House Read: Digger by Ursula Vernon

My Current Read Is: Digger: the Complete Omnibus by Ursula Vernon
Published by: Sofawolf Press, 2013
Cover Illustration: Ursula Vernon
Read This: while contemplating geology and the interfering nature of gods

The Digger Omnibus is a brick. It can, as Ursula has pointed out before, kill a man if you really, really want it. Granted, the hardcover would probably do a better job than the paperback, which is what I have, but still. 850 pages of pure awesome is nothing to be sneezed at.
So, Digger is, as you might have noticed, an anthropomorphic wombat. She is very, very practical. Wombats have very little whimsy in their souls. This makes it especially interesting when Digger ends up wandering into some supernatural machinations and digging right up into the temple of a talking statue of the god Ganesha.
Before long, Digger is dealing with oracular slugs, cranky hyenas, baby demons, and undead gods. It’s all a bit much for one wombat to cope with, but wombats are practical and there’s no one else to do it all.

Digger has gotten amazing accolades. She won the Hugo Award. She won the Mythopoeic Award. She is a very celebrated wombat. The comic started as a webcomic and is now available in six volumes or in the omnibus edition.
I love Digger. I realized after I finished it that somehow my two big tattoos are retroactively relevant to my Ursula Vernon fandom. I’ve got giant mechanical bees on my left arm, which tie into Castle Hangnail and Bryony & Roses. So that’s cool. What was a tattoo tied to one book has become a tattoo tied to three! But, I also have a giant Ganesha on my side, which is very specifically a tattoo of a statue of Ganesha. So, that’s nifty.
Ursula has an amazing ability to make me feel intense emotions for non-human characters; a little burlap doll, a slightly insane hyena, a malicious rosebush, a little animate inkblot. I can’t even explain to you how much she is able to impact me. I was sobbing into my pillow over something she wrote last night.
So, read her with caution, probably not in public, which, given that Digger weighs almost 4lbs kind of rules it out for your daily commute anyway. But definitely read it.