Word: sketchbook
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...favor of raw, expressionist artwork. Over time that outsider style has been adopted (co-opted?) by traditional, established publishers. Three recent works, available in regular comicbook shops, typify this style with their autobiographical stories rendered in immediate, rough graphics: Allison Cole's "Never Ending Summer," James Kochalka's "Sketchbook Diaries Vol. 4" and Jeff Brown's "Unlikely...
James Kochalka's "Sketchbook Diaries, Volume 4," (Top Shelf Productions; 48 pp.; $7.95) continues the annual series of books that collect a year's-worth of Kochalka's daily online strip. More like haikus than indulgent chronicles of the author's day, each strip consists of just four, or less, panels showcasing a singular moment. These can be banal (June 27, 2002: "Uncomfortably tossing and turning till my legs get twisted in and bound by the sheets") or funny (June 6: "I gagged while brushing my teeth ? expelling red wine, venison, fillet mignon and hand made sausage?the color scheme...
...James the Fly-Killer in his "Sketchbook Diaries...
...most gorgeous graphic novel ever published. It has gold ink embossed in the hardcover, with thick paper and an exquisite mix of color and black and white strips. The "Date Book" likewise has come out as a hardcover with top-notch production, including a placeholder ribbon. A tantalizing sketchbook page from 1995 contains a quote attributed to Goethe, "Architecture is frozen music." Ware adds an addendum, writing, "This is, I think, the aesthetic key to the development of cartoons as an art form." Indeed, music and architecture play major roles in Ware's aesthetic both explicitly and implicitly. Carefully rendered...
...self-portrait from Chris Ware's sketchbook...