His archives are, as Tom McHenry says himself on the main page of Beer Before Liquor, "all sorts of messed up." But from what I gathered clicking around his site, McHenry's been writing and drawing the adventures of Cat and Dog, a couple of hand puppets, since his high school days in the late '90s.
They went with him to college--Purdue, I'm guessing from what appears in the comics themselves--and he continued to do the strip for the newspaper there, what he calls "Season 1" running from January through April of 2002. Here's where the "messed up" part comes in, though: only the first 20 or so of these comics are available on the site, and it's a similar story with "Season 2" where the pages are dated from August through December of 2002 but only the first 11 actually have comics that appear on them.
I really enjoyed what was there, though, so I was glad to see that "Season 3," which picks up in January of 2003 and runs through May of that year, is pretty much complete, and "Season 4," which starts in August of 2003 and runs through December and takes place on one night in one bar, is too: I mean, Season 4 doesn't have an ending, but what's there is very nicely done--the whole thing has that underplayed, over-the-top quality of a good college strip--and I looked forward to reading his newer stuff.
Again, with the archive problems, I couldn't find a lot of the stuff he must've done at the beginning of the Daily Grind, but as April turned to May, his LiveJournal seemed to become his posting-place-of-choice. Much of what's there is a bit on the meandering side until near the end of June when he gets back to Cat in a solo adventure that ends a month later in veritable oceans of vomit, and heck, ya can't beat that! He concentrates on some basic Cat and Dog schtick, then, on through August and has recently started branching out a bit more.
Now, as I've stated before in these essays, I'm a fan of storytelling. And when McHenry gets on a roll--as he does in his Cat and Dog stories--he does "slacker angst 'n' laffs" as well as anyone I've read in a long time. Some of his individual, stand-alone strips work well, too, but as usual, it was the longer stuff that got me. So I'll definitely be back to see what else he's up to.
I sometimes use the phrase "two-fisted philosophizing" to describe my Terebinth comics. But Stephen Burrell's musings--I'm not sure if the comic's overall title is Trains of Thought or Ted Scrawl, but Trains of Thought fits the whole thing a lot better--they're the real deal. They've got philosophy up the wazoo, as we used to say.
Because these seem to be quite literally Burrell's trains of thought, his streams of consciousness squeezed out onto the page and digitized for our mass consumption.
Now I suppose any journal comic has elements of this in it--I mean, people chronicling their daily lives will of necessity put their own personal philosophies in, won't they? Even in as action-oriented a journal comic as The Devil's Panties, a reader can get an idea of what Jennie Breeden thinks and believes from the way she has herself act and the things she has herself do. But Burrell takes it a step beyond that, focusing almost entirely on, well, like the title says, on his trains of thought.
He's a bit more "left-brain" about it than Bela Whigimill, for instance, the way he adds commentary at the bottom of some strips to explain where his mind was at the time, and I certainly appreciated that. But his archive system is even more unwieldy than Ive Sorocuk's--the only way I found to start at the beginning was to click the little calendar up in the corner of the main page back to February, then click on the Friday of each week: this would then display about ten days worth of comics with the oldest stuff at the bottom of the page.
Still, the question addressed in these essays is: did I like the comic? And overall, I'd say yes. The stew of images and styles Burrell chooses to convey his thoughts--various 20th century comic strips, paintings, scribblings, stuff that looks like it was done on a scratchboard--it made for some nice juxtapositions. And Burrell seems to be a very thoughtful person, something that's a definite plus in a comic that's taking us on a tour of his thoughts.
So another 'yes' to this one.
And a very big 'yes' to Remi Treuer and his various comics!
I mean, I haven't even finished reading them all yet, but the Secretland stories that he starts out with hooked me right away and kept on hooking me. His latest story, The Mule has its own website, but I'd recommend using his LiveJournal so you can read all his stories from the beginning.
A bit of warning to our younger readers: Treuer's stuff isn't exactly for kids, so be prepared for a god deal of salty language. But these are story comics of the highest order. Go: check 'em out.
Back in my Seventh Essay, Owen Kuhn's older work were kind of my introduction to the world of "sprite comics," comics that use computer game images and characters to tell their stories.
Kuhn's newer comics weren't sprite-based, but still, it was a coding error that led to him falling out of the contest here. He's been doing comics for a long time, though, so I hope he'll keep on with them even though they weren't exactly my kettle of fish.
Next week, I think I'll just be reporting on two comics: I think I've got four left to look through, so two next week and two the week after that. Or something like that. We'll see...
The Eleventh Essay lies in the past while the Thirteenth Essay awaits you in the future. The Main page for these Book Reports seems to exist in something of a parallel timeline, and of course, there's always the main page of my Daily Grind comic.