017)
Summary: The Customer is Always Wrong is the saga of a young naive artist named Madge working in a restaurant of charming drunks, junkies, thieves, and creeps. Oakland in the late seventies is a cheap and quirky haven for eccentrics, and Mimi Pond folds the tales of the fascinating sleazeball characters that surround young Madge into her workaday waitressing life. Outrageous and loving tributes and takedowns of her co-workers and satellites of the Imperial Cafe create a snapshot of a time in Madge’s life where she encounters who she is, and who she is not.
Employing the same brash yet earnest style as her previous memoir Over Easy, Pond’s storytelling gifts have never been stronger than in this epic, comedic, standalone graphic novel. Madge is right back at the Imperial with its great coffee and depraved cast, where things only get worse for her adopted greasy-spoon family while her career as a cartoonist starts to take off.
Notes: Prepare to plunge into the drug-fuelled whirlwind of lost souls that occupy the Imperial Diner. You can’t help but get lost in the lives of these characters as author Mimi Pond transports us to the heart of 1970’s Oakland and introduces us to her colorful cast. Marge, our creatively repressed waitress narrator, painfully makes her way out of toxic relationships and moves from lost drug-addled years to a path of creative fulfillment and self-worth. The book is a fictionalized version of Pond’s life, a creator whose impact in television and comics is greatly over-looked, including writing the first episode of The Simpsons, as well as stints on Pee Wee’s Playhouse and Designing Women.
The Book to Screen Club 