'Small Drawings' by Dustin Harbin
If there is one thing I am a sucker for its a neat, tiny, smartly put together book of drawings. Dharbin also does a diary comic of the same size and similar style that I am not so much a fan of but will still always buy because I am a sucker for tiny books of tiny drawings but this is even better because its not so much the autobio bent and more just flexing drawing skills. I mean, cartoonists are just not interesting! Their work is, its fucking interesting as all hell, but Im just not captivated by diary and autobio works by artists who have spent 3/4ths of their lives alone at a drawing table honing their skills. They're all inherently stunted miscreants but for the fact of all that time spent alone, or at best with their own ilk, and not playing soccer with the rest of the reindeer or getting properly socialized with the girls. The good that comes from that morlock style existence is just how creative they become in fashioning words, drawings, whole worlds to substitute on the lives they missed out on by favoring a drawing table and a pen over a soft kiss or the joy of holding a puppy. We salute you, prisoners of your own design!
But all low blows aside, damn can this dude draw. He explains in the brief forward that these drawings were kind of sketch games or excersises all done in an hour or less. I can't do anything in an hour, let alone drawings of such skritch skratchy fun and zang. If I hadn't been playing all that soccer and having all that sex and doing all those drugs and instead practiced drawing every day maybe I could. But thats not true, because I have no talent. Dustin Harbin has talent and he also had the foresight and wherewithal to hone that talent into a bonafide solid skill. He's the smart one, I'm the dumb one. I belong in the sewer.
He's got that great style where he can draw anything and every time he draws it it not only exactly looks like what it is, but it also looks like a dustin harbin drawing every time. This is the kinda guy who woulda been a god in the 1930s. Or maybe not, didn't they just grind up cartoonists for hamburger back then? I'm sure there is an era sometime in the past that was better than it is now where they treated cartoonists real good, he woulda fucking owned it back during that time whenever it was.
During that time I probably was a coal taster or something. A guy that they brought all their coal to and he would taste it. They'd bring big buckets, sometimes wagons, of coal to my mud hut and I'd hobble out in my suit made to look like a big blackbird and I'd take out a piece of coal and lick it and tell them, "yep, its coal." and then they'd go on their way and have their babies and make roads and shit.
And roads, who the fuck invented roads? Why didn't we just make bridges from tree branch to tree branch? And weren't we already real good at swinging from trees so why would we need roads?
So try and draw that Mr Dustin Harbin who can draw everything and everyone thinks is awesome and I'm stuck living in a mud hut and licking coal, you jerk!
Here's his website where you can buy all sorts of cool things.
