Cutting Steak With a Spoon

My friend James Kochalka has been making music, art, performance, and comics for the twenty years that  I’ve known him and I’ve always admired his steadfast commitment to persevering in the smallish, sometimes insular community where we live. Eventually, he became rather famous (someone has a blog about him now, it’s called Kochalkaholic). You can always count on James to deliver up a great rock show, with fantastic dance moves, hilarious lyrics, and occasional nudity. And he makes comics, drawings, and paintings that are beautiful in their simplicity. He has a cool new comic out called Superf*ckers (haven’t read it yet, can’t comment) that tells us what a bunch of teen superheroes do in their downtime, when they’re just hanging out and acting like teenagers. But it’s his comic diary American Elf that I think is his greatest achievement. It’s an epic of the everyday, which is, after all, how we actually live our lives, as an ongoing collection of mostly diminuitive details. So I was surprised to read a letter to my local weekly, which publishes selections from American Elf, decrying everything about James’ strip that I love. What didn’t surprise me was the excellent, articulate rebuttal that my friend Bill Simmon wrote, because Bill is a genius. You can read both that and the original letter over at Candleblog, the blog Bill co-authors, edits, and maintains. You can also subscribe to read the online and comprehensive version of American Elf (you can read the daily entries for free), or you can read the print compilation of five years worth of diary entries that was published last summer, which includes the very moving story of the birth of James’ son Eli. Either way, you won’t be sorry. Unless, I suppose, you are the guy who wrote that letter.