The Sun And The Frogs, by TS
Moss. This is an elegantly designed mini featuring a die-cut cover
and a beautiful sense of design throughout, meant to mimic stained
glass storytelling. This feels like a retelling of a fable, only it's
one directly related to climate change. The swirling blue of water
throughout the story appears placid but holds menace as it rises day
after day. On one set of pages, as the story within the story is
told, the frogs beg the sun not to give birth to another sun, because
they would boil. The narrative continues on the next two pages, only
the visuals are of a protest against climate change that is
ultimately fruitless. The final image is truly the final image, and
the end of the story: “The frogs boiled alive”. This is a
beautiful, pointed and straightforward story that makes its point
quickly and doesn't overstay its welcome. Moss' aesthetic is sleek
and stylish without being overly slick; I believe this story was
drawn on a computer but it doesn't have that slightly stilted feel
that such comics can have.
Confidential and B.B. By
Gaurav Patil. B.B. looks like it was drawn as an Ed Emberley
exercise, like several other of the first-year students' assignments.
Patil took the opportunity to make the story a children's story of
sorts in the Emberley tradition of stripped-down, geometric drawing
with basic shapes. Patil uses the format as a sort of shaggy dog joke
that doesn't pay off until the final panel. The titular B.B. stands
for “big bad”, who comes from a tribe of badasses and seeks out
other badasses to confront in the world. Every creature he encounters
simply tells him their name, and a dinosaur points out to him that he
hasn't made it clear what he is the biggest and baddest of. He
realizes he's a wolf at last and can finally make sense of what the
other animals are doing, but things go awry when he meets three
little pigs. Patil shows nice comedic chops here, as well as a solid
sense of how to use negative space effectively.
Confidential [Top Secret] is a
variation on a world with mutants and how they affected the world.
Someone would experience an “awakening”, which would unlock
“their true potential.” Some were recruited by a sinister
organization called The Agency, and this comic explores a mission
featuring agents code-named XI (super-hearing) and XII
(super-strength), as they went on a mission. It's an amiable enough
comic, rolling on with a distinct sense of humor without resorting to
outright spoof. The characterizations are exaggerated slightly to the
point of silliness, but there's a darker core here. Patil's drawing
here is serviceable as it's clear he understands his limits as a
draftsman. He's careful to make clarity a priority in his
storytelling and drawing, even if his actual drawing is wobbly at
times.
Sage Persing submitted a whole bunch of
comics that fell roughly into comics about family, comics about queer
and trans issues, and other stuff. I'll start with the latter. Dead
End was done using an unusual twelve panel grid, shoving a lot of
story into each page. That pushes the reader through what is
otherwise a relatively placid slice of story featuring two teenage
girls who are wandering around. Persing's draftsmanship is shaky
here, but their storytelling is confident and clear. Moreover, their
sense of verisimilitude regarding the dialogue is spot-on, as this
feels like a real anecdote that sums up a brief but crucial point in
the lives of the two girls. Be Well is a portrait comic
featuring various people saying things to them, often related to
wellness—and mental health in particular. It's a comic of
gratitude—thanking people for being there for them when Persing
reached out and needed them. The portrait work is raw and expressive,
and it captures something lively about each subject.
Visiting Dad is an excellent
series of anecdotal memories of visiting their father in the
hospital. The things that Persing remembered and chose to record are
precisely the kind of fragments that stick with you during a
traumatic and transitional time. In this case, it was hospital socks
that Persing drew in great detail, recalling that they were supposed
to have finished reading Kafka's The Metamorphosis before the grade
started, and details of the restaurant they went to afterward.
There's no other narration or information given, because the point of
the comic was memory, not narrative. Good Friday sees Persing
using watercolors to detail a particularly volatile argument between
a daughter and her father; while it's not explicitly
autobiographical, there are certainly family dynamics at work here.
The argument is with regard to the existence of god, and it upsets
him so much, that he stops the car and gets out. The comic is not so
much about the substance of the argument as it is about the memory of
the event itself. The moodiness of the color scheme is key to the
success of the story, as Persing's character design is wobbly.
Things I Know About Nanny is
Persing's Emberley assignment, and they made it a doozy. It's a
family history of their grandfather (Nanny), including the bizarre
events surrounding their great-grandfather (Cactus) and how his wife
ran off with another man and took the children with them—until they
dumped them. Persing not only expertly uses Emberley-style shapes in
an efficient and clear manner, they also add a color scheme that
makes the story pop. The narrative goes until the death of their
grandfather, who at a certain point was paralyzed after an accident
but lived long after that. The story concludes with Persing's birth,
which was the anniversary of the day of Nanny's paralysis.
The Beasts, The Birds and the Bat
is Persing's take on the Aesop assignment. The story is about the bat
refusing to take a side in the war between birds and beasts, claiming
to be a beast when asked by the birds to join and vice-versa. When
peace arrives, they shun the bat. Persing turns this into a metaphor
for being trans, with Aesop's admonition to “be one thing or
another” especially brutal here. On Queerness is a
single-page comic done in the form of a quilt to honor the work of
David Wojnarowicz, who often used “stitches and thread”. It's
symbolic of the patchwork but beautiful “chosen and created”
families of queer folk, and there's a similar kind of beauty to be
found in this representation of Persing's own chosen family. The
metaphor of wounds being stitched-up by one's chosen family like a
quilt is stitched is a powerful one. Finally, Tranny Joke is a
brutal, personal account of the way trans people have long been used
as a punchline in comedy—dehumanized, reduced, slurred. Persing
relates how especially hard this is because comedy is so important to
them, and shows that are otherwise incredibly important to them are
instead attacks on people they love. Persing's potential bursts off
of each and every page: as a memoirist, as a political cartoonist, as
a slice-of-life storyteller and more. Persing's got the goods, and at
this point it's just going to be a matter of refinement for them.
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