In 1998, comics creator James Kochalka launched an ambitious creative experiment: every single day, he would create a comic—later named American Elf, as he draws himself with pointy ears—based on the quotidian events of his day. A decade later, Kochalka’s diary comic is still going strong, and amazingly, still daily. A deceptively simple strip rooted in observational vignettes about his family, friends, and the small joys and frustrations of living, American Elf is now a Web comic with over 20,000 page views a day, and a new collection, American Elf Vol. 3, due out later this month from Top Shelf Productions. Kochalka talked with PWCW on the 10th anniversary about the underlying rhythms of everyday life, and how capturing them in comics changed his life forever.
PW Comics Week: Are you surprised that American Elf has been going this long as a daily strip?
James Kochalka: I haven’t even had a chance to think about it yet. I’m going to draw something about it for the strip today, but I don’t really know how to sum up ten years. I had a pretty good idea that it was going to be a really interesting project, but I wasn’t really thinking about how it was going to completely transform my life.
PWCW: How has it done that?
JK: It makes life better. I started it just a few months before I quit my job as a waiter, so almost the whole time I’ve been working on American Elf I’ve been a full-time cartoonist. It gives my life a little bit of structure. I think you need a little bit of structure in your life or you go completely insane. My day is not very structured at all. There’s not a specific time of day that I sit down and do the strip; it could happen anytime. I’m not always worried about it, but I am always thinking about it in the back of my mind.
PWCW: Have you ever missed a day?
JK: In the second year, I quit for maybe two or three months. I had decided that it was way too hard and it was taking way too much time, and I would have more time to for projects if I quit doing the diary. So I quit. And I did not work on any other projects; I played video games for three months. And then once I started working on the strip again, everything has been fine ever since. So for some reason, doing the daily diary strip makes me more productive.
PWCW: How has the experience of making the strip changed over time?
JK: In some ways it’s not really a big deal, because it’s just this thing I do every day, like brushing my teeth. But it's also more than that. I’m contemplating my life; I’m contemplating existence. It’s an hour or two every day actually trying to make sense of where I am at that moment. It’s a fairly profound experience, and I think it’s kept me from going off track many times, because I can watch myself going off track and readjust my life. It’s not like there are these secrets of my inner psyche that I’m trying to reveal, but I’m discovering things about myself during the strip that would have remained hidden if I had not drawn them. It’s not always spelled out in black and white, though; some of it is kind of sideways.
PWCW: I think a lot of people try to keep diaries and record their lives at one point or another, but rarely do they have the kind of discipline to sustain it for ten years.
JK: Also, rarely do people write about what they’re thinking; in their diaries, people just write about what they do, not what it means. And I’m always trying to explore what it means. And sometimes I think the meaning is only revealed in the relationship to all of the other stuff—the years behind and the years ahead.
PWCW: Do you plan to continue the strip indefinitely?
JK: I was really kind of hoping to quit today. But I don’t see any way out.
PWCW: Do you seriously think about quitting?
JK: Sure, yeah. I think about quitting every day.
PWCW: In the same sort of way that a lot of people think about quitting their jobs every day?
JK: Yeah, except it’s not anywhere near as painful as an actual job. But it would be nice to do nothing, right? Part of me always feels like, wouldn’t it be great? But it wouldn’t really be that great. All of my feelings of self-worth revolve around making things. If I didn’t make anything, I’d feel like a horrible person. There are other ways I could measure my worth like being a good father or husband, and I do measure myself that way, but I’m a much better husband and father if I’m working.
PWCW: You often include a lot of personal details in the strip; has that ever bothered anyone in your life?
JK: I have one friend who just did not like to appear in it, even if it didn’t reveal anything about him. But he’s the only person I’ve ever met who didn’t want to be in the strip. Everyone else really, really wants to be in it. They try to come up with things to get in it, but it never really works if you try. You’ve been in the strip, for example, but I have some very, very good friends who have never been in it.
PWCW: You used to give readers access only to the newest strip until they subscribed, and now all of the regular strips are available for free. What prompted the change?
JK: I realized that if you read only one strip, it’s not really that good. It’s not until you’ve read a dozen or so that the strip starts to get good, and you get the rhythm of how the whole thing works and how they fit together. After the first collection came out, I sat down to read it and I thought it was horrible. I felt like I’d put all this time and energy into the worst thing I’d ever done. But then after ten pages I was like, this is pretty good. Then after twenty pages, I realized it was far better than I ever imagined. Now I really think it’s my best shot at being remembered after I’m dead. It just gets better and better as it goes along.
PWCW: Would you consider making your strip available as mobile content for phones?
JK: Well, some people say that the strip reads great on an iPhone [already]. The problem with [mobile comics] is that they all have their own little shape, and I don’t draw specifically to their shape. I don’t have much interest in changing my strip just to fit them. I might do another strip to fit them, though.
PWCW: You’ve got a new show of your Little Paintings series coming up at Giant Robot in Los Angeles. What interests you about making 2-inch by 2-inch paintings?
JK: So that people can afford to buy them. So you don’t have to be rich to own a painting. I think everybody should be able to own art and have it in their homes. I’m kind of against posters. I think people should have real art made by real human hands in their homes. They sell for about $60. People in New York said, “I can’t believe it’s so cheap; it’s less than going out to dinner!” That might be the price of going out to dinner twice in some places, but it’s still not outside the realm of possibility for them.
