King-Cat Comics and Stories (1989)

John Porcellino has been making King-Cat Comics and Stories himself since 1989, and it is still going more than 80 issues later. If the other entries here are about self-publishing as a launch pad, King-Cat is about self-publishing as a life's work that never needed a bigger publisher. The comics are short, plain-lined diary strips about walks, birds, cats, jobs and illness, and their simplicity is the point: they feel like a letter from a friend. Drawn & Quarterly's King-Cat Classix gathers a selection from the first fifty issues, and new ones still come straight from the source.