Birthdays And Things To See
For starters, let me point out the Birthday Boys of Webcomics, Rick Marshall¹ (today) and Aaron Diaz² (tomorrow). You would be hard pressed to find two guys more in love with comics, more devoted to finding good examples of same, or more dedicated to improving their own skills within their respective roles (reviewer/promoter, writer/illustrator/teacher). Happy birthday, guys, I owe each of you a beer.
Pretty things for you to see, some of which I’m recommending purely on the basis of their creators’ past work:
- Rebecca Clements did a 24 hour comic, and it’s available for your purchase. Come Inside My Body is a choose-your-own adventure tour to the insides of Clements³. Her whimsical, Seussian style is ideal for what might otherwise be an unending parade of horrors, since let’s face it — our insides are pretty awful, disgusting bags of glop. Bonus points if you can tell which pages were done during the onset of no-sleep madness.
- Also on the recommended sight-unseen list, Tyson Hesse has a Kickerstarter campaign up, to support print versions of his Boxer Hockey and Diesel projects. There’s lots of price points with small incremental dollar amounts, with tangible dead-tree product available down to the $15 level.
Guys, if you’re not familiar with Hesse, what you need to know is that he has a command of color that’s mindblowing. Check out his posters if you don’t believe me. That one guy working alone can produce work this pretty (and that printing technology is advanced enough that it can be produced without the need for a monastery full of illuminators) is surely proof that we live in the future.
- Recommended sight-seen: I’ve long been a fan of Tyler Page’s Nothing Better — it just reads so honestly that you could almost think that you were reminiscing about your own experiences, not reading about people that are totally made up and not real. Page is now turning that eye for verisimilitude to somebody that is real and not made up — himself, in the just-released first chapter of a full graphic novel titled Raised on Ritalin.
Part memoir, part exploration of ADD/ADHD and the medicines prescribed to treat it, it’s eventually going to be a full book, but for now you can get a taste of what’s to come. So far it’s unsparing, uncompromising, and promises to read like a combo platter of Tracy White’s How I Made It To Eighteen and the psychiatric/science comics of Daryl Cunningham.
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¹ Will, and Holly.
² Who may need a new nickname, seeing as how the only reason he doesn’t have a promised update today is that he had to run off a pack of four would-be muggers yesterday. The Latin Art-Throb sounds great, but what do you all think about The Punkbuster?
³ She already did the ladyparts previously, so don’t expect a guided tour this time around. KLARBLARG, indeed.
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