If 365 Reasons to Love Comics was done as a Marvel comic book in 1993, then this installment would most likely have a foil cover to show you how "special" it was. Luckily, the artist featured today is so amazing, he DESERVES a foil cover to show you how special he is! Heck, a foil EMBOSSED cover, even!!

10/2/07

275. Kevin Huizenga

I don't think it is much of a stretch to state that Kevin Huizenga is one of the greatest young artist working in comics (what is young, by the way? I think Huizenga is 30 years old - that's young, right?).

His early work on his indy comic Supermonster began when he was still in high school, but even then, while his work was clearly not as developed as it is now, his simple style was still quite evocative, and his down-to-earth tales were filled with insightful comments upon the human condition.

Huizenga only got better as he began developing his sorta-kinda autobiographical character, Glenn Ganges, who first showed up in a late issue of Supermonster. Glenn Ganges was the star of Huizenga's acclaimed Or Else series, which is put out by Drawn and Quarterly.

Glenn Ganges was given his own series last year by Fantagraphics, and the first issue was spectacular (the second issue is due out in 2008, I cannot wait!).

Huizenga has this strange ability to ever so gently come up with these mind-blowing thoughts, but explain them in such a matter of fact manner that it just seems so completely natural.

It is hard to explain, so if you will forgive me, I'm going to share with you a short story that Huizenga has up as a sample of Ganges #1 on his website here. I hope this is all right with Kevin, but I figure that if he was willing to have it up on his website for people to sample, he would be okay with me showing it to you for sampling purposes.

Isn't that just a remarkable achievement, on both an artistic and simply a storytelling level?

Drawn and Quarterly released a collection of his early works (along with Or Else) titled Curses. You would be doing yourself a great favor if you checked it out.

Here, again, is Kevin Huizenga's website, and here is a link to his blog.