Friday, August 8, 2008

Ten Years of Postcards

So, while I was away from my computer on a trip, I turned over an interesting point on my personal odometer: I've been sending several postcards a day for ten years now. I started keeping track on July 17, 1998. (At first it was four a day; that rapidly turned to five a day.) Today I'll send number 18,650.

I'm still planning to design, print, and send a special tenth-anniversary postcard, but that's going to wait until I'm done unpacking.

I wasn't going to say anything about my little anniversary, because it's really not comics, and not Satisfactory Comics either, but this morning I discovered that an artist in Los Angeles has also been doing a daily postcard project for ten years, and many of her postcards are cartoons or comics.



Here's a postcard she drew on Feb. 23, 1998. This one from a couple of years later also involves a cat-headed person, though I think that's just a coincidence:



Julianna Parr has been drawing or painting a postcard a day (on most days) for ten years, and she not only has a gallery show that opened yesterday, but a web gallery of the Timestamp project that shows all ten years of postcards.

I've never met Julianna Parr, but I salute her. Here's to the power of a daily routine!

6 comments:

Mike said...

Salutes all round! It was a happy day when I was enrolled in the rota of Isaac's weekly postcard recipients. And not a few of the postcards have featured comics or cartoons in some form or another. (Most recently: Guy Gardner, Green Lantern!)

And since you invoked "the power of the daily routine," I thought I'd add the link to your earlier post featuring further discussion of your postcards and a look at the awesome skull-a-day blog:

http://satisfactorycomics.blogspot.com/2007/08/power-of-daily-routine.html

Isaac said...

Dude, the link is already up there, in my first paragraph.

Mike said...

Hm, so it is! Well, there go any points for close reading I was hoping for today...

Rick Bradford said...

Hey, interesting stuff. I love postcard projects like this.

You might be interested in another guy doing this too, Warren Craghead:

http://postcardsahoy.blogspot.com/

Matt said...

Isaac--your 10 years of uninterrupted daily devotions continue to amaze and inspire me.

e.g., I love how the snail-mail serialization of Elfworld necessarily invokes the mystical agencies of the postal system, exposing your creations to maximal mayhem. The cards arrive, numbered and in sequence, randomly crimped but never folded, sometimes weather smudged, but so far, without the marks of the less subtle postal criticism one might imagine (soup stains, gunpowder residue, etc). I also love those days when I get home and even before I'm inside, my kid greets me from some unseen place: "Hey Dad--the Card is here!"

All the best for your next 10 years of days in the Card!

Isaac said...

Hey, Matt -- Just so you know, I put #9 in the mail today. You've just got one more installment left. You'll have to let me know what it's like to read it serialized like that. Is your kid reading it? And has your kid read the ending online?