0146 — Author's Diary Comic: The Found Book (Patreon)

The names have been changed to protect the innocent, but the content and verdict have not. I recognized in this young fella's implicit framing of his task an unfounded yet rampant belief from the very earliest hours of web comics publishing: if you ran a diary comic every day, you were bound to pull an audience, to earn fame, to be "picked up." You might even get a couple minutes on Letterman.

The indefatigable James Kochalka was doing it, and fortunately his cute American Elf drawing style did a lot of the heavy lifting, because it turns out that most people don't have newsworthy days or regularly profound insight. Quantity and Regularity were tattooed across our bare, sweaty yokes as we shoveled coal into the furnaces of our own Titanics, our uncalibrated sextant pointing the prow to nowhere. Create something good enough to offer posterity? Check, please. (There was never a check.)

These days, when I'm out coaching the next generation of cartoonists*, beating my snare as they goose-step across the back lawn, they are allowed lunch only once they have repeated the following: "Sir yes sir, a life is not a story simply because it is lived, we must add the anchovy, we must charm the saliva from its sac." My camps are unpopular, expensive, and poorly reviewed on Yelp. Only one cadet, Malvern Tibbles, has gone on to publish anything, but I will not link to it, because he mischaracterizes me as onerous.

Be it not forgotten that at noon in tiers 2 & 3 today a "making-of-this-strip" strip will post. Other recent upper-tier posts include several pages of my hand-drawn BonAire and Balanesçu Comix; three archival one-off comics; a piece which attempts to prove that I am Téodor. There are over 350 original posts waiting for you in tiers 2 & 3!

*I don't actually coach any cartoonists, and I think everybody innately senses this.