Lopez, Fran – Still Making Your Diary Comics?

January 10, 2025

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Still Making Your Diary Comics?

Go ahead, admit it: you have a very specific idea of what this comic is going to be like. That’s OK! I did too. But Fran really takes this in a completely unexpected direction, and it ends up being all about that creature he’s holding on the cover. It starts off like you’ve seen these comics start out countless times, as the first strip is about Fran talking himself into doing diary strips again, then we get a few about mundane aspects of daily life, even hitting the “I’m bored” type of strip very early in the comic. Then he literally stumbles across this creature, seemingly on the edge of death, and they quickly have to decide what to do with it. From there they have to deal with what to feed it, what kind of diapers to get for it, and how to hide it from the neighbors, before finally deciding that they’ll need to get out of town entirely. It turns into an odd surviving in harsh conditions/raising a child comic (even though the child is an alien maybe) which, again, kudos. I did not see any of that coming. He also has thin pencil drawings on each page (in the space not filled in by the strip), and each of them end up telling their own story if you’re paying attention. This one was an unexpected blast, which is the kind of thing that makes this whole reviewing hobby of mine still seem fresh and worthwhile 23 years into it. I still have one more of his comics to review, but after two comics I think it’s safe to say that yes, you should check out his stuff, and at this point it’s probably safe to just do a random grab of whichever one looks most intriguing to you. $5