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Strum and Drang
Great Moments in Rock 'n' Roll
By Joel Orff, All Ages, 72 pages, $6.95
ISBN: 1-891867-27-X; Diamond Code: STAR 18518
May 2003

Great moments in rock 'n' roll. Everyone has at least one. For the past three years, Joel Orff has been collecting people's stories, illustrating them, and posting them on his web site. Though several of these comics feature well-known musicians, they aren't necessarily about music. They may be life-defining experiences, or they may be small and sublime occurrences that the narrator has never forgotten, or moments that they would have liked to have forgotten, but couldn't, because they made too good of a story. These are funny and sometimes poignant comics about people struggling with and celebrating their circumstances, often through unlikely forms of self-expression.

... a sweet, poetic collection of small moments of suburban beauty captured in simply drawn comic vignettes. Many of the stories don't have to do directly with rock 'n' roll, but rather an acute acknowledgement that music's sensibility defines a way of life. Orff's characters are suburban hippie-punks, whose stories might be cloying if they weren't so damn real. They are tiny glimmers and utterly life-affirming. Orff takes modest stories and turns them into Zen-like meditations. In nine frames, with 42 words, he catches something transcendent: "It was a beautiful night in July, and we were pretty stoned / ...we had hooked up three pairs of earphones to one cassette player and walked around listening... / ...to some improvised instrumental music... / ...that we'd performed and recorded ourselves." Strum and Drang is warm and sentimental and just perfectly captures a terrific innocence.
— Jesse Jarnow, Hear/Say

Like Lynda Barry with Ernie Pook's Comeek, Joel Orff's Great Moments In Rock 'n' Roll strike at the heart of some deep emotional truths about adolescent longing and the power of dreams in Nowheresville, U.S.A. Orff understands that rock (like cartooning?) is no mere "hobby," but a way of life. And like an unforgettable melancholy pop tune or a timeless, enervating rocker ¡X think Brian Wilson's "God Only Knows"; think Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" ¡X he taps into a soulfulness that is all too rare today in any medium.
— Jim DeRogatis, pop music critic, Chicago Sun-Times, and author of Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic

"My goal with the Great Moments in Rock 'n' Roll series has always been to entertain, and to present people's stories in a respectful way. My favorites are the ones that someone may have never thought was worth telling, but for some reason has stayed with them as a favorite memory. I've consciously kept the drawing loose and spontaneous, to reflect what I believe are qualities of the best rock 'n' roll."
— Joel Orff

Strum and Drang: Great Moments in Rock 'n' Roll	Thunderhead Underground Falls	Waterwise

Stapling cast-off newsprint from the local small-town newspaper into little books, Joel Orff churned out a thirty-two page comic once a month for most of his childhood. After his first year of college he threw them all out; a decision that he's still not sure if he regrets. More recently he's been published in several books and magazines around the world, including the Artisti Allibratori Associati publication Tattoo Comix (Italy), Fahrenheit Magazine (Denmark), The Comix Compendium from Mangijin Books, The Stranger weekly newspaper in Seattle, and 'Heroes of Invention', which was created for the Minnesota Children's Museum. His illustrations were included in an exhibition at the National Comic Library in Copenhagen in 1994. In 2001 they were featured at both the Somerville Comix Fest and Curious Brain exhibit in Boston.

In 2002 Joel Orff was a finalist for the McKnight Foundation Screenwriters Fellowship, and had his first play produced as part of the Minnesota Fringe Festival. In 2004 he was a finalist for the McKnight Screenwriters Fellowship. In 2005, his comic strip 'Great Moments in Rock 'n' Roll' began running weekly in the California paper Pacific Sun. In 2006 his second graphic novel Waterwise was published in a French translation by editions ça èt là in France. In 2007 editions ça èt là will publish a French translation of Thunderhead Underground Falls.