Three fantastic stories from Off Life
Issue nine of Off Life landed with me this week and it’s completely brilliant. There’s always plenty of good stuff in there, but this time there were three artists whose work really jumped off the page.
I thought about interviewing editor Daniel Humphry to talk about the issue but decided that nothing can beat just seeing the comic strips themselves, so what follows is a small (and hopefully tantalising) glimpse of the new issue.
A small and quiet cartoon by Sally Jane Thompson, Things We Could Do #58 packs an entire lifetime of crumpled dreams onto one page. You just know this relationship isn’t going anywhere (let alone to the stars).
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I’d completely missed the furore over Shia Labeouf plagiarising Daniel Clowes, but Brendan Kiefer clearly didn’t. His two-pager hoists Labeouf by his own petard, with a brilliant Clowesian punchline in the final panel.
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And finally, Will Elliott takes the nursery rhyme ‘ladybird,ladybird, fly away home’ as his inspiration for a crushingly bleak but darkly funny cartoon that has to be seen to be believed. It’s seriously amazing. And horrible.
And all this in a magazine you can pick up for free around Bristol, Bath, Cardiff and London. Or of course you can read it all online, also for free. You can’t say fairer than that.
