Addicted to Distraction #1 reviewed at Poopsheet.

Poopsheet Foundation
Review by R. Krauss

If you read Shannon Smith's small press comic reviews on his blog File Under Other, it isn't long before you're struck with the notion he must be a pretty nice guy. The image is only reinforced through his latest mini comic.

The book is a collection of several different projects, so while there's no overall theme, the pieces still work together and provide a varied reading experience.

Laughing Sam's Dice is Smith's contribution to a chain story created for Narrative Corpse #2. It's only a segment, but it's fun to watch as Jimi Hendrix guides the unnamed main character (Laughing Sam perhaps?) through Electric Lady Land.

In a World of Savages presents a few pages of auto-bio comic strips in which Smith highlights real or imagined slices of life.

Smith turned Superbowl Sunday into Hourly Comic Day on February 1st cranking out over a dozen comics and gags to celebrate his team's participation and eventual win that day.

Inspired by the drawings fans can pick up from cartoonists at conventions, Smith created Mailcon, a project that extends the concept—without the convention. Just send him a drawing request along with an SASE and he'll send you a drawing. Distraction concludes with a nice sampling of drawings from Mailcon.

The cartooning in Distraction ranges from sketchy (Hourly Comic Day) to polished (Mailcon). Either way, they're full of energy and humor. I enjoyed Smith's writing too. His stories and gags are playful and warm-hearted with an occasional sarcastic aside.

Shannon Smith is Addicted to Distraction is 40 b&w pages, plus color cover. 7" x 8.5", handmade with saddle-stitch binding. It's available for $4 from his website (along with Mailcon directions). Mature readers.

Addicted to Distraction # reviewed at High-Low

High-Low

by Rob Clough

ADDICTED TO DISTRACTION, by Shannon Smith. The best word to describe this mini is "pleasant". Smith is an amiable fellow with a loving family who enjoys relating anecdotes about his life and the world of comics. The "In A World of Savages" strips are my favorite in the book, as Smith employs a pleasingly shabby line to relate stories about his daughter, his obsession with the Comics Journal, and his status as a cartoonist vs being a musician. The bulk of the issue is devoted to his Super Bowl Sunday drawing experiment, where he drew a page once an hour describing his day. His line here is extremely crude for obvious reasons, but his gentle, self-effacing humor shines through on every page. Smith works the angle of being a laid-back, toy-loving guy in a house filled with women & girls quite nicely, especially in the way he lets his children dictate the pace and nature of their play. A different strip where a character encounters a lyrics-spouting Jimi Hendrix felt more like an exercise than a real story, and his more heavily-labored art doesn't add much clarity. On the other hand, the pages of illustrations in the back were often funny (Lucy Van Pelt haranguing Judge Dredd?) and weirdly enthusiastic (like several pages hyping up Virginia Tech in the ACC football championships). All told, this wasn't an earth-shattering collection of stories, but it was one without any pretenses of such.

Addicted to Distraction #1 reviewed at Optical Sloth

Optical Sloth

Shannon Smith is Addicted to Distraction

Generally speaking I’m against throwing your own name in your comic title, but if you’re going to go all the way like Shannon did and also picture yourself bursting through the cover, I say more power to the man. This is a collection of odds and ends, so naturally some pieces are going to better than others. Things start off slow with a baffling story of a man who runs into an all-powerful Jimmy Hendrix and gets taken to heaven with a bunch of naked ladies who preach nothing but love. Oddly, the guy can’t wait to get out of there, but seems to have gotten something from the whole experience. Then there a few one page autobio pieces, at least a couple of which I’ve already seen in his other minis, but the piece sampled below was new to me and nicely reflects the struggle to ever find a copy of The Comic’s Journal. The heart of the book is up next, and 24 hour comics folk take note: Shannon has blasted you all out of the water. He decided to do a one page comic every hour of Super Bowl Sunday, starting at 8am and ending around midnight. It’s especially impressive because the guy is a Steeler’s fan and he still took time out of the day to make a comic. Granted, the art is about as simple as you can get, and I got a lot more out of reading this hourly strip that I just about ever have by reading most daily diary comics. The hourly format really gave him time to dig into the small details. There’s waking up, dealing with a nagging headache, cleaning up cat puke, picking up toys for his kids, making unhealthy food for the big day, playing with toys with his kids, and finally watching the game. If that sounds like too much detail for you, you’re clearly not a fan of autobio. You can’t get much more “day in the life” than this. Finally there’s a pile of sketches in the back of the comic, mostly stuff he’s sent to people who’ve mailed in over the years. I particularly enjoyed Ant Man fighting an ant over a twinkie, but maybe Wonder Woman using her lasso the make the Invisible confess her true love would be more your thing. It’s a pretty nice pile of comic any way you look at it, and well worth checking out. It’s $4, and if that’s too rich for your blood at the moment there are always all the cheap, cheap minis listed below this to convince you. $4

Shannon Smith is Addicted to Distraciton #1 can be purchased here.