Claytor, Ryan – And Then One Day #5 Sketchbook

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And Then One Day #5 Sketchbook Now Available! $8

It looks like Ryan is still too busy to produce comics with any kind of regularity, so he’s decided to go the “easy” route: turn the book into a journal. And, again, he’s managed to top himself. He’s up front about the fact that this is all raw, all taken from sketchbooks reflecting his ideas at the time, with very little planning or figuring out how it’ll all look when it’s put together. It doesn’t show at all. This is essentially a look at his life from 9/9/05 to 12/1/05, but it’s a lot more verbose than his other books. Drawings are just to accentuate the dialogue in this issue, not the other way around. There are several pages where it’s just him talking about his new house, his new graduate school, trying to find good friends in the new area, etc. And he still somehow manages to make it the best book of the series. This felt more like an extended letter from a long lost friend than anything else, and that’s an impressive accomplishment. There’s also a foreword from a friend, a long afterward and a pretty extensive interview with Ryan about all sorts of things. If you’re frightened by that $8 price tag, all I can say is that if you’ve seen the other issues of this series you know that these books are made with pure love (and some sort of paste), and it shows after one look at this thing. It’s also right around 100 pages of pretty dense text, so you’re definitely getting your money’s worth if you’re a fan. If you’re not a fan, you should really think about checking out some of the older, cheaper, fuzzier issues first and then see what you’re missing here. $8