Escape from the Great American Novel Drew Lerman

Is it trite to say that A Lot Was Happening during the peak years of the COVID-19 pandemic? Maybe so (definitely so), but it was an especially fertile time for emerging indie cartoonists, what with nobody being able to go outside for extended periods of time. It lent itself well to the emergence of creative, dedicated obsessives and their fans, with little to distract them, and that’s when Drew Lerman–who’s been making his fascinating minicomic, Snake Creek, since 2018, but finally started to grow into the wider comics landscape in the early days of the coronavirus–caught a lot of peoples’ attention, mine included. And whatever else one might think of Snake Creek, it’s anything but trite.

I first encountered Snake Creek–the ongoing adventures of best friends Dav and Roy in a blasted, sandy someplace-or-other that resembles both George Herriman’s wild and shifting deserts and the minimalist ruins of a suburban business park–when Lerman released Tales of Old Snake Creek. A self-published minicomic that came out in 2022 (a previous, self-titled collection of older material was out of print at that time, but is now back on his website), it was surprising, difficult, half-formed, and full of promise; it was also a good entry for people like me, who find Instagram (Lerman’s main platform for Snake Creek) unnavigable and ill-suited to the comic art medium. Surprising: It was shockingly cohesive for something that seemed so randomly composed. Difficult: The art could seem amateurish at times, and it’s frankly still a style that I have trouble with today. Half-formed: It wasn’t yet a thing in and of itself, and it hopped around a lot thematically in a way that could be confusing, but was never boring. Full of promise: Well, now it’s time to talk about Escape from the Great American Novel.