The Customer is Always Wrong
Drawn & Quarterly 2017
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“Sharp and ambitious... If Pond’s last book was a sitcom, The Customer is Always Wrong would be an HBO drama with a Sunday night time slot.”
- Jezebel
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“A book filled with ghosts... An Oakland that doesn’t exist anymore, a culture that doesn’t exist anymore, and people that don’t exist anymore, in more ways than one.”
- Hollywood Reporter
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“Mimi Pond is an incredible storyteller in any medium... But the greatest depths of melancholy, tragedy and humor are found in her quasi-memoir graphic novels, starting with Over Easy (2014) and now with The Customer Is Always Wrong, about an artist named Madge and a rogues’ gallery of restaurant customers wandering through Oaklandin the 1970s.”
- San Francisco Chronicle
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“Pond’s observant portrait of life in one’s mid-20s is keenly aware of how aimlessness can become desperation.”
- The Globe & Mail
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“Mimi Pond is a treasure, one we ignore at our own risk... Her latest book — a thick, semi-autobiographical bildungsroman called The Customer Is Always Wrong — might be her greatest work to date.”
- Vulture
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“[Customer] does something I didn’t know graphic novels could do: it made me depressed, excited, nostalgic, and sentimental all at the same time.”
- New York
A young woman’s art career begins to lift off as those around her succumb to addiction and alcoholism
The Customer is Always Wrong is the saga of a young naïve 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 sleaze-ball 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.
Told in 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.