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Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Who knew comics could be funny?

The other day, one of my friends, who I never ever see, came over and instead of wasting our money of bad alcohol and junk food, we decided to stay in and watch movies in my tiny, cold apartment. Initially I wasn't too excited with the idea, but then he pulled out this little "movie" (and I use the term loosely since it was hand-drawn comics and only forty minutes long, but I don't know a better word to call it), and I found myself laughing and agreeing with what it was saying immensely.

This little gem that he showed me was a collection of Levi Yilmaz comics, which are called Tales of Mere Existence, put onto a DVD and sold as an accompaniment to his book, Sunny Side Down, which I regret to say that I have not read, but plan to in the future. I also plan to buy the accompanying DVD because seeing it once was just not enough for me to capture all the humor, especially since I was watching it with a friend who I haven't seen in a while and wanted to talk to (which is never a good thing to do while watching movies).

It was a simple movie. That was possibly the best thing about it. It didn't try to make itself something that it wasn't with a lot of ritz and glitz. It was just a guy drawing simple little pictures as he told a story, and it was a bunch of these little stories strung together under the theme of "existence" and what it means for him to exist. There was the tale of getting ready in the morning, deciding on a job, his relationship with his father, and this one, my personal favorite, the decision to take your shoes off in bed:



This isn't the type of thing that I normally watch. I read Calvin and Hobbes in the paper when I was little and I'm pretty fanatical about Batman, but I wouldn't say that I'm a comic fanatic. I don't follow any comics now even though I stumbleupon them all the time, and I certainly don't know anything about comics in the way that I know about books. So, to me, this was a pretty obscure find and I was pretty excited about it.

Hope you enjoyed the clip!

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