When I was in high school, I used to put copies of King-Cat in my backpack. I'd place them (carefully) between textbooks. Then, during homeroom or geometry or U.S. history -- whenever I was really miserable -- I'd open my backpack and take out a copy. I'd hold it long enough to look at the cover. Then, quickly, I'd put it back in my backpack. Doing this always made me feel a lot better. On the bus to school, knowing I could do this with King-Cat made the idea of high school, the hardest idea to even consider sometimes, bearable.

Sometimes, at night, I'd prop a copy of King-Cat on my night table. I'd sit and look at it until I got sleepy. Then I'd fall asleep. Somehow, this also made high school (or being that age, I guess) a lot easier. I could have made it through the day without King-Cat, but I'm glad I didn't have to.

I think a lot about why King-Cat is so important to me, but I only have guesses for answers. I don't mind, though. I like the guesses. I guess a simple answer might be that King-Cat taught me (okay, helped me) to like the guesses.

I can say without hesitating at all, not even a little bit, that King-Cat changed my life ... not in any kind of earth-shattering way, though. That's not to say that I don't think art can be earth shattering, but I don't think King-Cat works this way, even though I sort of wish it did. It would make explaining it a lot easier. There are so many things about King-Cat that are inside of me now, and I want to mention all of them. I think they need to be mentioned, for the record, on tape, in print, at least once.

King-Cat showed me a way of organizing experiences. I'd always felt, somewhere in my brain, that going to the barber was just as much fun as listening to music, and that closing my locker at school was just as interesting as a good book. King-Cat, I think, is an endorsement for this kind of thinking. It's not a new way of thinking (pssshh, so what, fuck you!), of course, but John's comic is a wonderful endorsement for it. If someone said to me when I was 16, "Yeah, man, all experiences are worthwhile! Believe it, live it," I think I would have been really uncomfortable about the whole prospect. But John's comics about, yes, going to the barber really showed me, more then anything else when I was a teenager, how to notice things and how to enjoy noticing them.

John's comics don't notice these things in a removed, epiphany-type way. It's the opposite of all that. Going to the barber is funny and mysterious, and there's nothing else quite like it. It's funny in a way that nothing else is funny. Driving your mom to the record shop... in the hands of someone else, that would turn into a terrible story, along the lines of, "Yeah. Y'know you can write a story about anything! For instance, driving your mom to the record shop! Bam! There's a story!" When John writes about driving his mom to the record shop, it's about the feeling of what that drive is like: what's funny about it, what's weird, what's sad.

King-Cat is often described as being about the mundane; a champion of mundane life! But it's not -- there's nothing mundane about feelings, thank you very much. For me, King-Cat made drama seem mundane. I often tell people that all I like is melodrama. I hate the plot points of dramatic fiction, but I love everything else. I can't really focus on why Madame Bovary is in debt with that guy, but I really remember how she feels when she's in debt. That's the part I'm interested in. King-Cat's characters don't go through the same hardships as do Flaubert's, but the way they feel is just as masterfully rendered -- in a very different way, but that's just because John and Flaubert are different people. The reason John is one of my favorite artists is that his art shares my view on what it's like to be alive and feel: In almost every experience, no matter how sad, there's something funny, or something quiet. No matter how unpleasant something is, there is something kind. I think in John's sad stories, the way he draws a table with care and grace gets at that. Not matter how sad you feel, there's that table, and it was made by a human, and it's nice to look at it. A companion to that: No matter how nice and funny something is, there's still something otherworldly about it all. The way John draws himself when he's little and playing football is what I think of here -- even though everyone is having fun, the idea of the strip is never, "We had fun." It's more, "We played football, and it was like this." Playing football when you're little is it getting darker, and not being able to see the quarterback's pass, and trying to impress whoever's watching, and getting a little tired, and --

None of this happens by accident. John can convey all this because he's an incredibly skilled artist. King-Cat is one of the most perfectly drawn things in the world. Every line is a pleasure to look at; a real, genuine pleasure, full of feeling, thought, strength and amazing compositional power. I like the way John draws more than, oh, let's say Jaime Hernandez, even though I think Jaime can draw flawlessly. Looking at Jaime's comics -- and almost every great cartoonist, for that matter -- is like watching movie-stills. John's comics, on the other hand, look like paintings, not in terms of detail and color, but in terms of how they effect you. Comics are about the sum of the parts. Jaime's comics work because when you add up all those movie stills, you have something unlike anything else in the world. John's comics, for me, don't have to be added up (though they CAN be).

This is a roundabout way to say: There is something aesthetically perfect about how King-Cat is drawn. Through it, a great way of cartooning emerges: John's drawings convey the type of emotions and feelings he's after in a way that nothing else can. King-Cat has to be drawn the way it's drawn. If it was drawn any other way, it would feel like something else entirely. This is, perhaps, true for all comics, but I'm mentioning it here because I think it's truer for King-Cat then any other comic in the universe. Chris Ware talks about how comic figures should look really simple and iconic, so that you can read the emotions like musical notes. I agree, but I'd also like these simple drawings to look beautiful! John's drawings are beautiful, but they also do what Ware wants comics to do: They convey feeling. King-Cat is one of the best-written comics around. So many comics rely on emotional shorthand: "Teenagers are morose. Here is a story about that." Great writing is really about saying something only you can say, no shorthand. John's drawings are beautifully unique pieces of writing.

There is a new collection of King-Cat comics out. It's called Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man. The book contains every story ever published in King-Cat about John's job as a mosquito man, plus a few stories that are brand new. The earliest mosquito-man stories appeared in some of the first issues of King-Cat, when the drawing was a lot cruder and the writing was way more action-packed/louder/more gung-ho (the early pieces re-printed in this book make what I've written above sound nuts). In the beginning, John's job (killing mosquitoes) is treated as the most-fun-crazy-cool thing in the world -- time off, you work outdoors, etc. Then John gets sick... really sick. (Readers of King-Cat know that John still has a special diet and can't be in loud places for too long.) While lying in bed, he reads up about world religion. Afterwards, doubts about killing mosquitos begins to seep into John's brain and heart.

The first stories in the book detail John enjoying his job, and the last story details John changing his mind about it all. It's what happens in-between, where John writes about things he saw and did while working outside -- eating asparagus, driving through a chemical plant, seeing kids sell Kool-Aid -- that I really thought a lot about after reading the book. It's this middle section that relates to what I've been writing about the most, and it's why I'd recommend this book whole-heartedly to anyone who hasn't read King-Cat. But the book-endy nature of the collection, the built-in change-of-heart, is really of interest, too. Not only have John's thoughts on killing mosquitoes changed, but the way he makes art has changed, too. His drawings in the beginning and in the end are obviously made by the same hand, but by a different heart, I think. Seeing someone's feelings change in writing is one thing, but seeing it change in drawing is another. This collection was edited in such a way that you can't not see that change, so it's one of the most smartly edited comics collections of all time. Actually, scratch "smartly," and replace it with "artfully."

The book is also one of the most beautifully designed comic books I own. Tom Devlin, one of the best designers in comics, understands John's aesthetic 100%. I like holding King-Cat, and I like the typesetting that John has been using recently. Devlin's design job is, thankfully, just as nice to hold: compact, digest-size but somehow the most definitive digest-size thing ever created, the last word on digest size. The typography feels like a John Porcellino comic. It's funny. Somehow the Times New Roman font used in this book feels like King-Cat. I don't know how much of the overall design is Devlin and how much is John, but, again, it feels like King-Cat while having just enough zing to appeal to bookstore types. For many people, John's work is above reproach; any change seems like blasphemy. Devlin is, I'm sure, aware of this, and so his design is a real triumph: endlessly attractive and appealing to non-King-Cat readers, but never overpowering John's aesthetic. All the design ideas seem like they grew out of King-Cat, but tweaked ever so slightly to make it look like a book and not a zine. For those of us who care, however, we can still fool ourselves into thinking that it looks like a zine. It's that slight of a thing.

If you haven't read King-Cat yet, please go out and buy this collection. It's one of the best comics of all time, but who cares about that, really? The best comic; the best peanut butter and jelly sandwich; the best toenail clipper. Blah blah blah. King-Cat is a great work of art and a million other things as well. If you like this collection, I'd recommend sending John some money and buying the last 10 issues of King-Cat and reading them all in one sitting (or two). In this review, I wanted to talk about that aspect of King-Cat: ordering it by mail, and reading it like it's a letter from John. But, I think to understand that part, you have to order it yourself. How can I write a review about a letter you haven't opened yet?

Austin English is a cartoonist living in New York. His new book, Christina and Charles, was just published by Sparkplug Comic Books.

Illustrations from Diary of A Mosquito Abatement Man © 2005 John Porcellino