American Elf
| American Elf | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | James Kochalka |
| Website | http://www.americanelf.com/ |
| Current status / schedule | Daily |
| Launch date | October 1998 (online since 2002) |
| Genre(s) | Autobiographical |
American Elf is an online comic strip diary created by award-winning cartoonist James Kochalka.[1] Many critics consider these strips to be Kochalka's most significant work.[2] American Elf has won the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Comic Series and Outstanding Online Comic.[3]
Contents |
[edit] Style
Each strip usually portrays one event that happened to Kochalka that day. These events are sometimes momentous (such as the birth of a child) and sometimes relatively trivial (such as eating a slice of cheese). Although the strips document real events, Kochalka's art style deviates from realism. For example, people aren't always represented as people; Kochalka and his wife Amy are drawn as elves, and Kochalka's friend Jason is represented as Jason X-12, a dog with a robot brain. This is a carryover from Kochalka's long-form works, many of which take place on the Moon in a magical duplicate of Kochalka's hometown of Burlington, Vermont, and which feature versions of people from his life.
Kochalka considers these strips to be an attempt to document the rhythms of his life, and as such refuses either to edit the strips or to publish a "best of" collection — according to Kochalka, the value of the strips doesn't lie in any individual strip, but rather in the totality.[2]Recently, Mr. Kochalka has hinted in American Elf that he may end the strip at the conclusion of 2011.
American Elf is syndicated online as part of Webcomics Nation. The webcomic version of American Elf used to be subscription based and only the most recent strip was free to read. In 2007, the archives were made available to anyone. American Elf was used along with Penny Arcade, Fetus-X and Questionable Content as an example of comics using the web to create "an explosion of diverse genres and styles" in Scott McCloud's 2006 book Making Comics.[4]
[edit] Books
The American Elf strips are collected and published in hardcopy as The Sketchbook Diaries and American Elf by Top Shelf Productions.
[edit] References
- ^ Glenn, Joshua (July 11, 2004). "This American Elf". The Boston Globe, p. D2.
- ^ a b Murray, Noel (July 28th, 2004). "Interviews: James Kochalka". The Onion
- ^ Ignatz Awards
- ^ McCloud, Scott (2006). Making Comics, New York: Harper Collins Publishers. ISBN 0-06-078094-0. Pg. 227
[edit] External links
 |
This article related to webcomics is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
