Lots of folks have a diary. But not a lot of people have a cartoon diary.

Vermont cartoonist, musician and all-around renaissance artist James Kochalka has been chronicling the ups and downs of his life online in his daily cartoon journal for more than eight years now on his website, American Elf. The result has been one of my must-reads for some time – drawn in Kochalka's simple, fluid and infinitely expressive style, American Elf is a testament to how much the comics medium can deal with in just three or four tiny panels. Hilariously funny, often raw, sometimes poetic, it's an amazing creation.

Collected in book form, the scope of American Elf is amazing. Kochalka's first collection, the hefty American Elf Volume 1, packed together five years' worth of strips into one of my favorite graphic novel collections in a long time. The brand new second volume, American Elf Volume 2, isn't quite as large – only two years as opposed to five – but it is all in color this time out as opposed to black and white.

One of the pleasures of American Elf is watching a life as it unspools – at the start of the strip, Kochalka was working as a waiter at a Chinese restaurant, full of dreams of stardom. These days, he's got record deals, published dozens of books and even had dealings with Hollywood. He's a father to four-year-old Eli, and a homeowner.

Kochalka channels the observant spirit of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz combined with an underground anything-goes spirit. There's no rules as to what he covers – a strip can be about a fight with his wife, something cute his kid said, or a random sketch of a day's detail, like a weirdly shaped icicle or a piece of cheese on the ground. Read a huge bunch in one go and you start to see the world Kochalka's way. Everything looks a little more cartoony in real life.