2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 7: In which I get annoyingly artsy

Any minute now.
Like I said at the beginning of this series, I've been a comics fan almost my entire life. I was introduced to the medium at a very early age through newspaper comic strips, with Beetle Bailey, Peanuts, Hagar the Horrible, Hi & Lois, and the formidable Bloom County being among my favorites. My love of "sequential art" deepened as I discovered Marvel and DC, mainly through "spinner racks" of cheap comic books at the local drug store. (Was the original Crisis on Infinite Earths a major part of your childhood, too? How about the Ambush Bug miniseries? Spider-Man's costume change?)
It wasn't really until my late teens, however, that I discovered the weirder, edgier, darker side of comics. First, there was the documentary Crumb (1994). Then there were the graphic novels I discovered in the college library. I would spend hours poring over those, plus Art Spiegelman's anthology RAW. And my trusty guidebook was Scott McCloud's seminal Understanding Comics (1993). I think the comic strip above is my attempt at doing something McCloud-ish that plays with the medium of comics, using repeated panels to suggest the passage of time. The artwork is again cribbed from the much-missed Comics Outta Context Twitter account.
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