Godek’s Everyday
I’ve been following Tym Godek’s blog for quite awhile now, and I’m finally getting around to mentioning a few interesting comics he’s put up.
This post features a number of autobiographical/diary strips from late October. I always enjoy Tym’s clear and simple style, but it’s his penchant for formal play that makes some of the works rise above. A few of the pages on that post are explicitly about the idea of the everyday and what makes up a notable event of a day.
The page from the 24th (first on the page) is a montage of banal aspects of a day. Things that would normally be ignored or forgotten, or if not would be expanded into some form of antidote. I love the compression in panel five. The narration reads “my kids did something funny and/or cute” while the image shows Tym and his wife. He is laughing; she is saying “awww.”
The pages from the 26th and 29th are variations on a them for the everyday: the former with weather, the latter (my favorite) with sounds. Unlike almost all autobio comics I’ve read, these are not trying to be stories, they are more like artfully arranged recordings. The everyday sliced up through the focus of the artist’s attention to the banal.
I’ll also direct you to Tym’s ongoing (nearly complete, I think) story “!” which is a very long horizontal scroll of a story.