Ricky Garduno passed away last week. A huge fan of his Kimbo comics myself for only the past couple of years, I didn't know him personally, and had only had the briefest of correspondence with him on Facebook recently. But as a creator of fucked-up web comics myself, I felt a kind of respectful kinship with the artist and decided to start drawing a series of fan-comics with a story-arc, back when his Dumm Comics strip 1930 Nightmare Theater was still running. But the strip went from 3-days-a-week to weekly and then concluded. Although I hoped that maybe he would return to Dumm Comics someday, I still put the fan-comic on hold - until I heard the sad news. I'll never know what Ricky really would have thought of my fan-comic (or of NSFW Comix itself) but I felt I had to finish it anyway. Closure sure is weird, eh?

Although it was evident from his comics that Ricky was something of a tormented genius, it wasn't until recent months when I saw his posts on Facebook - and other people's posts about him - that I realized just how little of both his genius and his torment I'd seen. And in these past few days, more and more of his genius is coming to my attention as his friends and contemporaries deliver their eulogies. In light of those, I, as a mere fanboy, feel a bit presumptuous about delivering my own eulogy for Ricky, so I'll wrap things up with this thought:
The internet has lost a brilliant, daring, insightful cartoonist, and the world at large has lost a truly great guy.

What I now ask of you, Dear Reader, is to go and browse the 1930 Nightmare Theater archives on Dumm Comics. When I first started reading those strips, it wasn't love at first sight, but they grew on me and soon became my favorite webcomic (even better than Ctrl-Alt-Del! OMG!!!1). So don't feel as though you should plough right through them in one go. Pace yourself. The amount of wit and detail crammed into those strips is a bit much to appreciate all in one brainful.

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