Introducing Ryabovich, in: "Basketball Chair"

Meet Milton Ryabovich.  He's an ordinary 30-something bachelor living in the city.  He fancies himself a writer, but if pressed, probably couldn't present any evidence to support that claim.  His best friend is Charlie, and his on-again-off-again girlfriend is Rain.

I've been drawing "Ryabovich" for over 10 years now, though I don't draw him much these days.    The strip has two "formal features":  The first is verticality--you're supposed to "read down," as my thick felt tip pen advises multiple times on this page, and which is just plain unintuitive and a bad idea.  The other is that instead of speech bubbles, "Ryabovich" comics use floating quotation marks with short lines to indicate the speaker.  Again, an arbitrary and possibly poor choice, as demonstrated in that frame in the bottom left corner, where the basketball chair totally gets in the way of the words.  Weird.

Also:  A basketball chair?