By Aaron Warner (Amazing Aaron Productions)
ISBN: 1-889509-00-0
As a result of the 1980s boom in self-publishing the comics industry underwent a radical and permanent change in creative access wherein eager or talented – and sometimes neither – new strip-makers found themselves given unprecedented access to the buying public. A plethora of comics appeared by artists and writers who no longer had to wait to be discovered by DC or Marvel. The majority of these liberated Young Turks used comicbooks as their forum but a few, such as Aaron Warner, first began to find fame with the venerable but dying newspaper comic strip.
After much fruitless portfolio bombardment to (paying) comicbook publishers and a few commercial art gigs Warner began contributing a semi-fictionalised autobiographical weekly strip to the Young Adults weekend entertainment section of the Kalamazoo Gazette and his self-deprecatingly wry yet frantically over-the-top frat-boy humour and spectacularly fresh and impressive cartooning soon found him an appreciative and constantly growing audience.
Still fortune eluded him until Warner began a wave of guerrilla-marketing and began pedalling the strip to other local papers. This self-syndication eventually led to The Detroit News, a stage play, comicbook compilations from Image and, eventually, the Tribune Media Syndicate who picked up the feature in 1994. The Adventures of Aaron debuted nationally on October 20th 1995; ten years of whacky, unconventional, irreverent fun…
Since then Warner has created A College Girl Named Joe and You Are Here whilst running his own commercial arts business.
This large monochrome landscape collection gathers two years worth of the pre-syndication strips: a bold period of innovation as the artist explores the limits of his page and mirthful, pictorial self-abuse as young, dumb and feckless Aaron relates the latest low point – and occasional high – of his crummy mid-western existence.
Aaron lives with – and is hassled by – his mother and arrogant ineffectual, parsimonious, baldness-obsessed dad, his diabolical older sister (married, a mom, living elsewhere but still terrorising him and ruining his lazy life).
The boy can’t keep a job and often hangs out a lot in the print copyshop; quietly adoring the gorgeous Michelle who works there. Like most kids he has a couple of close friends – Brad and Scott – and they’re both worse than him. His dog and sister are both insane and possibly possessed by Satan…
Peppered with lushly drawn daydreams of hot chicks, a regular girlfriend, coolness not perpetual shame, untold wealth and acquiring superpowers, the early Adventures of Aaron are wildly experimental, fabulously exuberant, gloriously, infectiously fun, whacky, absurdist, astonishingly intimate and delightfully off the wall, and include delightful text features on the poor suckers good friends who were the basis of the strip’s wide and varied cast.
Still readily available this splendid self-published tome is well worth tracking down for a great read; and most worthy of your attention if you’re a cartoonist in dire need of an inspirational success story…
© 1996 Aaron Warner. All rights reserved.