Pick of the Week: EmiTown

LOCAL(ish) GIRL MAKES GOOD: Image Comics to Publish EmiTown – Reviewed by Joe Keatinge:

Chances are if you rented movies from Hollywood Video on Van Ness seven years ago, Emi Lenox was the rentee.

Like everyone else working the video store beat, it was far from her goal in life. Whenever Emi returned home, she was furiously sketching and illustrating with her eye on becoming a published cartoonist. With a wide range of influences including Craig Thompson’s Blankets, Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Lost at Sea and Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball, Emi was relentless in her goal.

All these years and a move to her native Portland, OR later, Emi has stuck with it primarily via her online autobio comic, EmiTown. Since launching her daily strip in October 2008, she has gained the attention of such cartoonist luminaries such as Madman’s Mike Allred, Sweet Tooth’s Jeff Lemire and The Spirit’s Moritat, who describes her as “the adorable little sister of Harvey Pekar.”

Her persistence has finally paid off as earlier this morning Berkeley, CA based publisher Image Comics announced they picked up the series for a 400-page collection due this October.

As Image describes, “In EMITOWN, Lenox brings you into her world with superb cartooning, a brilliant cast of characters, and an innocent perspective often left on the cutting room floor of other diary comics. With a broad range of styles, every day is an adventure, from a morning breakfast burrito to metaphoric tales of superheroes and battlefields of love. Emi proves that life is never dull in her first annual collection of EMITOWN!”

Sound like something you dig? Well, you don’t have to wait! Check out what the hypes all about today at the EmiTown site, http://emitown.blogspot.com.