Lunch Break is a short round-up of favorite webcomics appearing here each weekday at noon. Here’s something for you to enjoy over your lunch break or whenever. The premise is simple: it’s another day on the internet. Here’s a new or forgotten comic that seems interesting. Have something to recommend? Email us: crosshatchdispatch@gmail.com.

1. Chapter 6 of “Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth” by Jay Hosler, Kevin Cannon and Zander Cannon // January 3, 2011
2. Put This in Your Pipe and Smoke It! by Lance Ward // January 4, 2011
3. Wild Ride by Vanessa Davis // April 2009
4. Prologue, Part 1 from “Drive: The Scifi Comic” by Dave Kellett // 2011
5. Awkward by Tracy White // 2007

– Sarah Morean

Lunch Break is a short round-up of favorite webcomics appearing here each weekday at noon. Here’s something for you to enjoy over your lunch break or whenever. The premise is simple: it’s another day on the internet. Here’s a new or forgotten comic that seems interesting. Have something to recommend? Email us: crosshatchdispatch@gmail.com.

1. Serial Typist by Kevin Cannon // ~ May 2010
2. A Walk With My Double by David King // October 2010
3. “When Janitors Die” from Toothpaste For Dinner by Drew // 02.19.2005
4. Climate Change by Darryl Cunningham // December 13, 2010
5. Sleeping Together by Julia Wertz // June 7, 2006

– Sarah Morean

Minneapolis is a great place for comics. Have I said that enough?

Last weekend, two of our best festivals fell on the same date.  For one day only you could attend either the Rain Taxi Book Festival or FallCon.  Pretty good for the people of Minneapolis.  Pretty tough for cartoonists wanting to exhibit at both shows.

The exodus from FallCon this year was substantial — at least ten indie cartoonists went to the Book Festival instead of FallCon.  By all accounts, this year’s FallCon was the best yet.  It’s still a great show, but decidedly more mainstream, which is why more cartoonists are spending money for space at Book Fest instead of enjoying the free tables and wonderful hospitality at FallCon.

No hard feelings, FallCon.  Sometimes a cartoonist just needs to get out and try new things.  Experiment a little.  Test a new market.  And they did.  So how was it?

Danno Klonowski, Minneapolis cartoonist and prominent International Cartoonist Conspiracy member, was kind enough to write us a little something about his experience exhibiting for the first time at the Rain Taxi Book Festival.  Full particulars after the cut.

– SM

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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
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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