Cartoonists With Attitude

Enlarge through precise clicking.

Click here to see the page in all its glory.

Click to see the full scale image.

I’m no comics historian, but I believe Knight Life, the new daily strip by fellow Cartoonist With Attitude Keith Knight may be the first appearance of an autobiographical comic strip syndicated on a daily basis. Sure, other strips and panels derive from the personal lives of their creators - For Better or For Worse, Dennis the Menace, and Family Circus being prime examples - but I think Knight’s may be the first to actually inject the creator directly into the strip, featuring stories and gags based on the creator’s experiences, personality, whims and whatnot. If anyone was to break that barrier, it would be - and should be - Keith.

Click to see the full scale image.

Like the K Chronicles, Keith’s popular weekly strip, his daily strip is irreverent, self-parodying, silly, yet quite smart and always very funny. When I first heard Keith was creating a daily strip, I had wondered if he would carry over my favorite of the K Chronicles’ running gags, jokes about sheep buggery. So far, nothing yet; and I have doubts about their ever making the dailies. That’s okay, because so far, Knight Life succeeds in bringing in the other elements that have made the K Chronicles a classic among weekly alternative comics - especially the sensibility informing the occasional “Life’s Little Victories” theme. And as a bonus, it diversifies the white middle class suburbia of the funny papers by depicting the urban lives of a bi-racial couple (Keith and his wife Kerstin) seeking happiness through creativity and risk.

Another bonus - Keith’s work in color:

Click to see full scale image.

I was drawing random people walking by with my fountain pen and pen brush, when Sara Ryan said, “Dude, you should create a Flickr gallery out of those! They’d be awesome!”

And so I did.

Actually, I don’t have any more “galleries” left, unless I upgrade. Eh. I’ll spend my money on beer.

My fellow Cartoonists With Attitude Matt Bors and Jen Sorensen will be at Powell’s Bookstore on Burnside this Friday at 7:30pm. Here’s how Matt describes it:

Jen Sorensen and I will present a live slide show and reading of our comics and Jen will be signing copies of her new collection of cartoons, “SlowPoke: One Nation, Oh My God.”

We’ll be doing some live drawing as well, showing folks how we cartoonize McCain’s numerous cheeks and Obama’s massive smile.

Maybe I’ll even draw a cat’s asshole for you.

That last link brings you to a drawing Matt did for a Willamette Week editorial on the politics of spaying cats. It is all that it should be.

There will also be a pre-Stumptown Comicsfest Party at Guapo Comics.

I hope to make it, but no guarantees from this father of two.

Why, yes I will.

I’m sharing a table once again with Chris Baldwin. I don’t have anything new to sell, but I will have fresh copies of the first Sheldon comic book, “Into the Woods,” an In Contempt collection from 2002, several old undergrounds called “Dreck” I did with other cartoonists (including mister_punchy in the late 90s/early 00s. Oh, and I do have t-shirts, but they are all at CafePress.

I really need to get another Sheldon/Wanderlost comic book printed, as well as a new In Contempt collection. I started a 2000 - 2004 retrospective called Nothing But Contempt in December 2004, but grad school in January 2005 and nothing was ever the same again. Had Stumptown been in October of this year like it was last year, I would have gotten much of this done in time, but APE decided to mix it up. So here we are, and I know I’m not the only one who was caught off-guard.

Like, say, the poor organizers. Props to them for pulling it off on short notice.