Participants
Parrish
Baker
It is a truism that there is no money in comics, but it is literally so for Parrish Baker, whose self-published comic Sparrow's Fall has been distributed for free in Kansas City, Missouri since 1995, with the result that, as comics commentator Matt Fraction put it "You have to go to a comics shop to find Superman, but you can find Sparrow's Fall anywhere."
Taking place "somewhere between the city of the poor and the city of the not-so-poor, a long ways from heaven but not quite in hell, is a neighborhood where the people are mad and the animals are sane," Sparrow's Fall bends the boundaries of genre, with its Wind in the Willows or Beatrix Potter-esque animals as the supporting cast to melancholy Christopher Sparrow, who is vehicle for veiled autobiography, much like Eddie Campbell's Alex or Glen Dakin's Abe. Sparrow's Fall is committedly local, mostly taking place in recognizable locales, but hard to place: by turns it is a work of political satire, the story of a fall into madness (Baker had originally intended to end the series with Sparrow's suicide), local documentary, or cautiously approaches toward the magical and hopeful.
Parrish Baker is the artist and writer for the independent comic Sparrow's Fall.
