Apartness Archive
Welcome to the Apartness Archive!
Apartness is a comic about a guy whose girlfriend moves away for a job. He stays behind while they figure out their next move. On his own for the first time in years, he lives on cookies, beer and television. But his temporary return to bachelorhood is not quite what he expects.
Drawn in gag-a-day and half-page Sunday formats, Apartness is also an homage to the newspaper funny pages of my youth, and the beloved strips contained therein. The traditional comic strip today is a dying and outmoded form, as newspapers and cartoonists alike scramble to shift to an online approach to content. But it's the form I grew up on, and despite its obsolescence I find it has enduring qualities. The newspaper strip was around for a long time, and there's a good reason for that: as a medium both for making quick jokes and for telling longer stories over days, weeks, months and years — and some that even last decades — it simply works.
As I create Apartness, I'm also reading The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, one of the most masterful examples of the form. Bill Watterson was immensely inventive despite the ever-shrinking confines of this medium. He showed that even within the increasingly limited and generic world of the newspaper strip great writing and drawing could still have a seat at the table: Calvin and Hobbes was immensely popular and successful during its ten year run, and it remains a huge inspiration to me, as well as a shining example of what comic strips can achieve when they're made by someone who truly cares about the form.
And so I give you Apartness. Check this page for updates to the complete story, or just follow along every week on Malcontent. And when it's all done I'll be making Apartness into a short book. So buy that when it comes out!
UPDATE: Apartness is now a book. Go buy it!
