Ellerbisms began life with few pretensions. It was to be a diary comic like so many others: a page of a Moleskine a day, illustrated with something which happened to Marc Ellerby in the last twenty-four hours. These are the bread-and-butter of the indie cartoonist’s world, and, along with gag strips, make up the majority of webcomics (once you exclude the furries, at least). But, as Ellerby says:
Then I met a Swedish girl called Anna and it stopped being so sporadic (and boring).
What you end up reading is a chronicle of a relationship, messy bits included, written as it happened. To this end, Ellerby has also added a new prologue and epilogue, as well as adding a few pages in near the beginning to elaborate on the context of some of the strips. This is a good idea; those early strips, already the weakest part of the book, occasionally make reference to events which Ellerby simply didn’t get round to illustrating in real time, and the extra content helps the story hold together as one coherent piece.
New artwork next to old does serve to emphasise how much better a cartoonist Ellerby is now than he was when he started. But thanks to his decision to excise the first few months of Ellerbisms strips, and turn the book from “the complete collection” to “the complete Marc and Anna”, there’s little of the genuinely amateurish stuff left in. His very first strip remains as a nostalgic title page, and it’s a nice scene in its own right; but if the first twenty pages were like it, readers might never hit the good stuff.
Which would be a shame. Like Joff Winterhart’s Costa-nominated Days of the Bagnold Summer, Ellerbisms‘ short episodes, frequently just a page each, build up a detailed, touching portrait of the young couple (whereas Bagnold Summer‘s episodic nature was an affectation, this is the real deal). We see them fighting over nothing, singing and preparing, and their holidays, working days, and days out in the park. The end, when it comes, isn’t surprising, because we have come to know the pair so well that the writing was on the wall. But it is saddening nonetheless.
Not that Ellerbisms is a mopey book. It wears its page-a-day heritage on its sleeve, and the pages of silliness and gags are frequently laugh-out-loud funny. But without that emotional core, it would feel like so many other good but ephemeral webcomics.
Ellerby has also worked hard to make Ellerbisms worth reading as a book, rather than just mooching off the still-available free archives. As well as the aforementioned extra content – and removed content, because what’s not collected is as important as what is – it’s also packaged together with production values (including delicious rounded corners, a hat-tip to the Moleskine heritage) that well exceed what was necessary to get it out the door. It’s all part of Ellerby’s – and diary-comics co-conspirator Adam Cadwell‘s – audacious self-publishing venture, Great Beast.
The two are publishing high quality editions of their complete diary comics – Cadwell’s The Everyday is available in hardback, nigh-on unheard of for a self-published webcomic – as well as their other works, like Cadwell’s six-part Blood Blokes, about hipster vampires, and Ellerby’s Chloe Noonan: Monster Hunter, a sort of Buffy-without-powers. If it works, it will let them cut out the middleman, and may just make publishing these sort of comics, if not quite profitable, then at least break-even. If it doesn’t, it will have been an expensive experiment.
No matter what the quality of the physical objects produced, Great Beast will live or die on the skill of its artists. While Chloe Noonan has failed to find the commercial success it deserves, leading to a reboot being planned, it shows that Ellerby has the chops to make something fun and accessible. Hopefully it will find the audience it deserves, and give Ellerby a ticket to riches. But Ellerbisms is proof that he can do much more than just that.
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