This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2026.
Ah, the carefree joys and fun of childhood.
As adults, we all look back to that time of our life, or we are supposed, with a wistful, sigh-laced nostalgia, having lost all of the playfulness and happiness of being a child to taxes and commutes and a slew of other responsibilities that none of us envisaged when spent our childhood wishing we could be bigger (and let’s be honest, stay up longer).
And to an extent that nostalgia is justified; while many of us had to duck bullies and deal with over-interventionist adults, there were also times where we just explored creed beds, and rode our bikes from morning to dusk and built LEGO or played with dolls and that was the all we had to worry about.
That sense of bliss, and yes, of course, some angst because what childhood is free of it really, is distilled into Crabgrass by Tauhid Bondia, whose second collection of comic strips find a happily diversionary and escapist home in Unsupervised: a Crabgrass Comics Adventure.
This bringing together of the adventures of Kevin and Miles, who are worlds apart in many ways but who have found a close and enduring friendship with each other, is a joy, with the boys “curiosity and mischief [resonating] with today’s kids while reminding adults of their own childhood misadventures” (thank you, exuberant back cover blurb).
Set in what TV Tropes calls “an Ambiguous Time Period before cellphones, the Internet and so-called ‘helicopter parenting'”, Crabgrass sets its sights, and hugely successfully so, on taking us into the lives of Kevin and Miles who makes all the mistakes that kids do and yet somehow survive it all as they stave off boredom and try to have some fun with a world that doesn’t quite make sense to them yet (let’s be honest, life doesn’t make sense when you’re an adult but they don’t know that yet).
There are strips where “good kid” Miles who bright, intelligent and aces school draws a tattoo on devil-may-care and not quite as scholastically impressive Kevin who thinks being so adorned will be far more cool than troublesome, and thus goes to school without a shirt on to show off his body art.
Miles suggests a shirt might be a good idea but Kevin is having none of it and all kinds of trouble and merriment, and yes, a few sage life lessons ensures.
This wonderful sequence of strips distills what makes Crabgrass such a pleasure to read, offering up the thrill of just doing something because it seems like it will be fun, realising all too late there may be unintended, distinctly un-fun consequences and moving on, maybe some lessons learned, to the next grand, escapist and slightly ill-thought adventure.
It’s on the whole more joy than not and Bondia captures it all with heartwarming charm and honesty, much of the storytelling based on his own childhood, which resonates with this reviewer who may have had to contend with bullies and church attendees who thought the pastor’s son should be this or that, but who, as he read it on a week away in an internet-free bust eco-cabin north of Sydney, Australia, saw much of the good parts of his childhood in this wholly wonderful, spirited comic strip.
Here are two interviews with the talented cartoonist, Tauhid Bondia …
And one with the SiouxCity Journal …