Five Perennial Virtues & The College of Comic Book Knowledge
June 15th, 2008 by Martin
After purchasing a back issue of Omega: The Unknown that I’d been looking for, and a Usagi Yojimbo comic picked out by my nephew Jake yesterday at The College of Comic Book Knowledge, I ended up talking about ReadComics.org to David Tea, who was manning the shop. Florence was busy in the back room, A.K.A. The Nostalgia Zone, buying some back issues of The Authority she’d only just discovered we were missing. David was incredibly friendly, and I ended up leaving the store with a couple issues of his self-produced comic, “Five Perennial Virtues”.
Five Perennial Virtues is basically just photocopied and stapled, and (as it says on the front “Written, Drawn, & Stapled by David Tea”) the production values remind me a lot of my own old books of poetry produced the same way. Inside, the art is a very cool mixture of different hand-drawn styles. There is some interesting pointillism, but I think my favorite scenes have these really cool tiled backgrounds. Actually, my favorite favorite is a drawing on page 35 of issue #3, where David (he is his own main character) stands among all these falling maple seed “helicopters”.
Anyway, in case you haven’t been there, and are looking for an awesome shop to buy your comics in south minneapolis, check out The College of Comic Book Knowledge. And if he’s there, say ‘hi’ to David for me.
