summercomfort | My love for Dave Kellett

So Dave Kellett draws Sheldon, which gets emailed to me every morning. It's a great way to start the morning, and one of the things I love about it (beyond the strip itself), is how *personal* the emails (and the whole site!) is. There are these blog posts that serves to remind me that there is a dude there, drawing these comics because he likes it. But he's also making it work as a business, but in a rather cheerful way -- he hosts book launch parties with free booze and high fives, he highlights old but still-funny strips (which then lead to them being bought), and he works hard to churn out really professional-looking book collections.

It's quite inspiring in some ways -- this is not sudden success, but rather something he works at. According to this, he and his wife made a deal -- he would work at Mattel while she pursued her creative interests, and after she has achieved financial stability doing what she loved, he would quit his steady job and pursue cartooning full time, which he has, successfully. This might be something that I want to do with Jono -- I keep teaching while he goes and works on his games/comics/projects, and vice versa.

Not only that, he has also taken the time and the risk to start another comic, Drive, which Jono and I fondly call "Sheldon in Space." And recently he just revealed that he's been spending the last 2 years going around interviewing cartoonists (from comic greats to web greats) about cartooning/comicking. That's pretty cool! There's a Kickstarter to make it into a documentary. The trailer makes it look pretty awesome.

So I guess... yeah, cool guy, in his mid-30s, doing cool stuff. (There's hope for us yet!)