A pretty well kept secret that you might like to know: Ron Rege Jr. has recently put, in it’s entirety, the orig­i­nal art from his acclaimed book Skibber Bee-Bye (2000, Highwater Books) up for sale on the Comic Art Collective. If you’re unfa­mil­iar with this book, you should quickly famil­iar­ize your­self.

Chris Ware puts it suc­cinctly: “Ron Rege Jr. is prob­a­bly the great­est ‘new’ car­toon­ist (what­ever that is) I can think of in the tra­di­tion of ‘pio­neers’ like Herriman, Sterrett, McCay, et al, in that he has wholly rein­vented the comic strip lan­guage to suit his own idio­syn­cratic vision. His appar­ently sim­ple yet beau­ti­fully com­plex lit­tle line draw­ings seem to spring from the very essence of ‘the form’; they’re warm, funny, sad, smart, stu­pid – and, best of all, alive. His stuff should shut every idiot up who thinks that the comic strip is ‘dead.’”