Red Meat (comic strip)

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".[2]

Lambiek's Comiclopedia describes Red Meat as "a collection of absurd and sometimes cruel comics".[3]

Red Meat features "slug lines" at the top of each comic. In a 2005 interview Cannon said his favorite slug lines included "Plastic fruit for a starving nation" and "Official pace car of the apocalypse."[1]

Red Meat's characters include Stubbo, Milkman Dan, Bug-Eyed Earl, and Ted Johnson and his wife.[3] Many of the strip's human characters are 1950s caricatures.

• Bug-Eyed Earl – A demented person, slightly resembling Edgar Allan Poe or Charles Pierre Baudelaire but a lot more like Steve Buscemi. Earl's appearances generally involve him telling a surreal, strange, and usually disgusting anecdote.
• Milkman Dan – The local milkman; he is eccentric and hostile towards people and animals, especially Karen, a neighborhood child. Constantly battling against sobriety. Dan also dresses as a cow in the part of McMoo, the anti-drug cow.[4][5] Cannon said that "Milkmen seem so wholesome, and there’s no way anybody can be that wholesome… I grew up in a military family, and there’s something about that military-style uniform, all cleaned up, a brutal control effort the military necessarily breeds."[1]
• Ted Johnson – Cannon has stated that Ted is based on his own father, and said that despite some readers thinking so he is not based on Bob Dobbs.[1] He has a taste for gruesome sexual fetishes and cruel hobbies.

Red Meat was started by Cannon in the Arizona Daily Wildcat in 1989, the student newspaper of the University of Arizona, though Cannon was not a student of the university.[1] It was later picked up by the Tucson Weekly.[1] Since then it has appeared over 80 publications,[1] including The Onion.[6] Red Meat is also available online, and has been published online since 1996, making it one of the oldest still-running webcomics.

Red Meat has been published in several other languages, including French, Italian, Spanish, Danish, and Finnish. Localisers have changed some details, such as the Finnish translation making Milkman Dan into a mailman.[1]

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.[7]

At least three collections of the strips have been released:

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

Red Meat is created by Max Cannon. Lambiek's Comiclopedia states that Cannon was born in England,[3] but the Tucson Weekly described him as a "native Tucsonan".[8]

Cannon is also creator of the Comedy Central animated web show Shadow Rock,[6] which was based on the Red Meat strip.[9] He also contributed to Marvel's Strange Tales #2, writing stories with the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man.[10] In a 2009 interview, Cannon said that he taught college animation and was working on two screenplays and doing some preliminary writing on a graphic novel.[10]

• Official website