Reza Farazmand is best known for Poorly Drawn Lines, a comic series that turns everyday discomfort, existential dread, awkward social moments, and surreal animal conversations into sharp, deadpan humor. His work is deceptively simple on the page, but the writing is precise: blunt dialogue, unexpected emotional honesty, and punchlines that often land somewhere between absurdity and truth.
If you like Reza Farazmand, you’ll probably enjoy cartoonists and humor writers who combine minimalist art with strong comic timing, relatable anxiety, offbeat characters, and a slightly twisted view of modern life. The following authors and illustrators offer a similar mix of wit, emotional intelligence, and highly shareable comic-strip storytelling.
Allie Brosh is one of the clearest recommendations for readers who love Farazmand’s ability to make awkward, painful, and ridiculous experiences feel unforgettable. Her breakout collection Hyperbole and a Half combines intentionally unpolished drawings with intensely funny writing about procrastination, dogs, depression, childhood, and the strange logic of the human brain.
Like Farazmand, Brosh understands that simple art can carry complex emotion. Her comics often begin with familiar situations and then spiral into extremes of panic, stubbornness, or chaos, which makes them both hilarious and weirdly accurate.
If what you enjoy most about Poorly Drawn Lines is the mix of silliness and uncomfortable self-recognition, Brosh is an essential next read.
Matthew Inman, creator of The Oatmeal, writes and draws with a louder, more exaggerated energy than Farazmand, but the overlap is easy to see. His books and comics specialize in taking ordinary subjects—cats, grammar, running, work, technology, irrational behavior—and pushing them to wonderfully absurd conclusions.
How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You is a strong place to start. It captures the petty menace, chaos, and manipulative charm of cats through exaggerated scenarios and punchy visual jokes.
Fans of Farazmand’s animal humor and blunt comic voice will likely appreciate Inman’s high-speed version of observational absurdity.
Sarah Andersen’s comics are ideal for readers who connect with Farazmand’s humor about anxiety, introversion, avoidance, and the low-stakes disasters of daily life. In Adulthood Is a Myth, she turns procrastination, social exhaustion, body-image worries, creative insecurity, and general millennial unease into quick, relatable comic strips.
Her style is slightly warmer and more diary-like than Farazmand’s, but the appeal is similar: clean artwork, excellent timing, and an ability to find comedy in the things people usually keep to themselves.
If you like comics that make you laugh because they feel painfully familiar, Andersen is a very natural follow-up.
Nathan W. Pyle’s Strange Planet approaches everyday life from a different angle, but it shares a key quality with Farazmand’s work: it reveals how bizarre ordinary human behavior looks when described plainly. His blue alien characters use formal, literal language for familiar activities, turning snacks, pets, birthdays, and friendship into tiny works of comic defamiliarization.
Where Farazmand often uses bluntness and melancholy for his punchlines, Pyle leans into innocence and linguistic precision. The result is gentler, but still very funny.
If your favorite Poorly Drawn Lines strips are the ones that expose the absurd rules of everyday life, Strange Planet will likely hit the same part of your brain.
Tom Gauld is a superb choice for readers who enjoy understated humor and economical cartooning. His collection You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack features concise, elegant comics about literature, academia, technology, and the quiet foolishness of intellectual life.
Gauld’s style is drier and more literary than Farazmand’s, but both cartoonists share a gift for restraint. Neither needs a crowded panel or a complicated setup to land a joke. A few lines, one sharp observation, and a strange twist are often enough.
If you appreciate deadpan delivery and comics that reward close attention, Gauld is an excellent recommendation.
Jonny Sun writes and draws with a tenderness that will appeal to readers who enjoy the more reflective side of Farazmand’s humor. His illustrated book Everyone’s a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too follows a curious alien exploring Earth and meeting characters who are lonely, strange, anxious, or misunderstood.
The misspelled, childlike language and minimalist drawings give the book a playful surface, but beneath that is a thoughtful meditation on identity, belonging, and emotional vulnerability.
If you like comics that are funny in one moment and unexpectedly moving in the next, Jonny Sun is well worth reading.
Liz Climo’s comics share Farazmand’s talent for using animals to reveal recognizable human feelings. In The Little World of Liz Climo, bears, rabbits, sloths, porcupines, and other creatures navigate friendship, insecurity, seasonal gloom, affection, and mild disappointment with sweetness and quiet wit.
Climo’s tone is softer and more wholesome than Farazmand’s, but she works in a similar comic space: short-form strips, expressive simplicity, and humor built on emotional truth rather than flashy punchlines.
If you love talking-animal comics and want something warm, charming, and consistently clever, Climo is a great pick.
Catana Chetwynd is best known for relationship comics that transform tiny shared habits into affectionate, memorable scenes. Her collection Little Moments of Love focuses on the small rituals of everyday partnership—staying in, making coffee, stealing blankets, celebrating laziness, and surviving ordinary life together.
While her work is more romantic and less existential than Farazmand’s, fans of concise, emotionally legible comic strips will likely enjoy her style. She understands the value of simplicity, and her panels often capture a full emotional dynamic in just a few lines.
If you like comics that feel intimate, recognizable, and easy to revisit, Chetwynd is a strong recommendation.
Ruby Elliot, also known as Rubyetc, brings a rawer and more openly anxious energy to autobiographical comics. In It’s All Absolutely Fine, she explores depression, intrusive thoughts, self-doubt, social awkwardness, and the exhausting absurdity of trying to function while your brain is being deeply unhelpful.
What makes her work connect with Farazmand fans is the balance between honesty and comic escalation. Elliot is very good at taking a private feeling and turning it into a vivid, exaggerated scenario without losing emotional accuracy.
If the darker, more self-aware parts of Poorly Drawn Lines are what keep you coming back, Elliot is likely to resonate.
Alex Norris has built an instantly recognizable comic formula around the phrase oh no, and the brilliance of that formula lies in how flexible it is. In Oh No, Norris presents simple, brightly colored scenes in which a blob-like protagonist encounters disappointment, dread, false hope, embarrassment, or cosmic bad luck—then reacts with that famous two-word conclusion.
The humor is minimalist, repeatable, and surprisingly rich. Like Farazmand, Norris understands how much can be done with stripped-down drawings and carefully controlled pacing.
If you enjoy concise comics that distill modern frustration into a perfect final beat, Norris should absolutely be on your list.
Grant Snider is an especially good match for readers who enjoy the reflective side of comic art. His book I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf blends visual wit, literary references, and thoughtful observations about reading, writing, attention, creativity, and the private habits of book lovers.
Compared with Farazmand, Snider is a little less caustic and more meditative, but both creators share an ability to compress a recognizable experience into a small, elegant comic idea.
If you want something clever, bookish, and gently funny—with the occasional moment of real insight—Snider is a rewarding choice.
Luke Healy may seem like a less obvious recommendation at first, but readers who appreciate Farazmand’s understated honesty may find a lot to like in his work. Americana combines travel writing, memoir, and graphic storytelling as Healy reflects on the Pacific Crest Trail, American mythmaking, physical endurance, and his own shifting inner life.
The humor here is quieter and more situational, but it is grounded in the same kind of observational intelligence that makes Farazmand effective. Healy notices awkwardness, contradiction, and small failures without overplaying them.
If you’re open to something more narrative and reflective while still retaining wit and self-awareness, Healy is worth exploring.
Nick Seluk’s Heart and Brain: An Awkward Yeti Collection turns internal conflict into literal dialogue, with Heart arguing for impulse, comfort, and desire while Brain counters with caution, overthinking, and unwanted realism. It’s a simple premise that allows for a lot of relatable comedy.
Fans of Farazmand will likely respond to the way Seluk translates invisible emotional processes into clean, accessible visual jokes. Both cartoonists are especially good at showing how irrational, contradictory, and mildly disastrous ordinary thought can be.
If you enjoy humor built around self-sabotage, indecision, and the weirdness of being a person with feelings, Seluk is a great fit.
Jason Adam Katzenstein brings a memoirist’s depth to the kinds of anxieties that Farazmand often approaches through short-form humor. In Everything Is an Emergency, he writes about obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic, family, and the stories people tell themselves in order to feel in control.
The book is funny, but never glib. Katzenstein’s cartooning gives shape to spiraling thoughts and irrational fears in a way that makes them legible without flattening their seriousness.
If you admire Farazmand’s ability to joke about distress without denying its reality, Katzenstein offers a richer, more autobiographical extension of that sensibility.
Simon Hanselmann is the darkest recommendation on this list, but for some Farazmand readers, he may also be one of the most memorable. Megahex follows Megg, Mogg, Owl, and Werewolf Jones through messy friendships, emotional stagnation, self-destruction, boredom, and deeply strange domestic chaos.
Hanselmann’s work is more explicit, more abrasive, and far more bleak than Poorly Drawn Lines, yet there is a shared interest in absurd behavior, deadpan exchanges, and the comedy of people failing to function properly.
If you want a version of offbeat comic humor with a darker underground edge, Hanselmann is a compelling next step.
