The looming form of an Enormous Ruminant.

 The first Ruskin comic is How To Be Rich, based on John Ruskin's most widely read book, Unto This Last.  Unto This Last is a short work that discusses wealth, economics, social equality and profit in ways that were very new for the time.  It had a huge influence on the early socialist movement, and was often the only book in a working class house apart from the Bible.  It's said that members of the first Labour government of Britain, in 1924, were asked which book had most influenced their political thinking.  Of 25 asked, 3 cited Marx's Das Kapital, and the rest Unto This Last.

In How To Be Rich, Darren Bloke, a hapless individual, wins a fortune on the lottery, then proceeds to waste it.  He is left with only a crummy apartment and his faithful dog, Skittle.  In the depths of despair and drink, he is visited by the Spirit of John Ruskin, who whirls him through a blizzard of ideas and images that enable him to see the whole world of Wealth, Property, and Happiness in Life in a different way.  In John Ruskin's famous dictum: THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE.

How To Be Rich.  The Ruskin Foundation. 2005.
Written by Kevin Jackson, drawn by Hunt Emerson.

Click image to enlarge.