Red Meat (comic strip)


Red Meat is an independent comic strip by Max Cannon, first published in 1989. It appears in over 75 alternative weeklies and college papers in the United States and in other countries. Since 1996, it has been available for reading on the web.

Style

The strip features a cast of characters with abnormal personalities. A visual hallmark of the strip is the almost total lack of movement of the characters from panel to panel and a "Featureless Void" of no background. Cannon has said that he wanted Red Meat "to have a look that was somewhere between clip art and arresting minimalism, so that the text was more important than the art itself".
Red Meat features "slug lines" at the top of each comic which are frequently alliterative. For example, "Official pace car of the apocalypse" or "puckered piehole of the pointless".

Characters

Many of the strip's human characters are 1950s caricatures.
The strip was briefly picked up by The Arizona Daily Wildcat, the student run newspaper of the University of Arizona, in 1989. It was then picked up by the Tucson Weekly.
Cannon is also creator of the Comedy Central animated webshow Shadow Rock. The 10 episodes are now available on Atom.com.
In 2009, Max Cannon urged his readers to contact the editors of their local alternative weekly papers in an effort to save the comics printed within.
Three collections of the strips have been released: