John Persons Comics -

Due to his small print runs (Persons rarely prints more than 5,000 copies of any given title), collecting his work requires patience. Here are tips for the aspiring collector:

Despite his obscurity, the DNA of John Persons is everywhere in 21st-century "slow media."

To understand John Persons Comics, one must first separate the creator from the creation. John Persons (born 1968 in Kalamazoo, Michigan) is not the name of a slick New Yorker cartoonist. He is a former zookeeper, a failed seminarian, and a self-taught illustrator who began drawing comics as a form of therapy after his divorce in 1994. john persons comics

The "John Persons" character in the strip is a semi-autobiographical cipher. He is usually drawn with thick, wire-rimmed glasses perpetually askew, a coffee mug fused to his hand, and the posture of a man who has just realized he left the stove on an hour after leaving the house. Unlike the hyper-articulate Calvin or the cynical Dilbert, John Persons (the character) rarely speaks in complete sentences. His dialogue is a staccato rhythm of sighs, half-finished observations, and the occasional muttered, "Huh."

The comic debuted as a self-syndicated strip in 1996, initially running only in the Kalamazoo Gazette. By 1999, via the early internet and the rise of webcomic aggregators, John Persons Comics had found a national audience among college students and adjunct professors. Due to his small print runs (Persons rarely

A silent comic. No dialogue, no narration, no sound effects. Over 80 pages, we watch a figure in a hazmat suit drag a broken piano across a salt flat. It sounds pretentious, but it is devastating. Tether proved that Persons could convey more emotion in a single ink wash than most writers can in a novel.

A return to raw horror. This 50-page one-shot deals with postpartum anxiety and rural folklore. A woman living in a decaying farmhouse believes a flock of crows is trying to steal her baby’s shadow. The final page—a full splash of the barn interior—is considered a modern masterpiece of comic pacing. He is a former zookeeper, a failed seminarian,

If you pull up a classic John Persons strip from 2001, the first thing you notice is the "ugliness." Persons draws with a nib pen that looks perpetually on the verge of running out of ink. His lines are scratchy, his backgrounds are usually a single bookshelf or a lonely diner booth, and his characters suffer from a condition cartoonists call "Muppet neck"—a strange, floppy elasticity that shouldn't work but does.

This is intentional. Persons has stated in interviews that he hates "clean" comics. He argues that life is not a vector graphic. His art style is a defense mechanism against nostalgia; you cannot feel cozy looking at a John Persons comic because the art refuses to be cute.

Yet, there is a brutalist beauty to his layout. Persons is a master of the "silent panel." He will often devote three of the four panels to a character staring at a wall, a blank television screen, or a houseplant.

Case in point: The famous strip from October 2003. Panel one: John Persons sits on a couch. Panel two: A single dust mote floats in a sunbeam. Panel three: John Persons’s cat looks at him. Panel four: John Persons mouths the word, "Okay." No punchline. Yet, for thousands of readers, it was the funniest thing they had ever seen.