I'm glad James Kochalka exists

Neil Gaiman, comic book writer, once asked why literature is art and drawing is art but when you put them together the result is not art but crap. I've never had a problem with comic books being considered entertainment fit only for children and morons but I've always known that there are comics that are art.

James Kochalka is not a great draftsman and he's not a tremendous story-teller and his writing is fairly ordinary. But he knows what art is and he's spent the last several years exploring the art of the mundane with his (now) online American Elf: The Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka. As a comic strip, these diaries are ineffective. They are not gag-a-days. Often they aren't even close to funny. Some days Kochalka sees life as a prison, except for the love of his wife, Amy, and his son, Eli. But he turns an artist's eye to his life and finds real meaning in what surrounds him. Zen-like, he can write about the smell of his own breath or the pattern that snow makes on unraked leaves.

Kochalka, if his diaries are accurate, is a neurotic, depressed bulimic with deep seated insecurities about the lack of permanence in human interrelations. Creating these strips is, like the creations of all artists, his attempt to declare that he lived and mattered.

Read a month's worth of the strips. Use tonyrose1@comcast.net and vanity to get to the archives. If you like them well-enough, subscribe and quit using my account. :)

The first five years of the diaries are collected in this volume and reading it made me want to keep a sketchbook diary. Or at least to make notes about the quality of my life on a day-to-day basis. He has other work but it all pales beside his magnum opus.

Kochalka is also a singer/songwriter with the band James Kochalka Superstar. Vulgar and un-musical and often very, very funny. Exactly like his comic strips.