What I remember most vividly from Existentialism 11 was nausea—not Sartre’s famous novel, but a classmate of mine who spontaneously vomited during a discussion of Nietzsche. This incident may have been a response to a sudden realization of what Sartre refers to as our “monstrous freedom,” or perhaps it was the rigours of examining the philosophies of Kierkegaard, de Beauvoir, Sartre, Nietzsche and Heidegger in six weeks. The class certainly piqued my interest in existentialism, but I was still an amateur, so I was thrilled to discover Sartre for Beginners by Donald Palmer (Writers and Readers), which not only presents Sartre’s main theories in an easy-to-understand way, but combines the descriptions with illustrations! Not all of the comics are the best artistically, but the depictions of Sartre himself are downright adorable. One can easily imagine him swilling wine and lamenting the sad nature of existence alongside the Peanuts gang. Sartre for Beginners is just one in the “For Beginners” documentary comic book series, which introduces subjects ranging from Brecht to sex to Malcolm X.