In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  The Diary Comic isaac cates In a story Jesse Reklaw contributed to the parody minicomic Krayons Ego, a young comics artist seeking inspiration attends a “superstar lecture” by the cartoonist James Kochalka. When a student in the audience asks for a topic for her “first comic,” the parody version of Kochalka, with a bright grin, replies, “Oh, that’s simple. Do diary comics. They’re totally easy!”1 The lack of explanation around this climactic punch line suggests that the reader, presumably part of the “indie” minicomics coterie, already knows about both Kochalka’s seminal role in the diary comics phenomenon and the present ubiquity of diary comics among the rising generation of young cartoonists. Kochalka is best known for his twelve-year (and counting) diary strip American Elf, collected in four volumes of Sketchbook Diaries, an omnibus American Elf collection, two subsequent collections covering two years apiece, and further ongoing strips at americanelf.com. Since , dozens or perhaps hundreds of young cartoonists have followed his example , bringing the mundane incidents of their daily lives to print or to the Web and shaping their autobiographies in a form originally designed to contain comedic daily strips like Peanuts. Although these diary strips are unquestionably a form of autobiographical writing, they hardly conform to generic expectations about memoir or autobiography; they even distort the category of the diary in important ways. In their daily publication rhythm and their quotidian presumptions, diary comics resemble blogs, but the formal constraints of the page or (more commonly) the four-panel strip require a sort of concision that most forms of Internet writing do not. A real consideration of diary comics as a mode of life writing, then, invites us to borrow generic expectations not only from the documentary genres of diary and memoir but also from other modes, particularly the lyric poem and the lyric sequence. It would be difficult to overstate the ubiquity of diary comics among today’s young cartoonists, particularly as a learning exercise or a temporary rite of passage for cartoonists in their teens or twenties. Just after the turn of the twenty-first century, having seen Kochalka’s first self-published collections of the American Elf strip, the young cartoonists Todd Webb (Casual Poet) and Drew Weing (The Journal Comic) took advantage of the possibility of Internet publication to bring their diary comics online.2 In the following years, the ready availability of photocopying and the growing “minicomics” subculture provided a venue for several other diary cartoonists , such as Vanessa Davis (Spaniel Rage), Ryan Claytor (And Then One Day), and J. P. Coovert (Simple Routines).3 Many other diary cartoonists, such as Erika Moen (DAR), Jesse Reklaw (Ten Thousand Things to Do), and Liz Prince (Delayed Replays), have published initially online and subsequently in minicomics collections. More experienced artists, like the prolific French cartoonist Lewis Trondheim (Les Petit Riens), have since been drawn to the diary strip’s capacity to record the nuances and rhythms of daily life. Diary comics have become one of the most common minicomics genres for both aspiring and established cartoonists, ubiquitous even to the point of becoming a target of derision. Not all of these diary cartoonists see Kochalka as a primary influence, though his American Elf remains the most prominent and the longest-running diary strip, and the genre’s conventions owe a great deal to his approach and his aesthetic. Even by , Kochalka’s status as the preeminent diary cartoonist was distinct enough that one of Drew Weing’s journal comics from that year shows Weing and Todd Webb, armed and advancing on him, announcing, “Your days are numbered, Kochalka!”4 Now, more than a decade after American Elf began, Kochalka’s work stands as the definitive diary comic, as much for its accumulating length (indeed, a different sort of numbering of his days) as for the gradual sharpening of Kochalka’s vignette-writing craft. Although it does not offer the structure or closure of a typical memoir, American Elf is an unparalleled record of an individual life in comics, tracking Kochalka’s gradual growth as an artist and as a husband and father. In fact, as Kochalka recounts it, the notion for the diary comic was originally a reaction against the fashioned closure of the memoir, the narrative structural devices that such writing borrows from fiction. In the introduction to the first volume of Sketchbook Diaries, Kochalka writes,  isaac cates I wanted to explore the rhythm...

Share