Sites We Love: Em Cartoons

Click to enlarge. That goes for all of 'em.

I have worshipped Em Cartoons, the autobiographical strip written by Maria Smedstad about her life and friends in London, since it first appeared in thelondonpaper in 2006. This one, from last week, is basically me and the gold plastic swan clock I bought for four euros from Ireland all over again. It doesn't work! It doesn't matter! I love it!

There are six years of cartoons on her website, and I've fallen into the trap of "just taking a look" only to realise that half an hour has passed more times than I care to recount. Even after thelondonpaper closed in 2009, my friends' fridge were covered in torn-out cartoons that perfectly summed-up some drunken boy-related catastrophe or other in pithy, acerbic and always tender little strips. (Sorry, it's lunchtime and I'm hungry.)

I always felt that cartoons like Nemi weren't terribly relatable, but I adore Em's pithy stories and the people in them. I was massively jealous of my friend whose husband cajoled a print out of Maria for her, until Maria recently announced that she would do prints of cartoons on request for £30.

You can join Em Cartoons on Facebook, on Twitter @emcartoons, and trawl through the archives on the Em Cartoons website.