Comics I Like: Todd Barry

Todd Barry is my wife's favorite comic, and is one of my favorite comics as well. In addition to seeing him open for Louis CK at the Spreckles Theater a few years ago, my wife and I both saw him at the Casbah (underneath the San Diego airport's flight path) a few years ago, and he did a great set that kept us in stitches. Being die-hard fans, my wife and I called out "joke requests" once he was done with his regular set, and he was kind enough to honor them all. I felt a little self-conscious doing this, but we met up with him after the set, and he sounded more glad that he had such big fans rather than annoyed at us, and he posed for a picture. When I went to New York for a motion capture shoot for Rockstar in 2007, I popped into Raffifi's (before it went out of business) in Manhattan, and Todd was one of the comics I recognized there. I introduced myself and shook his hand--he was very nice. He can be a very subtle comic whose facial expression often hovers around what I interpret as "are you really that stupid?" Hopefully this reproduction captured this thought. Judge for yourself:

The work in progress, pre-computer. I only used an 8B pencil on this one, as I did the Louis CK and Myq Kaplan pieces. The soft lead makes it easy to move around the page and not have to stress as much about making an effort for the lines to show up.