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© 2001 Top Shelf Productions
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James
Kochalka’s The Sketchbook Diaries
Review by: Troy
Brownfield
From:
Top Shelf Productions
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James Kochalka never fails to present us with interesting
work. Whether he’s plying his trade as a musician or delivering
his unique comics, he’s always pushing to get something different
out of his chosen medium. I’m a big fan of Monkey vs. Robot,
so I naturally looked forward to The Sketchbook Diaries.
The
Sketchbook Diaries works almost as a “meta-comic”. We
are told that Kochalka began keeping his four-panel strip
a day diary in 1998, and that we can’t necessarily take every
single incident as a truth. In form and function, it reminds
me of Scott Dikkers’s superlative “Jim’s Journal”. That experiment
in “anti-humor” could be alternately hilarious and insight
as Jim commented on his uneventful days. Kochalka approaches
his humor in a similar way, but his art goes in some decidedly
different directions.
Kochalka
chooses to represent himself as “Magic Elf Boy”, with wife
Amy as, I suppose, a “Magic Elf Girl”. Other characters get
odd interpretations, yet the cat remains the cat. The understated
“cute” quality of the art disarms the reader; you don’t necessarily
expect the childlike images to get drunk, have sex, and say
“fuck”. When they do, it’s somewhat shocking, but equally
honest and entertaining.
The
bulk of the strips take an absurdist approach to life. Some
are stridently straightforward and insightful. This manner
of presentation could be tricky to pull off, but Kochalka
does it extremely well.
In
the end, there isn’t really an end. I assume that the diary,
like life itself, is a work in progress. We should be happy
that James Kochalka chooses to share some of that life with
us.
Find
out more about Top Shelf at www.topshelfcomix.com.
Troy Brownfield is the Editor-in-Chief of Shotgun Reviews. He could have
kept a diary of his time working for a certain catalog company,
but the Russians have already written all the good prison
novels.
Email Troy at psikotyk@aol.com.
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