by James Kochalka
ISBN: damn good question
When I met James Kochalka at MoCCA, he said that these diaries were his best work.
Being a Kochalka fan, I’m not going to argue with the man. (Though I will add that I really like his graphic novels.) This is the most recent volume of the diaries; it covers the time period January 2001 to January 2002. When I reviewed Volume Two, I said: “The continuing daily adventures of Magic Boy, Amy, Spandy, and assorted friends are amusing, strange, and recognizably true, sometimes all at once. If you enjoy peeking inside someone else’s head, you will probably like this.”
The same goes for this volume. Kochalka has an amazing ability to share his daily life in a way that doesn’t seem pretentious, arty for its own sake, or otherwise artificial: he sketches real life as he feels it. Maybe that is why reading his strips from September 11th and the days afterward didn’t bother me the way most things about September 11th do: he wasn’t trying to be profound, or arty, just real — confused, upset, then noting when he had that first day afterward when he was happy. (I remember that day for me; we went to see the musical based on Abba songs, Mama Mia.)
So in the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit part of the reason I like his comics so much is because I recognize much of my own life in them. Not because our lives are so much alike — that isn’t the case — but because I identify with the feelings and weirdnesses Kochalka depicts in his daily strip.
Reading his diary creates this strange sensation of knowing but not knowing James Kochalka. The last panel in this volume finds Magic Boy worrying “what if it doesn’t love me” about the baby he thinks about having every day. This summer, I eagerly checked his website (American Elf, where the current daily sketch appears) to see if he was a father yet. The baby he worried about in theory in Volume Three is now real live Eli, elf baby.
I highly recommend the Sketchbook Diaries. Go ahead, get sucked in: it is tremendous fun to watch somebody do something that they clearly love doing, and are so good at.
