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Interview

John Porcellino p1

Readersvoice.com aims to collect a few interesting reading tips. John Porcellino is the creator of King-Cat Comics and Stories, and he has a distinctive style, often depicting quiet autobiographical moments. In this interview John Porcellino mentions some of his favorite minicomics artists and talks about his reading, which runs from biographies of punk bands to Zen Buddhist classics.

You only have to look at sites like opticalsloth.com and spitandahalf.blogspot.com to see the myriad possibilities of the minicomics medium. These sites feature hundreds of excellent minicomics. Minicomics are basically home-made comics, but many of them are beautiful to look at, well-produced and interesting to read. They’re also inexpensive. It’s a thriving medium in the U.S. and it’d be great to see it take off in every other country, too.
John Porcellino’s minicomic King-Cat Comics and Stories has a distinctive and apparently simple, uncluttered style. He has read minicomics widely; and he mentions some of his favorites in this interview. John Porcellino also has a dry sense of humor: on his blog he described an old tv in his new apartment as an entertainment system.

READERSVOICE.COM: What’s your daily routine in South Beloit, Illinois, and how are things working out with your new apartment? What brought about the move?

JOHN PORCELLINO: I wake up as late as possible, shuffle to the bathroom and perform my morning ablutions, cook something for breakfast and then settle into the day. Which will usually consist of drawing, filling orders, or going to the library to catch up on emails/blogging. Now that it gets dark so early I lose steam pretty fast. I make dinner, and lay down in bed to read, and fall asleep. Wow, huh?

Things in the new apartment are fine, thanks for asking! It’s a little lonely, but that’s something I know I can handle. My main objective is to use the winter to regroup and get as much work done as I can. We’ll see where things stand in the spring.

As for how I ended up in South Beloit… This might be Too Much Information, but: Over the summer I was in Denver, going through a divorce. That spring I’d met a gal on tour, and we fell in love (the gal and the divorce are not related), so I ended up spending all my money moving to Florida to be with her. Shortly thereafter I got a broken heart, and drifted back up to Illinois, where my mom and sister live, thinking I could spend the winter on one of their couches and figure out my next step. Unfortunately that didn’t work out either, and I found myself with no job, no money, and facing homelessness. Luckily I managed to find a place in South Beloit at the last minute and I’ve been here since. So basically it was a series of broken plans that led to my arrival, coupled with abject poverty.

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-copyright Simon Sandall.