How to Quit Smoking Cigarettes

Reviews

Doris Sutherland | April 14, 2026

I suppose I should begin this review by mentioning that I have never, in my life, been a smoker. Reading How to Quit Smoking Cigarettes, a graphic memoir in which Nick Bunch charts his efforts to give up tobacco, gave me a creeping sense of survivor’s guilt.

Starting on June 1, 2024, Bunch began charting his experiences at the rate of one page a day. We start with his final night before going cold turkey, where we see him gathering together his friends around a campfire and smoking one last mouthful of cigarettes. Across the following pages, Bunch draws himself as a quivering mass of self-doubts living under constant observation by a demonic, pointy-eared doctor, even when having a shower. At choice moments the narrative pauses to become a deeply ironic self-help guide: “Choose one friend to be the punching bag for all the anger that gets released during nicotine withdrawal;” and “Let the waves of paranoia, blurred visions, suicidal ideations, loss of motor functions, irregular bowel movements and alternately extreme constipation, and general confusion and anger carry you to a higher plane of existence.”

Bunch’s avatar exists in a world formed from jagged edges, chaotic scribbles, and an overriding agitation that bleeds from every hand-scrawled panel border. The world is self-consciously cartoonish: Bunch depicts himself as working in a Gothic mansion dubbed Cartoon Castle, while his circle includes such wacky figures as his employer, Dirty Dawg, who resembles a grossly misshapen Goofy. But it is a cartoon world shorn of any sweetness, any comfort. When Bunch suffers a coughing fit that brings forth a plague of grinning germ-devils, disrupting a conversation with a colleague, we feel all too well the pain, frustration and despair behind the amusing visual gag.

The comic uses strange iconography that has the feel of having been pieced together from in-jokes. One of the protagonist’s associates, Lanya, is drawn with a Jack-O-Lantern face. Does her carved grin represent the forced, unsettling good cheer that Bunch sees in the society around him? Or perhaps Bunch merely based Lanya on a friend who happens to be fond of Halloween. How to Quit Smoking Cigarettes shows no concern as to whether or not its readers understand every last creative choice. All that matters is that Bunch uses the visual language he finds most appropriate for his feelings.

Nowhere near as scattershot as its daily-journal origins would suggest, the comic follows a mostly coherent plot, albeit still stepping away for the occasional vignette. Sometimes this will occur for a single page. Other times as an extended sequence, and the tone of these vignettes varies considerably. One of the longer sequences is a flashback to an earlier effort by Bunch to quit smoking, framed in somewhat traditional cartoon terms as a trip to a bar where he is taunted by anthropomorphic, fluttery-eyelashed cigarettes. Only a short while earlier, we saw a single page where three paragraphs of neatly-written, neatly-worded text about the psychological effects of nicotine withdrawal flank a picture of a man having his brains yanked out by hooks. There is nothing funny about this scene, not even in a dry, dark sort of way. It is merely painful.

While the main narrative of Bunch’s grappling with withdrawal is conveyed through these scattered sequences, How to Quit Smoking Cigarettes comes to develop a subplot that is told in a more coherent manner. Bunch’s lymphatic system gets torn from his body by the manic doctor, and afterwards, begins walking about by itself (the image is akin to the panel in Watchmen where Dr. Manhattan, still reassembling his body, manifests as a walking circulatory system). The two halves of Nick Bunch then meet up with pumpkin-faced Lanya as she pitches a new comic to them. Bunch’s outward form, his face a mask of scribbled anxiety, speaks only in an illegible scrawl; professionalism must fall upon his lymphatic system, now wearing a funky-patterned shirt: “I am the lymphatic system and I will be assuming all publication duties, and I can assure you, your book is my number one priority”.

Publishing Lanya’s volume (which turns out to be a “deep-sea gelatinous tragi-romance cartoon book”)  is easier said than done, however. It puts a terrible strain on the wacky contraption that is the Cartoon Castle’s printing press, and the gang must find a still-crazier gadget before Lanya’s Divergence in the Lithosphere can see print. All is well in the end, even if both Bunch and his lymphatic system are sidelined while his friends take centre stage.

This subplot may sound like mere whimsy, but it plays an important role in How to Quit Smoking Cigarettes. A project like this can easily give itself over in its entirety to the creator’s personal doubts, anxieties and pains. Bunch takes the time to illustrate the simple truth that, while an individual is being gnawed away by these doubts, their social circle will just keep on spinning around them. As we watch Bunch scribble himself into a twitching wreck, we also get to follow the humorous exploits of Lanya, Dirty Dawg and the rest as they try to get Divergence in the Lithosphere printed and sold to an eager audience.

These adventures in book publishing become the main plot of How to Quit Smoking Cigarettes, although the short asides depicting sexy cigarettes, severed limbs and internal demons remain a regular presence. Even as Bunch’s 44-day ordeal reaches its conclusion, he continues to pop up with deeply ironic advice, by this point descending into instructions for self-harm (no, staring directly into the sun is not a good way of dealing with withdrawal symptoms). The book ends the only way it could — with a forced grin and a desperately unconvincing assurance that all is now well.

The simplest testament to the strength of How to Quit Smoking Cigarettes is that, even as a lifelong non-smoker, I could feel Nick Bunch projecting his pain straight through my skin and mind. The secondhand smoke of the soul.