Diary Comics

Since 2010, Dustin Harbin has been doing something that sounds deceptively simple and turns out to be extraordinarily difficult: drawing a comic about his day, every day. The result, Diary Comics, is a sprawling, decade-spanning archive of one artist’s life—the depressions and the triumphs, the relationship highs and the existential lows, all rendered in a wispy, expressive line that makes the most mundane moments feel like they matter.

Published by the legendary Koyama Press, the collected Diary Comics (2015) gathers nearly 200 strips from 2010–2012, the period when Harbin first quit his job at Heroes Aren’t Hard To Find to become a full-time cartoonist. What emerges is not just a diary but a meta-commentary on diary-making itself: Harbin constantly questions why he’s doing this, whether it matters, and whether the act of documenting daily life gets in the way of actually living it. Library Journal called the collection “funny and affecting,” noting that “Harbin’s mild solipsism isn’t fatal” and that his willingness to be snarky and candid about his bouts of depression makes the work genuinely relatable.

But the series is far more than its collected editions. Harbin has posted hundreds of diary strips on his website over 15-plus years, chronicling everything from the death of his dog to the process of buying a house, from convention-floor camaraderie to quiet nights at home. His style has evolved from fussy, detail-heavy hatching to a looser, more confident line that lets expression and body language do the heavy lifting. As Rob Clough noted in High-Low, “Harbin is his own best fictional character”—a self-deprecating, deeply aware narrator who treats his own life with the mixture of affection and skepticism it deserves.

The strips also capture the texture of the indie comics community itself. Harbin’s convention diaries from SPX, HeroesCon, and APE are treasured documents of the small-press world, full of inside jokes, late-night hangouts, and the genuine joy of watching friends succeed. His girlfriend (and later wife) appears as a recurring character, her patience and wry humor providing an anchor for Harbin’s rambling anxieties.

Harbin continues the series to this day on his website, often using the diary format to wrestle with bigger questions—artistic purpose, aging in a creative career, the strange passage of time. What started as a sketchbook exercise has become one of indie comics’ longest-running and most honest autobiographical projects.

Perfect for fans of James Kochalka’s American Elf, Jessica Abel’s La Perdida, and anyone who believes that the smallest moments, drawn honestly, can add up to something profound.