Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email


2018 February 07 • Wednesday

A relatively recent development in comics has been the idea of a daily comics diary, making a strip every day. The people who have been doing this tend to set their own terms, limitations and obligations, but the results are consistently rewarding.

The most recent example of this form that I've seen is Cathy Hannah's Springtime in Chicago, which I must have picked up at Quimby's several months ago.

Hannah's approach is a four-panel comic strip every day, detailing friendships, crushes, sickness, work, pets, family, money problems and quotidian wins and losses.

Sometimes there's an actual punch line but usually there isn't. This is actually a satisfying twist as the visual presentation causes the reader raised on newspaper comic strips to expect the familiar set-up, build and release joke structure.

By offering these unsweetened shards of real life, Hannah's work should prompt you to see your own life differently as a result of glimpsing hers.

Of course none of this would work if her ability to draw weren't up to the task but she's a great artist with an apparent affinity for this medium.