Comic artist signing new book at Morris
By Danny Mayer
Around NoC headquarters, we simply refer to Kenn Minter as “the professional.” With a full-time staff comprised totally of donated labor, bi-weekly commitments are tough to come by, and deadlines even more rare. Kenn’s contributions to the NoC comics page have remained steady and on deadline since our eighth issue (Aug 2009), when he began showing strips from his ongoing series I’m Not From Here on our back page. Since the beginning of this year, Minter has been contributing a new serial strip, Fierce Company, about a superhero with an excitable nose.
“The thing that makes Kenn professional,” I recall layout editor Keith Halladay explaining to me on many a night our first year in print, “is that he knows his space. With Minter you know you’re gonna get product, and that product is gonna be quality, and that quality is gonna fit in a pre-defined area.”
Coming from a layout editor of a print publication, and a generally cantankerous one at that, there is little higher praise.
Of course, Keith only knows half the story. Minter began drawing for publication in the late 80s while still in high school, creating and distributing several zines. Once he got to the University of Kentucky, Kenn struck up space for a comic at the Kentucky Kernel. By the early 90s, he had a regular strip in Ace. About six years ago, his I’m not from here strip appeared regularly in Nougat. If Keith calls Kenn professional, it no doubt owes to the fact that, in one guise or another across four decades, he has steadily churned out quality product comics for readers of local papers to enjoy.
Minter visits the original Buster's.
If you want to read Lexington’s public political history in graphic printed form, go hit the Joel Pett archives. For those wanting to glimpse a thick vein of Lexington’s cultural history over the past twenty-five years as it’s passed from the Reagan eighties through the multi-cultural nineties and onto the Obama aughts, from zines to free print weeklies on through to online publication, from fact to fantasy, Minter’s work might be the most consistently visible.
Of course, this is another way of saying that Kenn Minter has contributed to this city’s culture of freely distributed print and online literature for a very long time now. This observation should be enough to get your curious self out to Morris Book Shop on April 2 to meet and thank Kenn, and to buy one of his several moderately priced comic books. But if it doesn’t, please read the below accompanying review of Minter’s newest book, a collection of strips from his I’m not from here series.
Review of I’m not from here: another book of this sort of thing
In 1999, Kenn Minter returned to Lexington after a several year stint in California. By this time, the graphic illustrator had already authored several comic strips for a variety of publications. I’m not from here grew out of Kenn’s relocation back to the bluegrass.
“At first it was just sketches from my sketch book, and I had this title, ‘I’m not from here,’ but nothing to place it on,” Minter recalls. “I thought what the hell, I’ll do an autobiographical comic strip and call it I’m not from here.”
The title reflects a certain distance and unease with his adopted city. Minter first moved to Lexington from Indiana (by way of Delaware and Louisville) with his family while still young. He grew up with a strong sense of not belonging, of not being from here. “We moved to Lexington when I was 11. It was just so different from everywhere else we’d lived. Maybe it was because I was going into my teenage years, too, but I never really felt like a Lexingtonian.”
“I was too much of a freak,” Minter continues. “There’s this ‘turn a blind eye conservatism’ about Lexington…I can’t grok with it.” (Possibly related sidenote: Minter seems to have been let go—fired—from every local publication gig he’s held.)
As a recurring strip developed over ten years on his online blog, I’m not from here riffs off the genre of autobiography; the content plays with the immediacy of sketchbook writing and often humorous feelings of displacement as it glides over the daily life of white, male thirty-something Kenn.
We meet family members, friends, acquaintances, neighbors. We see the comic writer at parties, driving in the car, walking around town, heading to a strange uncle’s place, taking a trip through the southwest. Peppered in liberally are breaks and reminders of the reality and fantasy of writing: Kenn getting writer’s block, Kenn contemplating ending his autobiographical strip, Kenn wondering about the social makeup of gnomes, Kenn sketching a new line of eccentric comic superheroes. The effect is to pull the reader into an immediate world of fact and fantasy.
In addition to its outsider relationship to Lexington belonging, though, I’m not from here speaks, often humorously, to a different sort of dislocation. Minter has grown up a white southern male during the age of multiculturalism. His comics tend to emphasize a certain sort of cultural disconnectedness amidst all the plugged-in connections developed over the past 20 years. Minter goes to many parties, travels the streets of Lexington and beyond, but his observations are often detached, taking place somewhere else. It’s as if the strips navigate the learning curve for a new many cultured age.
I’m not from here might be considered as a sort of grown-up Seinfeld, filled with observant characters who attempt to navigate the new realities of different cultural authorities not subservient to the default white, male perspective. The joke is often on Minter himself as he learns—being mocked for feeling uneasy about attending an all gay party, displaying poor parenting skills, not following protocol at a tex-mex burrito place staffed by a hispanic female—though not always.
Connection on the streets of Lexington
Unlike Seinfeld Minter doesn’t just go for the joke. Peppered into his strips are daily moments of connection and missed connection, of getting the joke and obstinate refusal. Some days Minter seems to capture minor successes, moments of clarity and communication and resolution. Others, he’s content to just note that the guy walking on the street, about whom he and his companion have been talking while they pass by in a car, is simply hooked on too many meds.
Minter’s first collection of I’m not from here strips, 2007’s Slightly embellished autobiographical comic strips, collected many of his sketches produced between 2001 and 2004. His second, the newly released another book of this sort of thing, captures the strip’s next five years, from 2004-2009. Kenn will be signing his new book at Morris Book shop on Saturday, April 2, 6:00 PM. Morris Books is located on Southland Drive. You can catch Kenn’s Fierce Company strip in this paper’s comic section, or online weekly at www.comicrelated.com to check out new strips of I’m not from here.
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