American Elf
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American Elf is the daily online comic strip diary of award-winning cartoonist James Kochalka. Many critics consider these diary strips to be Kochalka's most substantial work.
For the most part each strip portrays one event that happened to Kochalka that day. These events are sometimes momentous and sometimes relatively trivial; for example, the entry from August 23, 2002 concerns eating a slice of cheese. Although the strips document real events, Kochalka's art style is somewhat surrealistic. For example, people aren't always represented as people; Kochalka and his wife Amy are 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 to either edit the strips or 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.
American Elf is syndicated online as part of the Modern Tales family of websites [1] (http://www.moderntales.com/). The webcomic version of American Elf is subscription based. It is free to read the daily strip, but the archives are only available to subscribers. As of this writing, the cost is $1.95 (US) a month, with no option for annual subscriptions.
The American Elf strips are collected and published in hardcopy as The Sketchbook Diaries.
External links
- American Elf (http://www.americanelf.com)
- An Onion AV Club interview with Kochalka about the Sketchbook Diaries (http://www.theonionavclub.com/feature/index.php?issue=4030)
- Modern Tales (http://www.moderntales.com/)