Recommended Graphic Novels: Drive

By Peter

One of my favorite webcomic artists is Dave Kellet, who many years ago started the comic Sheldon about a 10 year old, his grandfather, and their talking duck. The strips are often about nothing at all, just Dave expounding on the absurdity of life through his delightful characters.

So it was a surprise to me when he decided to start a new strip called Drive, which is a science fiction graphic novel. It still has the same absurd humor (for example, characters celebrating making it through an asteroid field by getting shakes at Denny’s), but there’s a cool plot involving a spaceship drive, a corrupt emperor, and an alien with amnesia who can sense gravity waves.

Dave publishes a page once a week, just like we do. I asked him at the Emerald City ComicCon how long it would take him to create enough pages for a book at that rate, and he said a couple of years(!). Hopefully it won’t take us that long.

One more factoid about Drive. After the first few pages were published, I wrote to Dave, telling him I was a fan of Sheldon and that I was really enjoying Drive. I pointed out to him that all the characters in Sheldon were male, and that now that he was starting a new strip, there was an opportunity for female characters. Two weeks later, a grandmother-like captain was introduced. Coincidence? Probably.