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[Link] Alum Falls [Date] 12/04/03 [Comments] 
As with the best of art, Alum Falls is not so much a comic as a multidimensional experience. The artist has passed away, so it will not ever update again, but I hope you have as much fun as I did exploring both the large body of work contained on this site, and the trails that lead to the equally interesting story of the author himself. Alum Falls is the story of a boy, John Snavely, growing up in a midwestern town in the 50's. It is told from the perspective of his journal, over a period of about two years of high school. Accompanying each journal entry are one or two pictures depicting the events, one could argue that it's a book with pictures rather than a comic, but I've clicked away nearly a whole week exploring the archives so I've earned the right to call it what I want. Snavely seems to spend most of the summers wandering around the town after dark with his friends, or going down to the pool to hang out with the girls. Eventually he gets a girlfriend, they break up, life goes on from there. It is as long and confused as any real journal would be, and the author has managed to capture with stunning clarity the turmoil of adolescence, when it feels like you are being boiled by your own emotions. He also experiments with the format when needed, once putting his older self in the comic, plays with the art, sometimes puts in asides as hypertext links, and also occasionally reveals the story from other points of view such as the girl's, casting the details with touching delicacy. There is more going on in this work than just an illustration of somebody's journal. The author was working on putting the whole postwar american experience in perspective, tying together historical as well as literary knots. See if you can recognize some of them. If you follow the links from this site, you begin to learn that his own, nonfictional life was pretty much the postwar american experience. He was born about the same time as his character and lived in a small town, went to Yale, worked for civil rights in the 60's, got in touch with his father's WWII story, and got in on the ground floor of a computer startup back in the DOS days. I think he was trying to figure out how it all fit together when he was writing Alum Falls, and it's a shame it can never be finished.
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