Like a lot of cartoonists who became dads - James Kochalka, Jeffrey Brown, Guy DeLisle, to name just a few - Pascal Girard has made a bunch of comics about his kid and domestic life. Pastimes is a collection of four-panels-a-page diary strips, mostly about being a dad to his young daughter Lucie.
Maybe if I hadn’t read so many similarly-themed comics beforehand I’d be more impressed with Pastimes but I also feel that Girard’s strips here just aren’t that good either. The strips about his kid are cute - amusingly, she’s obsessed with death for some reason - but become banal after a while.
I had no idea cat cafes were quite so nightmarish, or perhaps that’s just Montreal (where he currently lives), and the strips about his weird neighbours in Jonquiere (the part of Quebec where he grew up) were alright. The occasional strip stands out for their oddness, like when he’s handed a grapefruit and carries it around with him all day sniffing it for no reason (the cover image).
Mostly though the strips are quite forgettable and unimpressive. Kochalka’s American Elf strips still stand out as the best of this subgenre of comics, which is what I’d pick up if you’re after something like this but better. Pascal Girard is an excellent cartoonist though and if you’re interested in this creator, I highly recommend his longer-narrative comics like Petty Theft and Reunion, or even Rebecca and Lucie in the Case of the Missing Neighbour, which also features his wife and daughter but in a more dramatic (and fictional) setting, over the rather dull Pastimes.
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