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Waurechen, Trevor – It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time #1: How to Draw Trevor
It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time #1: How to Draw Trevor
Have you ever wanted to draw Trevor Waurechen? Granted, this question is limited to people who know who Trevor is, but bear with me here. If you’ve ever wanted to know how to do that using (mostly) common household items, this is the comic for you. Hey, come to think of it, this is titled “how to draw Trevor” and it actually has nothing to do with actually drawing the man. It just shows you how to put together a rough composite of Trevor using a variety of oddities. False advertising! Anyway, for a comic this tiny it feels like cheating to actually list the items he uses to make a (pretty good, actually) approximation of his face, which doesn’t leave me much to work with as a reviewer. How about the fact that this comic somehow shifted to the bottom of my car and was only recently uncovered during a rare (obviously) cleaning of said car, making this comic possibly ancient? I know the reviews for the other issues of this series have already been posted. As for the comic itself, it’s funny and worth it for that last page alone. No price listed, but I’m guessing a buck or two.
Waurechen, Trevor – It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time #3: Artists in the Wild
It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time #3: Artists in the Wild
Before I start the review of the actual comic, I’d like a word with the artists out there who, like Trevor, were told at some point that their lives weren’t “interesting enough” to make a comic about. For the rest of you who see this line of criticism as silly, feel free to ignore the next few lines, but for the few of you who took that criticism to heart and actually postponed/cancelled projects because you bought into that? Don’t be stupid. It’s a dated reference, but does anybody remember “Seinfeld”? The answer is that yes, all of you do, because it made all of the money in the world. And what was it about? Nothing! Or to take it into comics, how many of the great comics wouldn’t have been made if the artists had taken that kind of criticism to heart? It’s not like all of the autobio comics in the world are about spy missions and fights to the death. Most lives are at least a little bit boring, so don’t ever be talked out of telling your story. Hey, my first rant of 2014! So hey, let’s talk about this comic. The events in here happened about 5 years ago when Trevor spent a week with his brother camping and painting in Jasper National Park. And it’s fascinating stuff, so phooey to whoever talked him out of making a comic out of it until now. Along the way they show their interactions with needlessly aggressive drivers, show the different types of campers (the people, not the vehicles), detail their various interactions with tourists with little to no grasp of English, mistake a muddy river bed for a rocky river bed, and the wisdom of trying to stay up late to party after a week of camping. It’s great stuff, and I say that as a person who has never had much use for camping as a concept. Check it out, help make sure Trevor makes a pile of money from this and proves his friend wrong.
Waurechen, Trevor – It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time #2
It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time #2
Can I be cantankerous for a minute? Well, sure, it’s my website. This comic is a collection of single pages, bundled together with a piece of paper naming the comic. This is fine, as I’m certainly not the boss of how Trevor makes his comics. The only problem is that I’ve seen other comics like these, and they do not hold up well. Inevitably the binder gets lost, or a page or two slips out somewhere along the line, never to be seen again. In his defense, he put quite a large sticky glob on the binder, so maybe that won’t be as big of a problem here, but it still seems like a bad idea. But what difference does that make, my “job” is to review the contents, not the presentation. Well, like I said, these are all one page stories, and they can be read in any order. Some work better than others (the one with the two people silently driving just baffled me, and not only because I have no idea where those feet came from in the second to last panel), and the stories include an odd cat conversation, the joys of living near water in a dry area in the summer, being the weirdo who draws outside in the rain, getting talked into getting an even worse movie than the one that you were trying to watch (knowing full well that it was supposed to be terrible), an average awkward drink order at a restaurant, an odd conversation about art, a hilarious description of the redneck mating call, calling the bluff of somebody working in customer service who says they can help you pick out a printer, and the dangers of talking politics at work. It’s a pretty funny pile of stories, so never mind my general crankiness on the presentation. I’m still thinking that people want their books/stuff to last for the long haul, which is probably a pretty antiquated notion all by itself.
