by Michael Whitney
Kenn Minter's journal comic, I'm Not
From Here, offers a shuttered look at his life, as do all
webcomic journals. Most text online journals are detailed
confessionals, but the webcomic variety can't be so completist.
The artists' hands would be pretzels after a week of drawing what they
had for breakfast, etc. So journal comics illustrate a moment or
a sarcastic comeback, and the readers get a blinking glance of the
artists' lives ... or, rather, what they think of their lives.
And it's mesmerizing, really. Minter's journal is, like many of
its peers, honest but oblique. In the strips, he either depicts a
moment of his life, a conversation or an incident, or he narrates about
the way he's feeling or what's going through his mind. It's never
as ham-handed or straight forward as that may sound. Minter
doesn't apologize or explain the moments he chooses to set down in
comics. Some of the strips show him riding a high (he assures the
reader that it's not chemcially enhanced) and some show him circling in
despair. The reasons, the background situations, are usually left
out, and that might be a strength. The missing details
universalize the moments. Everyone has felt the buzz of a good
day, and everyone has felt occasional confusion and despair. It's
most important that the readers can relate to the moments, even if they
don't know the stories.
After all, journal comics aren't about plot. There won't be a
"story line" where Minter eventually solves all his problems or defeats
a mad scientist intent on world domination. (Well, there might
be. But then it won't really be a journal comic anymore, will
it?) If we only pick up pieces of events and catch a few
scattered bits of conversation, that's only natural. We're
invited voyeurs into Minter's life. What he offers is good enough
to almost, almost, form a
picture of a character, a personality. And that's what a journal
is really about, for the people who don't write it.
Factual information about Minter can't be found on his journal
site. To find out where he lives, what he does for a living, etc,
you'd have to look elsewhere. Everything the reader knows about
him must be pieced together by following the comics and putting
together "clues" from what Minter chooses to reveal, which is sometimes
not very much. It's a bit like a mystery without a murder.
Minter's strips have a dreamy quality. He never chooses natural
color tones in the journal. They're colored to separate the
elements rather than to depict reality. Skin is yellow, blue,
green or any color that will set characters apart from the
backgrounds. It looks a bit surreal. Then the
contents: Conversations and stories are picked up in the middle
and left in the middle, like dreams that skip around in time and don't
quite fit together. Why is Minter's ex mad at him? Who does
he see on the street "just walking?" Then there are the series of
strips where he's Kung Fu fighting his best friend, who is drawn as a
giant pink rabbit, in an exaggerated Hong Kong movie/Dragonball Z style.
The art is either energetic or loose and feels ... fast. Whether
it's actually done quickly or not I can't say, but it has a feel that's
frenetic or relaxed by turns. The panel borders are wobbly and
perspective is inconsistent. Sometimes, jagged lines are used for
shading and small sharp lines are scattered over objects. In some
comics, the panels collapse into shards toward the end of the strips,
like broken panes of glass. These variations suggest Minter's
mood in the comic, and, often as not, are storytelling devices.
The strips overall show an eye for visual storytelling, and the layouts
are interesting.
As a Web site, I'm Not From Here
needs work. Browsing through the whole archive is bothersome,
since each comic is displayed in a new pop-up window.
There's no way to browse quickly to the next comic from the current
pop-up. A simpler interface would make the site much more
welcoming to read.
All mass media deals in the illusion of intimacy, and webcomics are no
exception. People feel they know some of our webcomics
micro-celebrities -- the ones that are always mentioned by their first
names -- just as others feel they know the faces that are beamed into
their living rooms every night. This illusion is, in fact, a
major appeal of mass media, including our own. Text journals were
one of the big phenomena of the early Web. Television talk shows
play on the same appeal, the same feeling. We enjoy getting to
know people, really or virtually. Reading through I'm Not From Here, you find
yourself trying to piece together a picture of its author, a portrait
that he keeps always just barely out of reach. In that way, it's
very much like a real relationship.
