Mimi Pond's 'Over Easy' is as much about kitchen zen as it is about coming of age in the 70's. In this fictionalized comic memoir, Mimi's alter ego drops out of art school and works for the eccentric proprietor of an Oakland diner. A lot of our pop culture elegizes 70's free love and mellowness, but Mimi (being somewhat spiritually East Coast) finds herself ill at ease among the her generation's Daisy Deadheads and macrobiotic hug-lords. She feels much more at home among the Imperial Cafe's gruff, hard-drinking staff.

The comic does not at all glamorize restaurant work life, but it does show how service jobs in neighborhood spots once brought you into the warm fold of a community, where turnover was more languid, people remembered your names and earnestly dole out life advice. There's a tactile thrill to reading about the down and dirty of 70's kitchen life that makes me want to abandon my computer forever.

Mimi Pond wrote the first episode of 'The Simpsons,' as well as several episodes of 'Pee-Wee's Playhouse.' She's been a staff cartoonist for Los Angeles Times, Village Voice and Seventeen. She also inspired Mike Judge's cartooning: