David Yoder's Awesome Journal #7

By David Yoder

Diary comics are pretty popular nowadays, especially compared to the past (when they didn't exist at all!), but for the most part I don't really get them.

Well, that's not true. I "get them" in the sense that I understand one of the major reasons that people make them: it causes you to draw every day. And if you want to get good at anything, then you really do need to do it every day.

However, for the most part diary comics don't do much for me, and this is because most people's lives are kind of...boring. I mean, we complain about people posting pictures of the food they ate on facebook or twitter or whatever, so why should making a comic where "I went to a restaurant" is a major event (and yet no additional information is supplied)?

Artwise these comics don't do that much for me, but I think that's probably because they're made without any real planning. The borders are all shaky and hand drawn, and some of the panels are just whatever space is left on the page.

Of course, some people really enjoy reading diary comics. I guess they enjoy the view into someone else's day to day life, but I think I mostly find them kind of boring. But hell, it's not like if I made them they'd be any better (Saturday: Ate cake for breakfast, went to a thrift store with a friend, bought a kinda janky chest of drawers for $5, went to another friend's house to play Unexploded Cow and watch Striptease Samurai Squadron).

Oak & Linden #2

By Pat Barrett
patbarrett.com

The first comic in this issue of Oak & Linden is a pretty awesome one about people going to war with gods because they are jackasses who eat all of their goats (see below).  It's pretty great, and uses an interesting art style where the characters look more like palaeolithic art than what you would expect to see in a comic.

The other comics use art styles that are more like what you'd expect in a comic. The one I liked the most was a sort of bizarre dream type comic about a guy who steals a wallet and finds a woman inside it. It was pretty strange, but I liked how things happened for seemingly no real reason. Just like in a dream!

The longest story in here is about a jackass space captain who takes advantages of the aliens on the planet he crash lands on. I'm guessing it's supposed to represent how white people treat developing nations, but mostly I just think the space captain is a jerk.

Plus there's a diary comic called "The Trouble with Diary Comics", about how people keep asking to be in your comic once they know you make one. I thought it was pretty funny.

Polite Fiction 2

By José-Luis Olivares

joseluisolivares.com

So I go travelling for two months and manage to keep to my three times a week schedule despite sleeping on people's floors and couches and not having consistent internet access.

Then I get back to Vancouver, and immediately start missing updates. In my defense I was sick, and had to move house, and blah blah blah. If you're reading a zine review site you know that the combination of zinester with blogger probably produces more excuses than anything else. ; )

Anyway, before I left on my trip I scanned every single zine in my review pile, and now there are only 13 left! (Of course I got _a lot_ on my travels, and also people sent some to me while I was travelling, including my brother who sent me a huge box of old ones, so this site won't be going away any time soon).

This is a pretty strange little comic. It's made up of several stories, all but one of which are in black and white. Some of the "stories" don't really have a narrative, such as the first one "Running Bird". It's about a weird bird headed person that runs a bunch. They just run past abstract backgrounds and some of the pages remind me more of pop art (sorta like Keith Haring). It's kind of interesting to see this style of comic, though I personally don't really care for it that much.

The second comic, "Tree-Island Birds", makes more "sense" in that things happen in reaction to other things and there's a narrative. A person washes up on a desert island, and has to deal with being stuck there with the birds who make it their home. It's actually kind of depressing, though I'm impressed by the amount of emotion Olivares gets out of the artwork considering the person has basically no facial features (see below).

There's also a dream comic, and a diary comic that is actually about diary comics and why some people make them. These use a different style than the other comics, and actually have text and dialogue. I think the diary comic was one of the more interesting of that style that I've read recently, though more on that soon.

Badaboom Twist Issue #1

By David Libens

badaboumtwist.blogspot.com

Sometimes people act in ways that are surprising to me. Now sure, that in and of itself isn't that strange, I mean people shoot other people and eat meat and do lots of stuff I don't really understand, but then there are the less severe things. You're marriage isn't going so well? Why not start a daily diary comic about your life and write it in a language that is not your own (and not the language spoken where you live), and don't tell anyone (including your wife) about it?

So yeah, these are kind of depressing diary comics that Libens drew while at work. Libens' wife is from America, but she's been living in Europe for a long time. She misses her family and wants to move. Libens also seems to want to move, but doesn't do anything about it. To me it really seems as though they're both depressed and stuck in a rut, unable to start the actions that would lead them towards a better mental place. I can understand this, and I guess things improved to some amount as the back page of the comic indicates that they had another kid (though they still don't live in America), so hopefully things are going better.

The art style is pretty simple and sketchy. I'm pretty sure that Libens just drew these directly with ink and didn't even bother penciling stuff. The art isn't really my favourite style, but I think it works pretty well for this type of comic, and some of the panels look pretty good.

Some of my Best Friends R Strangers

Ooooh, a sealed white envelope. How mysterious! (I love mysteries!) What's inside? Two minicomics!

It's Cold, Up North, This year. / New Year


By Mike
zine-it-yourself.blogspot.com

Both of these are diary comics by Mike. Or rather, they are pages from his diary which happen to be in comic form. Is there a difference? I don't really know.

The comics in "It's Cold, Up North" are rather sad and deal with it being cold and dark, Mike feeling uninspired and not knowing what he's doing with his life, and breaking up with his girlfriend of ten years. They're not the happiest of comics, but reading about stuff like this kind of makes me feel better about my life, in that it means I'm not alone in my thoughts and feelings. This isn't to say that there are no moments of humour or joy. At one point Mike states "My travelling companion today is a sousaphone." a line that, in its seemingly normal take on a (to me) absurd situation, brings a smile to my face.

"New Year" is comics from the first few weeks of January and continues the tales of depression, cold, and darkness. Somehow these ones seem more optimistic than "It's Cold", and it could be that with the new year Mike has attempted to concentrate more on the positive things in his life instead of dwelling on the negative. That's something I should really take to heart as well.