Red Meat

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For mammal meat, see red meat. For the band, see Red Meat (band).

Begun in 1989, Max Cannon's Red Meat is an independent comic strip. 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.

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.

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.

Red Meat features "slug lines" at the top of each comic. For example "Official pace car of the apocalypse."

[1]

[edit] Characters

• Bug-Eyed Earl - A demented sort of person slightly resembling Edgar Allan Poe or Charles Pierre Baudelaire. Earl's appearances generally involve him telling a surreal, strange, and usually disgusting anecdote.
• Milkman Dan - The local milkman; eccentric and hostile towards some people, especially Karen, a neighborhood child. Constantly battling against sobriety [2], [3].
• Karen - A young girl who spends time with Milkman Dan even though she hates him.
• Ted Johnson - Cannon has stated that Ted is based on his own father. He is called Vance in Shadow Rock.^[1]
• Johnny Lemonhead - A naive, well-mannered man with a head shaped like a lemon, who is abused and treated as a freak by others.
• Mr. Bix - Sadistic anthropomorphic robot. Enjoys performing painful and/or disgusting experiments on organic beings, usually Ted's son and his friends. [4]
• Clyde - Ted's local gardener and handyman. Glacially slow on the uptake [5], [6].
• God - A relaxed, laid-back, hippy-ish God [7]. Contrast to the Priest's more hellfire-and-brimstone outlook [8].
• Papa Moai, an omnipotent Easter Island statue. Usually speaks portentously of transcending time and space, but has more minor and immediate concerns... like finding decent tobacco [9], or filling in a crossword [10].
• Priest - Tries to live according to the Bible, often at loggerheads with modern life or the less conservative God.
• Stubbo - A parady of Sluggo from those old "Nancy" comic strips. Stubbo has previously been reported as retired. However, he appears in the May 13, 2008 strip.
• Postman Matt - A paranoid conspiracy theorist. He has no nose. [11] fond of dark sunglasses.
• The Lonesome Cowboy - Hobbies : overseeing his cows. He's very lonely.[12].

[edit] Books

Three collections of the strips have been released:

• Red Meat - ISBN 0-312-18302-X (1997)
• More Red Meat - ISBN 0-312-19514-1 (1998)
• Red Meat Gold - ISBN 0-312-33014-6 (2005)

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Official Red Meat page
• Red Meat in Czech language (approved by Max Cannon)
• Red Meat in French language
• Red Meat in Slovak language (approved by Max Cannon)
• Red Meat Construction Set (unofficial Red Meat universe comics)