This is about as autobio as this strip gets (so far, anyway.) I go through most of my waking day with this thought in the back of my head, that there is no God and the universe is a big, beautiful, and strange place that we will never get to the bottom of, and our lives are short yet a lot like the universe in the qualities just listed, especially that bit about bottomlessness. I agree with Sartre about existence preceding essence (but none of that “bad faith” shit, sorry), and so I do my best to make meaning out of my life. Yet the day-to-day routine can really suck the color out of living.
About the art: deliberately black and white this time, not because I ran out of time. I might go back and add more cross-hatching. And fix panel 3, where the wheels of the cars are just all wrong. I tried to keep things pretty simple, focusing on only essential details. I picked up a copy of Drawn & Quarterly’s collection of Shigeru Mizuki’sKitaro. So much great cartooning there. Mizuki’s expressive lines communicate all the information needed. He can do great detailed work, but most panels are as simple as possible. That’s an esthetic I have been trying to master since forever.
Speaking of details, if you want to know what my apartment looks like, panel 6 comes close. My car looks about like that. My day job, too. I left out the piles of bills I ignore, the coffee cups from various drive-thrus, the books I have stacked, half-read by my bedside. Oh, and my kids. A friend of mine observed that Fetch sounds like my son sometimes. I can’t deny the unconscious influence of his hilarious and disturbing commentary.
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