by Philip Sandifer

James Kochalka's American Elf is an oddity among webcomics. Part of this is simply that Kochalka is an oddity among… well, among anything, really. Another part of it is that the comic has an odd relationship with itself and with webcomics. Although it's a noted and respected webcomic, its readership online doesn't put it among what one would think of as the "big boys." Most of its attention and reputation comes from its print editions which go all the way back to October 26, 1998; its online archive only started on May 12, 2002. But despite its clear roots in the printed form, American Elf depends strongly on its web-based form for its effect.

Kochalka works on other projects – Monkey vs Robot, Conversations, and Superf*ckers, for example. But American Elf is the work he has produced the most pages of, and it is his most personal work. The comic is a daily autobiography of small moments of his life. In his words, "We all do a hundred thousand different little things, every day. And each day I pick one of these little experiences and draw a comic strip about it." The individual topics really are quite small – peeling an orange, forgetting to close the windows in his house, bumping his head, knocking over a can of soda, or even going to the bathroom. Usually the individual strips are not particularly funny. Instead, the strip is best appreciated over several days, or with a trip into the archives. Only in this broader context does one get a sense of Kochalka's life and his attitude towards it.

Although it is hosted by Joey Manley's hosting service, American Elf declines to use the default mode of other Manley-run websites for its archives [a vertical scroll encompassing several episodes.] Instead, Kochalka's site displays the episodes one at a time. The result is, to dabble in McCloudian terminology (for a moment at least – we'll be turning it on its head in just another paragraph) to stretch the comics out over space and thus time. There is, functionally, an infinite amount of space between each strip, and as a consequence the strips resist being collapsed into a single narrative line.

The result is the complete subversion of Scott McCloud's infinite canvas – in effect the creation of an infinite gutter. Whereas McCloud centers his vision of the webcomic on the physical computer monitor, Kochalka centers his on the dynamic of the Internet – its role as a series of unbound pages. The very thing McCloud finds so limiting – the point where you must physically advance the comic to the next panel – is put to constant use by Kochalka. There becomes no physical reference at all between one strip and another, and thus, following from McCloud's account of the relationship between space and time, no chronology. The strip becomes a succession of disassociated moments.

There are, of course, plenty of precedents one can point to and suggest that this infinite gutter is nothing new. Newspaper strips, after all, have no physical connections to speak of between one day's strip and the next. But newspaper comics deal with this in a different sense, in that the strips are always separated by time – there is no substantial archive for the newspaper comic. For most purposes, one cannot go back and read Blondie from 1930 to the present. And so it is not just that there is an enormous physical gap between newspaper strips, it is that the newspaper strip always exists in a temporary moment. But for a webcomic like American Elf, the archive is always accessible. Which means that two American Elf strips have a much closer relationship to each other than two Blondie strips.

But there's also something different with American Elf and other webcomics – even those that have gone to print. Take an issue of PvP in comic book form, and its original nature as a strip is completely erased – the strips are arranged on a page and flow linearly left to right, top to bottom. The same happens in published collections of newspaper comics – Foxtrot, Calvin and Hobbes, and the like become comic books in published form, completely losing the vast space between the individual strips. But in its printed form, American Elf retains its massive gutters. Although the collected edition published by Top Shelf places four comics per page, four 3x3 comics take up less than half of the 8.5x8.5 pages of the book. The strips have a one-inch gutter between them in the bound version – four times what two strips of PvP have in their bound form. Kochalka even beats the gutter size in the Complete Far Side collection, where strips are mostly separated by half an inch.

Even in print, then, Kochalka's work operates with a large gulf between strips. It is odd, then, that American Elf relies so heavily on being spread over multiple strips. Although each strip is very much a self-contained moment, the "feel" of American Elf is very much one that develops over time. This happens without much reliance on continuity – it's very rare for multiple strips to tell a story. It basically only happens when the subject of the strip is something that happens over days. Even then, the stretches are short – 9/11 is the subject of seven consecutive strips, and the birth of Eli only five. So it is not at all that the comic is telling a continual story. Rather, it is that no particular comic is so momentous as to drag you in and make you invested. It is not a comic in which important things happen very often. And so its effect is not that of an action comic nor even like that of a traditional humor comic – a given strip of American Elf rarely has a particularly dramatic punchline. Rather, it is a strip that works through the gradual appreciation of Kochalka's worldview – through the intimacy created by the small, personal tone of the strip. Indeed, the strip is intensely, at times uncomfortably personal – Kochalka's penis and its various functions show up even more often than Gabe and Tycho's.

These two facts produce a strange contrast in Kochalka's work. On the one hand, his work depends on reading a number of strips. On the other, the individual strips are very much isolated and disparate. The result is that American Elf becomes a sequence of moments – small fragments that are at once unconnected, but that make up, when taken together, a portrait of who James Kochalka is, and what his life is like.

This aspect of Kochalka's work – the moment-by-moment quality of it – occasionally generates criticism. The cartoonist Seth, for example, found fault with Kochalka in the pages of Finding Cerebus, saying, "I think Kochalka is a perfect example of someone who has, like, bled the life out of any attempt at reality by creating this really fake approach to reality, by trying to make everything into a "cute" moment. It's funny that from the outside fringes of the so-called avant garde, he's approaching life without much more complexity than a "Love is..." cartoon."

On one level, the comment is valid – Love Is and American Elf share a similar ethic of small moments. All the same, Seth's criticism ultimately depends on the inaccurate conflation of a focus on moments with the idea of cuteness. This is, admittedly, a somewhat understandable error on his part, considering that Kochalka has published a book called The Cute Manifesto, but it is still, I feel, an error. Love Is does not merely feature small moments, it features small moments that are stripped of any real content or character. Even when it's hinting at sexuality, as when "Love is receiving flirty e-mails," it's difficult to get around the fact that the characters have no genitals and appear to be about five years old. It is sincerely difficult to imagine the Love Is characters actually doing anything sexy, or having lives – they're cartoons.

Nothing could be further from the truth about American Elf, however. The characters of American Elf are just that – characters, with personalities that can be used to distinguish them. They are also sexualized in a non-trivial way. Although the July 29, 2003 strip does not put breasts on his wife, and her genitals are hidden, it's still a striking comparison with the desexualized waif of Love Is. And the March 9, 2005 strip – which features both a clear representation of Kochalka's genitals behind his pants, and a flat-out usage of the word "penis," pretty much puts an end to the claim that the characters are in any way similar. Kochalka's characters are not empty, receptacles for greeting card messages – they're people. They piss, fuck, and get pregnant. There is sentiment to it, but it ultimately stems from that fact. Likewise, when American Elf is being sexy or flirtatious, as in the June 6, 2002 strip, it has considerably more idiosyncracy to it than Love Is does. This is, I think, the central difference between the two strips – Love Is offers a series of moments shorn of all people – it is, if you will, pure sentiment. Although American Elf is frequently sentimental, it is always sentimental about something, as opposed to simply sentimental in general. And this is where I think the wheels come off of Seth's claim – Kochalka isn't making everything into a cute moment. Rather, he's identifying moments in a particular and deeply idiosyncratic life and extracting them in a way that both evokes and transcends the sentimentality of Love Is. Kochalka does not end at sentimentality, but rather ends past it – showing a life that is both fundamentally joyful and yet strikingly honest.

Which is, unsurprisingly, exactly what he set out to do. In Conversation, which Kochalka co-authored with Craig Thompson, Kochalka claims that "art gives us a way to process life, to understand it and to gain some control over the pounding waves of experience." The claim is no doubt intended with some irony – it would be difficult to make without irony - and he also has a fish in the same panel quipping, "Is this supposed to be self-parody?" But the statement, while tongue-in-cheek, can't be completely discounted. Kochalka's reads easily as an attempt to process experience into manageable and graspable pieces. And the contrast between his image of "pounding waves of experience" and the isolated, infinitely guttered moments of American Elf is striking. Indeed, in the face of the image of experience and life as some vast, insurmountable and unintelligible mass, the infinite gutter seems a natural response – a way of breaking the waves into something less monolithic. Kochalka is recasting his life into a particular form – small, daily moments, separated into individual unconnected pieces, that nonetheless can be taken together to form a picture at once understandable and unmistakably a piece of someone's real life.

This is what's most notable about American Elf . Despite the fact that it lives heavily in print, despite it not being digital art in the sense of digital graphics or infinite canvas, despite not really using any conventions that haven't been available to cartoonists for some time, Kochalka is doing something that only a few other strips that I can think of (Count Your Sheep and Daily Dinosaur Comics spring to mind) are doing. He's genuinely using the web in an innovative way, and a way that we all too often, in a blinding fit of McCloudianism, don't talk about. Enough thought of the screen and the infinite canvas – let's think about the infinite gutter.