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graveyard of DOOM index < | > I found jinxremoving six in Sticky last week. It's a bunch of hand-drawn autobio comic strips about a guy living in Chicago. It reminisces about his childhood relationship with comics, talks about meeting his current girlfriend and does a cute little "Pacman - where Are they Now?" joke. The way Arpad draws himself is, for me, the hook - a kind of highly abstracted minimalist head that looks kind of like a cat's head, or maybe just a guy wearing a pointy-ear hat. No neck, either, just the odd little heiroglyph of a face hovering above the square-shouldered body. He draws Alicia, his girlfriend, as a rabbit, so maybe the cat thing is on the money. His depiction of his younger self has vertical lines for eyes, whereas his older self has horizontal-line eyes, which I think he's using to illustrate the cynicism that comes with age, or something. Another thing that pulled me in was the bit in the "I Was a Pre-Teen Fanboy" strip where he realises that the whole "comics are collectable and will be worth lots of money in a few years" is a crock of shit. I remember my own comic-riddled childhood (I never turned my back on them like Arpad did) and the years that saw me following everything laid down in the "Marvel Guide to Collecting Comics", a free insert that I found in a second-hand copy of a Spider-Man comic. It was all about storing your comics in plastic bags and keeping them in "mint condition" so that they would be worth more when you sold them for that cool million. For years I was into that crap, buying two copies of every #1 issue that hit the newsagent, until a simple fact of economics occurred to me: the reason Superman #1 sells for thousands isn't because of the quality of the comic. It couldn't be. That thing is really not very good at all. It's the fact that there's only maybe fifty copies of it in existence that makes it valuable. So all of these 10K-print-run 1980s first issues I and every other fanboy in the Universe had been buying were worth fuck all by virtue of there being so goddamn many of them. The only reason for buying comics - and I've stuck to this rule ever since - is because you actually enjoy reading them. End of story. So that's why I bought jinxremoving. Because I liked it. I identified with Arpad's fanboy reminiscences, and was charmed by his pencil-drawn art. He's funny and honest. I like that in a comic.
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