Think back to your favorite book from childhood, during a time when your books were equal parts art and written word. Books with lettering sized so big that they eclipsed the text found in large print books. Pages filled with bright and colorful illustrations, spines covered in gold foil. scratch and sniff stories, or tales where texture adhered to the pages let you feel the fur of a bunny, or the rough bark of a tree. These books were your first exposure to imaginative stories told with words and pictures.

This is Picture Story Theatre, in a nutshell.

There are certain webcomic genres that seem to dominate the online world as much as the superhero genre dominates print comics. Any simple search will yield a seemingly endless list of gamer comics, college life comics, fantasy comics, slice-of-life comics – the web comic genre list goes on and on. But it’s quite a different thing to search for comics that deal with the self as source – or what is more commonly described as autobiographical. Aside from examples created by well known webcomic authors (for example Scott McCloud’s My Obsession with Chess and James Kochalka’s American Elf), most webcomic creators seem to pass over this method of conveying a visual story.

There’s a very good reason for this – it’s hard to do, and you can louse it up easily.