Comic Recommendation: Rick the Stick

Max and I are both big fans, you could maybe even say students of Scott McCloud and his book Understanding Comics.

One of my favorite concepts from the book is the idea of what I like to call metacomics. That is, exploring the medium of comics and doing things with comics that you can't really do in other forms of artwork. There's actually a lot of that in Cosmic Hellcats. Granted, pretty much no one ever notices it but us, but it's there, and that makes me happy.

What makes me even happier is seeing someone do it who's not us. And that's what Rick the Stick (by Kenard) is really about. It's easy to be funny. It's easy to be creative. Actually, that's not true, neither of those things are easy. But Kenard definitely pulls it off. But on top of bringing the funny, he brings much more. 

One of the hardest parts of comics is balancing consistency in artwork with character design. One of the first things a beginning artist does is strive for as much realism as possible. However, what you learn as you progress is that by sacrificing some of that realism you can gain a lot of expressionism in your work. What McCloud teaches in his book is that by moving towards the unreal or the surreal, you can actually allow viewers to identify with your characters on several other levels. While the Mona Lisa is a very specific image due to the attention to detail in the rendering, Charlie Brown is an everyman that anyone can identify with.

Rick the Stick takes this to another level. Rick is a stick figure. The ultimate everyman. However, he lives in a world primarily inhabited by more realistic figures and this creates a situation where anyone can identify with Rick and yet see how he stands as an outsider to the rest of the world around him. On top of this Kenard makes visual statements in his strip by playing with everything from color to word balloon design (obviously one of the things I'm most interested in from our strip here as well).

So please check out Rick the Stick. Read it for the sheer enjoyment or read it as a student of the art. But read it and enjoy.