Guest Strip: Kevin Cannon

St. Louis Park, MN — the childhood home of the Coen Brothers, Al Franken, and the illustrious Kevin Cannon.  Science has yet to conclude, but I suspect, that something in the water accounts for this rash of entertainment success stories.

Currently, Cannon co-runs a cartooning and illustration studio called Big Time Attic with his best pal and non-relative Zander Cannon.  BTA started in 2004 and was originally a 3-man show also featuring Shad Petosky.  BTA has since branched into two studios, BTA and PUNY Entertainment which is the go-to animation studio for shows like Nickelodeon’s “Yo Gabba Gabba!”

Recently, BTA churned out the highly acclaimed educational graphic novel The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA.  The book was featured on NPR’s “Science Friday,” a program with which I’m sure you nerds are familiar.

Cannon’s first solo book, the Arctic adventure Far Arden, will be released by Top Shelf this May.  The book is something of a triple-threat, having previously been serialed online as a webcomic (which you can still read), a self-published 100-copy offset print job (which sold out instantly), and a properly-distributed professionally-promoted graphic novel (which you should totally buy).  It topped my list of favorite mini-comics released in 2008, and I suspect it will top more best of lists for 2009 as a Top Shelf graphic novel.  It’s a real ripping yarn.

Cannon’s clear thirst for adventure comes out again in this guest strip, which you can read just below the Cutty Sark — I mean — cut.

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The Grand Re-Opening by Sam Fellman and Kevin Cannon

The Grand Re-Opening
By Sam Fellman and Kevin Cannon
Self-Published

At a thin eight pages, The Grand Re-Opening is more a meditation than anything else. With a script penned by Sam Fellman, a naval lieutenant serving in Iraq, the book wastes little time setting up a scene in the midst of that war-torn nation, and is over nearly as quickly as it began.

The author devotes no time waxing political on the perpetually hot-button topic of US occupation of Iraq, and if he intended to slip in some manner of judgment on the matter, he’s done an admirable job masking it. The book instead is a brief snapshot—an anecdote unfolding in a few hours out in the field, and even as some of the events that occur over the course of the story might easily be interpreted as vindication for one side or the other, fanning an already heated debated seems far from his mind.

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