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Everyday
posted June 21, 2010
Creator: Joseph Lambert
Publishing Information: Self-Published, mini-comic, 32 pages, 2010
Ordering Numbers: SubmarineSubmarine.com
Exhibit A in the growing piece of conventional wisdom that there may be more talented young cartoonists than there are publishers to nurture them, Joseph Lambert has filled the time before his
Helen Keller book drops from Hyperion and the longer version of his
I Will Bite You sees light at Secret Acres with an array of silk-screened mini-comics. I take
Everyday to be one of the newer efforts, with its 2010 copyright stamp and almost no mention anywhere on-line that I can find. It's a series of short stories -- more like variations on a theme -- around the idea of a sibling rivalry that stamps its way through the days of the week. The young men involved start their battle inside, are marched outside, and then seem to seek some sort of solace or justification or release through an interaction with nature, represented by the sun and moon. In most cases both heavenly bodies are uninterested, but in some the sun turns vengeful and in other the moon provides some semblance of comfort. In many instances one of the kids turns up dead, which is not only funny but sad, a kind of show-don't-tell version of the old lesson that parents yell that one day that sibling with whom you contend will die and
then how will you feel? More than tweaking the central metaphors, Lambert's comic is just fun to look at, communicating a sense of the wider world as something that should bend to a child's will in sometimes scary, sometimes lovely individual drawings. I can see some people rejecting this comic because they sense forced whimsy, an overly precious way of inflating a pedestrian set of emotions and circumstances, but I'm not one of them.