45 Days Of CCS, #31: Coco Fox

Coco Fox's middle-grade quasi-memoir Let's Go, Coco! is a delightful breath of fresh air in the genre. It's not a surprise that Harper Alley is the publisher, considering that they also published quirky quasi-memoirs by Jarad Greene and Colleen Frakes. Fox's is interesting because her expressive but super minimalistic style feels like it should be aimed at emerging readers, but the themes of budding pre-adolescent feelings and complex friendship dynamics put it squarely into middle-grade territory.

I actually saw Fox present this when I sat in on a class at CCS six years ago. What's interesting is that while Fox hasn't altered their style that much from when I first saw it as a draftsman, it's clear that their cartooning is so much more confident and sophisticated. The original title of the book, Right To Left, was a much better one than the generic title used here, and much more visually evocative of the plot. The plot follows young Coco into her sixth-grade year, where she will have to face life without her best friend Blair, who moves away from their small town in Indiana. Coco decides to face her anxieties and joins the basketball team.

Fox manages to delineate each of her teammates clearly. Maddie is a sarcastic bully who is talented. Coco has a crush on Tami, the team captain and mastermind. Vera is a nerdy goofball. Zander is a non-binary kid. A crucial aspect of the book is that Fox takes the basketball portions very seriously. She explains it in such a way that a non-fan can understand, but when she started to explain what a pick was very early on, I knew she wasn't going to shrink away from the importance of the actual game. This was a smart move because team politics and team drama became an important part of the plot. When Coco accidentally has her wrist broken by her coaching when attempting to demonstrate how to block a shot, her dominant hand is put in a cast. Being forced to use her left hand forms the majority of the action in the back half of the book and directly relates to how her cheerful and non-confrontational nature was used against her by those willing to exploit it or ignore her other emotions. 

There's a lot to sort out in the narrative as a result of having several important characters, but Fox never loses sight of Coco as a well-meaning protagonist who has a lot of learning to do about asserting herself. Her cartooning is so wonderfully alive and expressive, as she's able to generate a big emotional impact with simply-drawn facial expressions and gestures. It greatly helps that the color is a fairly muted two-tone affair, focusing mostly on light purples and shades of orange. Fox's line is strong and steady throughout and never gets lost in the coloring. I love that the book doesn't shy away from Coco's feelings toward one of her teammates, nor does it treat Zander with anything but respect. These days, that's a bold move for a publisher. There is a sweetness and sincerity in this narrative that was clearly entertaining for me, but I imagine that it will truly resonate with its target audience.

45 Days Of CCS, #30: Emil O'Melia

Emil O'Melia's The King Of Cats Is Dead is a beautiful, surreal, nightmarish, and colorful saga about a demonic cat named Spider who steals the soul of the King of Cats upon his death. This comic is truly a tour-de-force when it comes to combining deeply powerful & meaningful color with a strong use of line and spotting blacks. While it's a pleasure to just look at this comic, O'Melia uses a propulsive storytelling style with excellent panel-to-panel and page-to-page transitions. The story follows Spider as well as the Prince of Cats, who was supposed to ascend to the throne. 

Spider has to outwit and outlast hordes of followers in order to deliver the soul he devoured to some kind of demonic cat overlord. It's clearly a decision he starts to regret once he's done it, but there's no going back now. At the same time, the Prince delays a search party for increasingly vague reasons, until he declares he no longer intends to be king. This mini does not feature the conclusion of the story, but it's so beautifully made and with such attention to detail that hopefully it will be finished soon. 

Haunted Bathrooms is self-described as "a horror-poetry-comics chapbook," and that's about right. The mix of illustrated text, splotchy paintings, emo horror figures, and a stunningly sad story called "$950 Toilet" about the realities of exploitation under capitalism. The image of "renting a few hundred cubic feet...floating" is such a stark one, and the watercolors here add to the blunt starkness of this realization. "The Men's Room" captures a different kind of horror--the fear of one's own gender expression being literally illegal and impeding a basic human function. O'Melia's skill with color and having the right vehicle for expressing it has really led to them levelling up.

45 Days Of CCS, #29: Michael Albrecht, Ben Adkins

Ben Adkins is a first-year student, and he contributed his two iterations of some time-tested CCS assignments: adapting one of Aesop's fables and doing a comic in the style of Ed Emberley. You can sometimes tell a lot about a cartoonist's future looking at these assignments. In Adkins' case, it's clear that he's a humorist. In The Playful Ass, Adkins introduces the fable with his own characters as narrators, and you know that he had to open with an ass joke of some kind. He has one of his characters condemn the joke as soon as the other introduces it, and this bit of metahumor is effective. Adkins' line is clear and simple, almost deceptively so. He spots blacks very effectively, giving his pages depth and solidity even as his characters are fluid and expressive. In The Tedious Odyssey Of Boring Bob, Adkins uses the Emberley style (all drawings are done with basic squares, triangles, and circles) for another metafictional bit of fun. The story itself is about a boring guy who doesn't look as cool as the other characters (kings with crowns, divers with helmets, etc) he meets. When his boring qualities prove useful, he's made king, which leads him to accidentally trigger a device that reveals that all of the blocky figures are just different versions of himself. It's a fine gag that once again drills into the assignment on a conceptual level. I'm very interested in seeing what Adkins does in his own style.

Michael Albrecht has quickly shown a great deal of promise early in his career, and his most recent minis continue that trend. Rogue is a very funny and surprisingly poignant story about a rogue supercomputer and the security guard who watches it. Nicknamed "Carrot," the guard (unbeknownst to anyone else) secretly boots up the computer to keep her company. Shut down after it murdered its keepers in a bid for world domination, it now sits as a museum piece. The guard, Park, is a hilarious character, as she unreservedly treats Carrot as her friend, including the two roasting each other. There are fascinating twists and turns along with an ambiguous ending that feels like a test of humanity for Carrot. Albrecht's line is wonderfully sketchy, emphasizing gesture for the human character and making the computer feel human. 

Albrecht loves robots, it seems, and Robot Poetry Club goes in a different direction. A computer science student accidentally gives a desktop computer sentience while trying to write a program that counted all the r's in Romeo & Juliet. The computer is very insistent on its own freedom ("Hero's journey and all") and sets out on a rolling cart to seek its destiny. The computer takes the name Jill and a job in an office where they try to figure out the purpose of all of this. They flee, searching for meaning, and come across a "Robot Poetry Club" and a poem read that plunges them into the world of metaphor they had been so desperately seeking. Despite the overall silliness of the comic and its satirical tone, the consistency of the premise leads to a genuinely affecting moment regarding why we make and seek out art. Albrecht's art gets the hell out of the way of the story, enhancing the premise in subtle ways in panel after panel. The inky expressiveness of the final pages, as Jill is finally experiencing real meaning in their life, stands in stark contrast to the functional thin line featured in the rest of the comic. 

45 Days Of CCS, #28: Robyn Smith, Dylan Sparks, Kat Ghastly

Kat Ghastly's I Hunger may be short, but she packs a lot of conceptual power into its very silly punchlines. Its central idea--"What upset Cthulhu's tummy?"--is very dopey but also funny, and her gross-out drawings match the grossness of her puns. "Cult chowder," "Peopleroni pizza," and finally "This comic" are all culprits. This is like a wonderful Lovecraftian Garbage Pail Kids set. The sickly green cover is a nice indicator of its contents.

Robyn Smith's Night Fever won an Ignatz award for Outstanding Artist in an issue of the anthology Gladiolus. This is just an eight-page story, but it packs a wallop. Smith is best known for illustrating other people's stories, but she's actually an excellent writer in any number of genres. Her work has an edge that's certainly evident in this story of a group of college friends who drop acid at an outdoor Halloween party. They invite their friend Leanna to come out and meet them, and through a series of chaotic events, something horrible happens: she is dosed without her knowledge by a man she doesn't know. Smith cuts the story off before the inevitable consequences of this (something she's especially adept at--her own writing is filler-free), but the nightmarish visuals tell the reader all they need to know. 

Gallant Valor is Dylan Sparks' senior thesis, and it's one long play on gender and fantasy tropes. It's about a romance between a knight named Serim and an anthropomorphic dragon named Pet. That romance, as we learn in flashbacks, was born out of controlling and abusive relationships. For Pet, it was the king who treated her as more of a thing than someone who belonged in his court. For Serim, it was her devotion to the queen that obliterated boundaries by using her as a sex object. In both examples, it was a case of unequal power relationships taken to extreme levels. For Serim, the queen's need for total devotion led to the knight's death. For Pet, she defied her surrogate father's control and threats that she'd never fit in so she could find her own way. Finding and accepting each other was the key to their own personal transformations, as they started on their goal of marauding through the kingdoms. This was an ambitious comic, and some of the storytelling felt muddled. That includes some of the character design, which was a bit all over the place, but Sparks' line was also inconsistent. That said, Sparks nails the big shocks in this comic, and the romantic (and unsettling!) ending feels entirely earned. 

45 Days Of CCS, #27: Natalie Norris, Keena

From the very first, the comics I read from Natalie Norris dealt with trauma. Regardless of the assignment, it was clear that Norris had a burning need to work through her trauma through her art. That culminated in the first half of her memoir about a horrific sexual assault titled Dear Mini. She's currently working on part two of that story (about the aftermath of the incident), but she did a mini-comic for Paper Rocket's Mini Memoir Project. It's called Scar Tissue that I Wish You Saw, and it's about what happened when she was sent to an inpatient facility for mental illness. It's laid out plainly on page one: various forms of pain, including endometriosis, along with major depressive disorder. 

At the same time, Norris tells the story from her perspective as a 16-year-old, where her major problem was that she was in love with her older sister's boyfriend Shane. Young Natalie is the picture of the unreliable narrator, as she refuses to discuss her trauma with her doctors and seethes with anger when her doctors take away her Percocet. She sneers at another teen for being an alcoholic because she "ruined partying for the rest of your life," noting that of course, she could "handle my shit." There's a lot of two-track narrative used in this comic as she visually recalls a lifetime of medical trauma while denying trauma to her therapist. Natalie in this story is certain that she and Shane (an older drug dealer) are a perfect match, and she fumes when she reveals that her mom told him to stay away from both her daughters. This is one of Norris' best comics, as her storytelling is subtler than much of her earlier work, and it makes the depiction of her trauma all the more effective. This version of Natalie in the story is wounded but bratty, not capable of loving herself or feeling worthy of love, and the subsequent acting out is captured in such a direct but not overly obvious way.

Speaking of feeling worthy of love, her comic Belles Heures ("Book of Hours") is less a narrative than it is a series of immediate sensory impressions of the early days of a loving relationship with a man named Ima. Generally, someone's diary entries of a loving relationship are as tedious as any anecdote, but Norris is going for something else. These are loose, immediate drawings that are a revelation for Norris precisely because they had never experienced anything quite like this before. It's as though she had to capture these experiences as quickly and directly as possible, not just for fear of forgetting them, but as a way of concretizing them. In this way, it's a sort of way to prove that it wasn't all just a dream. It's a form of devotional study.

Keerthana Srinivasan, aka Keena, is a CCS student who came to cartooning by a rather circuitous path. In her early 50s, she began doing art after a lifetime in IT when her children grew up and her husband took a job in another city. Prior to CCS, she did a book in collage form using basic color shapes to tell this story, and it's called Journey. Despite featuring no drawing, it's actually a well-done piece of cartooning whose meaning is easy to grasp. She's a red shape, her husband a blue shape, and their kids yellow and green shapes, respectively. When the kids go on their own journeys, there's an especially poignant page where the red shape is shown to be old and wrinkled. When her husband goes on his own journey, she finally attempts her own on a turbulent ocean. She sees her children fly away, but her husband arrives again to act as a sail to steady her own, new journey. It's a lovely and touching story. Keena also contributed a two page piece that was more illustrated text than comics about her father near death, wanting to make sure that the suitcase that had represented his livelihood was safe. Keena has a great storytelling voice, and I'm curious to see her make something more in the vein of traditional comics. 

45 Days Of CCS, #26: Anna Sellheim

Anyone who follows Anna Sellheim on Instagram knows that her sketchbook drawings are wildly entertaining and show the breadth and depth of her talent. The Birth Of A Sketchbook Zine covers 2002-24 and sees Sellheim mostly concentrating on what she does best: drawing the female form. That extends to her ability to draw clothing and exaggerate gesture and expressions. The cover story, featuring a pair of sketchbooks getting into a tryst that leads to some unexpected consequences, is hilarious. When Sellheim commits to a particular style and lets her art do most of the talking, her drawings are particularly effective. Sellheim's use of color strongly balances decorative and expressive elements, and I especially like the way she uses deep, rich reds and purples. 

That's a reflection of Sellheim's aggressive style that tends to get in the reader's face. So many of her drawings are seething with emotion--anger, attitude, desire, and many more. While her naturalistic drawings show off her skill, her real virtues shine when she draws in an exaggerated fashion. Her 2023 Inktober Zine took that month of drawing prompts in order to learn how to draw directly from ink without other underdrawing. The results are mixed as Sellheim tries a variety of line weights and styles. Some attempts at adding more detail are muddled, but more clear-line approaches are more effective. There's also a hilarious bit where she came up with a potential story with a pair of young, gay teenaged boys and her boyfriend roasts her as one of many women her age interested in stories like this. Sellheim's nude drawings pack a lot of expressive power and I love the way she spots blacks. I really like it when she uses a thick, chunky and sketchy line, but her thinner line is every bit as expressive. At this point, Sellheim just needs to pick the right style for the right project and stick with it.

45 Days Of CCS, #25: Adrienne Adkins

Adrienne Adkins' cartooning and storytelling are smart and expressive, even if her line is a bit rough at the moment. Adkins certainly has no lack of imagination and a pretty wide range of storytelling interests. Be Not Afraid Of Bella Vol 1 posits a relationship between a person and what turns out to be an angel named Bella. The angel's form is hideous: a giant eyeball with wings, teeth, hands, and feet. However, its personality is like that of a highly insistent dog who's trying to steal meat from its owner's plates. However, this dog can bend time and space (as cleverly personified by the angel reaching around and between panels), until the person relents and hands over some steak. This is a clever, well-paced comic, even if the actual drawing isn't all that interesting. 

XxStarwolfxX is about a girl named Emma playing an online fantasy game with a friend where the characters are wolves. Her Starwolf is about to get revenge on a player named Redwolf for burning down her forest when the player behind Redwolf has to do something for their parents. It's revealed that Emma has been suspended for assaulting a boy at school but won't tell her parents why, and the boy's family is suing. The beauty of this comic is the way in which Adkins provides clues as to why she did it without explicitly saying it, with the metaphor of the forest being burned down echoing the forest design on her shirt. She's desperately trying to escape the rage that led her to beat the boy down and the words he said to her to spark that fury. Once again, the composition and cartooning are excellent, but the execution (especially the lettering) is a little rough. Those aspects of Adkins' work will be sharpened over time, but they already have a lot to say and know how to say it. 

45 Days Of CCS, #24: Violet Kitchen

Violet Kitchen came out of the gates at CCS doing interesting work, and they've only built on that potential since graduating. They co-founded GoPress Girl with Rachel Bivens, and they are already publishing excellent work on top of their own comics. The comic they published with the ShortBox Comics Festival this year, Allodynia, is probably their strongest work to date. It is fundamentally a comic about the limits of empathy. 

The title refers to a condition that is a type of nerve pain triggered by a stimulus that doesn't normally cause pain. The classic example is when sunburned skin feels unusually sensitive to touch. In the comic, the term has multiple meanings. The narrative follows a young trans couple named Tess and Jules. Tess is a jock who loves running, while Jules is a homebody who struggles with the pain and fatigue of fibromyalgia. Tess volunteers at a clinic for an experiment studying pain and responses to pain. They receive a drug that gives them a sort of total body burning sensation while they are in an MRI, and then they see images of human faces and click on the ones that seem to be in pain. It's a clever set-up for what follows next, especially as Kitchen is careful to establish the loving relationship between Tess and Jules, albeit one where Jules clearly feels the need to do certain things on their own, sometimes to Tess' chagrin. 

After a couple of sessions in the clinic, an unusual thing happens to Tess: they begin to perceive pain in others and feel their own pain in electric jolts. Working at a cafe, they start to look at their customers like the images in their experiments, observing their expressions to see if they are pained or not. Kitchen brilliantly uses color in an otherwise black & white comic to express this. When their nervous system is activated (something they never share with anyone), Kitchen uses a bright red to emphasize this pain. The images of people in pain are in blue. Kitchen repeats these patterns later when Tess starts perceiving all of this information outside of the clinical setting. 

As I said, this is a comic not only about the limits of empathy, but also how we interact with others based on that level of empathy that we feel. When Tess can sense how much pain Jules is in all the time, their empathy doesn't just come from a place of caring, it comes from them not wanting to perceive that pain in someone else anymore. It is allodynia--something that was a part of normal life has now become painful for them, and their reaction is to recoil from this feeling someone else's pain while ignoring their actual feelings. Jules tells them they need to do things for themselves, even if it hurts, and begs them to back off. Tess replies "I'm just supposed to let you watch you do that?", refer to Jules' pain, depression, etc. Jules goes to a logical place: if their pain bothers them so much, be with someone who's healthy.

The irony is that Tess can no longer escape from pain--including their own. The end sequence, with Tess listening to their motivational recording spout platitudes like "I know change is not comfortable" brilliantly encapsulates their sense of being trapped in this new sense of awareness, and it dawns on them that this is how Jules lives all the time. All of this is heightened by them both being trans, especially in a sequence where Tess seethes in frustration about having to educate someone at work about trans issues. Tess is furious, but it's also clear they relish having the moral high ground and are offended by the lack of empathy they receive from cis people. Their empathy only extends to themselves, something they learn the hard way. Kitchen is a fabulously nuanced storyteller who understands how to use color and tell a story primarily through the use of visuals. Some of the color registers were a tad off and there were a few lettering corrections that weren't quite fixed, but these are minor quibbles for one of the best comics of 2024.

45 Days Of CCS, #23: Riffraff

The Gutter is a substack anthology that mostly publishes very short stories or serials. Of late, they've gotten more serious about things, going to a paid subscription model for comics in 2025 and releasing their first print anthology, Riffraff, in 2024. The anthology also had a digital component, but I'm going to focus on the print edition here. 

It's edited by two CCS alums, Cathy Mayer and King Ray, and there are several CCSers who contributed stories. Emil Wilson opens with "Recycling Husbands," which is fitting since this issue's theme is "Trash." Wilson leans into the concept from the beginning, as a wife puts her "husband on the curb with the recycling. I decided I didn't need a husband anymore." It follows the logic of this statement in an even-handed and slightly dispassionate way, as she finds the husbands are "crushed into compressed blocks." Eventually, some of her friends get recycled husbands. Wilson's art is partly scribbly and partly looks to be inspired by advertising art designed to invoke a 1950s America feel, but the power reversal here is amusing and understated. 

Sofia Lesage's "Digital Wasteland" cleverly uses the short format with a repetitive gag that lands because it's only six pages. The protagonist is beset by a buxom bot begging for her attention while she scours the internet for something else, only the digital wasteland is a real one. This is a rare example where a digital font (for the bot) is an effective storytelling tool. The ending doubles down on all of this, as the protagonist's desperation leads her to make a critical mistake. 

Ana Two once again proves their capacity for innovation with "Throw Your Past Away." Once again, it's a smart use of a limited number of pages, as Two uses the Riso format to create a ghostly, foggy background. The protagonist talks about leaving messages behind on napkins revealing the sensation of wanting to be thrown away, to be drained, to be hollowed out of their depression and turned into something new. It's a striking combination of spectral images and beautifully concrete text. 

Violet Kitchen's "Birdhouse" reveals yet another strong story for the young artist, who has been on an incredible roll. Kitchen's line is scribbly and expressive; it reminds me of a certain kind of cartoony naturalism from artists like Michel Rabagliatti. However, their understanding of composition is incredibly advanced. Here, the open-page layout of hipster friends attending a garage sale transforms into one of them feeling the sincerity of an old woman's joy in the simplicity of her understanding of beauty. Kitchen's ability to subtly evoke emotion through visual cues is extraordinary.

In the other stories, Faye Harnest's "Books" makes interesting use of shapes in discussing how she felt when the books she was forced to dispose of weren't taken by anyone. Stephanie Guralnick's story about dumping out one's heart is less a story than a tone poem. Betsy Hudson's story of an unhoused man building his own tarp castle in the alley next to some friends' apartment was touching, especially with the tender, scribbly line. Abi Inman's story of a robot and a bird feels a little familiar, but it's well-executed. Quinn Stephens' ridiculous "Rick Garbage" short is just the injection of ridiculousness that this otherwise fairly sincere and serious anthology needed. Overall, this is a very well-edited anthology that makes good use of its theme while providing enough variance to prevent things from getting tedious. 

45 Days Of CCS, #22: Filipa Estrela

Filipa Estrela is an artist who makes the most out of the zine format, turning each one into an art objects as much as it is a comic. Rember Me?, done in conjunction with Shannon Spence and Alex Ahlquist, is a Risograph comic with various characters constructed and drawn in various overlapping ways to create a chaotic, colorful narrative about an angry doll whose body is transformed by way of choose-your-own-adventure flowchart that opens up after the last page of the story is turned. It's a funny, strange experiment that clearly features a lot of back-and-forth between the artists.

Fated Tears is one of the better 24-hour comics I've seen; that particular technique tends to produce comics that are more interesting in theory than in practice. Like diary comics, 24-hour comics are more for the benefit of the artist than the audience. In this case, Estrela once again turns to the Riso to depict the upsetting dreams of a young adult named Fate who is also struggling at her job. She finds herself waking up crying, thanks to the image of a creature feeling trapped and sad. Finding herself in a dream with the creature, she fights for its freedom and then feels free herself for the first time. It's a simple narrative that is expertly executed, from its use of color to the character design. I've been dying for Estrela to do something long-form, given their innovative use of unusual materials and their ability to create affecting, sincere, and exciting narratives. 

Estrelaa's line is strong and expressive, and they remind the reader of this in two short minis, Lately, I've been feeling Ok and I'm ready to be somewhere new. The former is a lovely and cute affirmation of improved health and the latter is about the long journey to growth. Both are quite short but perfectly express their central ideas.

45 Days Of CCS, #21: Crank Case & Iris Gudeon

Iris Gudeon's comics are odd and funny. Using a four-panel grid and a deceptively simple line, Gudeon's storytelling leans into a cute, upbeat aesthetic in order to disguise the sheer weirdness of what she's actually doing. In The Warm (worm farm), for example, the reader meets a farmer who works on the titular worm farm. What Gudeon is doing here is a shaggy dog joke, as the initially cute concept (a worm farm!) gets weirder and weirder. The farmer, desperate for human (or really, non-worm) contact, gets increasingly awkward until it's revealed that EVERYTHING is worms. I laughed out loud at the surprise punchline when I turned the final page. 

One of my favorite CCS assignments is when students are put together in order to collaborate on a particular genre assignment. They divvy up responsibilities like traditional mainstream comics. In the example of Crank Case, the team was Adrienne Adkins, Amelia B.C. Dutton, Fern Pellerin, and Fernanda Nocedal. Adkins did the designs for two of the characters, layouts, and lettering. Dutton did character and style designs, pencils, and the book design. Nocedal designed another character and did character inks. Pellerin was production manager and did background inks. 

The team decided to do "90s style science-fiction shonen manga," and the result is pretty solid. The story is told in a Western style (left-to-right), and it merges futuristic dystopian sci-fi with very familiar fantasy tropes. The story follows Poco, an engineer/scrap-seeker, and their robot dog K-9, as they meet an elven sorceress named Phae who was banished to this realm. Most of the comic is a chase scene, as Poco's competitors chased them down before Phae unleashed a nasty spell. The character design for Poco and Phae was by two different artists, but it was a clever idea to make these characters from completely different genres. It highlighted how weird and alien Phae seemed in Poco's gritty, junk-strewn environment in a dump. The composition was all over the place on every page: dutch angles, two-page spreads, inset panels, and other dizzying, disorienting choices typical of shonen. This was one of the better examples of this kind of collaboration that I've seen.

45 Days Of CCS, #20: Alex Washburn

Published in the pages of the Fantology anthology, Alex Washburn's serial Clan Zargs works well a solid fantasy story, a romantic serial, and a humorous narrative. There's a frantic energy to it where the plot can take sudden, massive, and unpredictable shifts while never veering from the glue that holds it together: the character relationships. Clan Zargs IV follows the ragtag team of adventurers as they've gotten in way over their heads, captured by the Missionaries of Jahk. One of Clan Zargs, Sasha, has agreed to join the missionaries, but it's part of a plan to break out their fellow clan members. 

Here's what makes this story interesting: Washburn abandons the action of the plot and takes a detour into interpersonal drama for seven pages. As it turns out, Sasha wanted to try something new and genuinely wanted to join the missionaries, though she wanted to free her friends as well. This was such an interesting left turn for the story, as Washburn defied typical fantasy conventions in breaking up a team in this way. The story then takes another sudden turn as the threat of violence arises, only to be quelled by another new character. There's a lot of talking and backstory in this episode, but it never supercedes the emotional narrative that runs through it. Washburn's line is thick and chunky, but you can see the confidence in his drawing increasing episode by episode. That thickness allows for rubbery, exaggerated action, like in Washburn's two-page short, Azzy's Pork Buns. That quality is ideally suited for comedic storytelling, which is true of this story about a side character hunting a pig for a recipe, but it's also true of the main series as well. 

45 Days Of CCS, #19: Annabel Driussi, Tom O'Brien, Ashley Jablonski

When Natalie Norris wrote her sexual assault graphic memoir Dear Mini, she dedicated it to "girls like us." In Dear Natalie, Annabel Driussi tells her own story in epistolary form to Norris, because of how much Dear Mini meant to her. Driussi's mini-comic is very different from Norris' deeply detailed account of the experiences leading up to and after her assault, in that many of the events are alluded to off-panel. The candy-colored hues of the mini and the anecdote about her telling one of her stuffies about her secret masterfully signify that the 14-year-old Driussi was a child when she experienced her own trauma--both literally and emotionally. At the same time, she "hated my childish body" and wanted to look like a woman. She was neither here nor there, and boys took advantage of this. This looks like it was done in crayon, which does much of the narrative heavy lifting, but Driussii's thin and tender line aptly reflects her own vulnerability. 

Ashley Jablonski is mostly doing very short minis these days about their experience teaching art to very young children. They delight in Jablonski as much as Jablonski delights in them, and this is reflected in their Life As An Elementary Ghost mini-comics. Jablonski draws everyone as cute ghosts and essentially relates funny anecdotes, like a kid saying "I made that shot," with an asterisk of "Definitely did not make that shot." Kids ask to spell words like "googleplexian," jump into piles of leaves and encourage Jablonski to do so, and play choose your own adventure. I also quite liked Jablonski's Apples As People, wherein she imagines what Granny Smith, McIntosh, and Baldwin might look like. Here, Jablonski's use of color is especially effective and evocative. 

I hadn't seen anything from Tom O'Brien in a while before I saw him at CAKE. He's working away at an illustrated guide to knives called The Knife Guide, and he gave me a mini of Chapter 4 to look at. This chapter covers different ways to hold a knife and cutting techniques, mostly for the kitchen. As someone who likes to cook but who knows very little about knives, I found it fascinating. It was helpful that he was careful with his image-to-text ratio, keeping the captions in each panel to five lines at a maximum. Anything beyond that would not only be too much text to read and absorb, it likely would have gone beyond the actual illustration in each panel and would have demanded another image anyway. O'Brien uses a six-panel grid as a base, collapsing panels along rows as per needed. The best thing about this was just how particular O'Brien was about illustrating fine details, like precisely how to handle and wield a knife to get a particular kind of cut, be it a mince or a chop. Not being afraid of these details is exactly what a beginner needs to see. The minicomic used grayscale shading but the actual art is in color (see above), which heightens the contrast of the object to its background; however, the constantly shifting color backgrounds are distracting. 

45 Days Of CCS, #18: 666 Comics

The latest iteration of 666 Comics, edited by Ian Richardson has some of the usual CCS names in a fun format: six stories, six pages per comic, six panels per page. Some of the artists take extreme liberties in these restrictions, as what is a "panel" is pushed to the limit at times, but the spirit of the idea is there. As the title would suggest, some kind of deviltry is generally part of the package, but the tone swings wildly from comedy to emo to twisty EC-style horror.

Max Riffner opens up with "Stretch Mark Of The Beast," a Rosemary's Baby/The Omen spoof where a man becomes pregnant by way of his wife after she joins a satanic cult. This is a classic two-track narrative, as the text is a straightforward, sad-sack narrative about being left by his wife then leading to being totally oblivious to the demon inside of him. Meanwhile, Riffner goes all-out with gore and over-the-top images until the final one, which puts the protagonist's stupidity into sharp, ominous relief.

Denis St. John is up to his usual EC Comics-flavored silliness with "Hellarella Pinball Ballyhell,", with his vampy demoness luring a demon to play a pinball version of her. The twist? He becomes the ball when he puts his quarter in! His line, as always, is pleasingly inky and dense, which adds a little weight to the cavalcade of puns mixed with cartoony violence. 

Richardson's "Hell Of A Deal" is the most traditional horror story in the comic. It's about a woman who turns to a psychic because of a deal she made with a demon. The psychic promises to help, but she gets a nasty surprise when the nature of the initial deal is revealed. Richardson's art (and lettering) reminds me a lot of Jack Chick's--naturalistic but with cartoony expressions, and a certain rigidity for effect.

As for the other stories, Jamie Messerman's "The Devil Takes Care Of His Own" is a tender story about a caring demon and someone going through trauma, done in a fairly standard, manga-inspired style. It's an odd fit for this anthology, but then there's usually one outlier in Richardson's collections. Jeff Lorentz's "Root Of All Evil" is a pretty obvious satire where the devil is talking about how humanity has ruined Earth far more than he has. Amanda Kahl's "Superstition" is one of the best stories in the collection, about a midwife in a small town encountering horror in a delivery. Connecting it to the superstitions that are really a manifestation of collective wisdom was a bit of clever storytelling. The use of blacks is especially effective, though the italic font is distracting. Overall, Riffner and Kahl were probably the best of the lot, while Messerman's piece was such a tonal shift (visually and thematically) that it felt out of place. 

45 Days Of CCS, #17: Pat Leonhard

I've been watching Pat Leonhard develop his graphic novel Margo since sitting next to him during a class at CCS when I visited for Industry Day in 2018. Margo is a horror-comedy-fantasy novel that is a cross between "The Monkey's Paw," Shawn Of The Dead, aliens, monsters, ancient civilizations, and much more. Part 1 is the first 70 or so pages of a story that's over 200 pages. Despite the fact that the book turns out to be an epic, at its heart it's the story of the friendship between Margo (a reanimated zombie girl) and Fran (the weird museum-obsessed kid who comes up with a lot of great plans. 

Leonhard loves to create double-takes for readers. The first comes when we meet Margo, and the reader realizes that she's a zombie or ghoul, with part of her face eaten away. She is also a perfectly typical girl. The second comes after she bites her half-sister Becky, and the reader realizes that Margo has accidentally turned her into a flesh-craving zombie. Leonhard unspools the plot slowly so as to focus on mean girl dynamics and to introduce Margo's cruelly buffoonish father Mortimer. It is revealed that Margo's mother is an archeologist who discovered a real-life monkey's paw amid an ancient civilization. Mortimer stupidly uses the paw to make a wish, but the wishes are cursed--Margo dies as a result. He reluctantly brings her back from the dead, but she comes back as the undead, which leads to her mother being able to speak only in an ancient language, which lands her in a mental hospital. 

Leonhard has gone through a lot of permutations in order to make two key segments of the book not only readable, but wildly entertaining. Part of this is his clever use of color. For the segment that reveals the key scenes in the story "The Monkey's Paw," Leonhard uses a sepia tone designed to make the pages look like an old horror comic (except for one page, where he forgets to do this). For the scene where we learn why and how Margo's mother wound up in her situation, Leonhard uses a purple wash in an action-packed segment. Giving the reader a lot of narrative pipe while finding ways to keep it entertaining prevents the story from bogging down until it really blasts off halfway through. There are so many delightful little jokes, easter eggs, and other visual details that enhance what Leonhard is doing. The final version will be an absurd, action-oriented YA fantasy on the level of Mathew New's excellent Billy Johnson book.

45 Days Of CCS, #16: Faith Cox, Penina Gal

Obstructions, Vol 0, by Penina Gal. I've always enjoyed Gal's work, whether it's fantasy, memoir, or comics-as-poetry. This time around, it's graphic medicine, in a zine about their Upper Airway Resistance Disorder (UARS). It's a cousin to the more common sleep apnea, but like many "hidden" disorders, especially for AFAB people, it's often misdiagnosed as a psychiatric disorder. The comic is interesting, as it's an illustrated guide to the symptoms and treatment for the disease, with occasional interjections by Gal as to their experiences. It describes their sleepiness in high school as well as out of breath while running in college. It includes detailed drawings of the orthodontic apparatus that they are currently wearing. This is less a traditional narrative than it is a kind of medical diary, as future updates are promised in this interesting hybrid of diagrams and drawings. 

I Can Feel It All, by Faith Cox. Many comics are howls, raging against pain, trauma, and mental illness. Fewer comics show the breakthroughs, the moments where the fog clears, and the pain subsides. That's what this comic is, as Cox enumerates all of the things they are taking the time to feel: their inner calm, the gardens in her neighborhood, the fruit at the farmer's market, and the summer air. She discusses the feeling of being a "prisoner to yourself," and the central theme of the comic is not taking any of it for granted. Cox's open-page layouts allow the images to breathe in the same way her character is breathing free, and the sketchiness of the drawings gives the whole thing a sense of immediacy.

45 Days Of CCS, #15: Ana Two

Ana Two's Hyperfawnus got an Ignatz nomination, and it was well-earned despite it being so short (just twelve pages of story). There's a neat trick and swerve on the first two pages, where we see a deer and a girl, and we are led to believe that the girl is the narrator, as the narration says "Follow me, little fawn." Instead, it's the Old Man of the Forest who's narrating, which we learn when the girl accidentally shoots the deer with an arrow. The rest of the comic is devoted to the price she must eventually pay after she refuses to fulfill the price of a single drop of blood. It's clear by the way that Two uses color, as well as their themes, that E.M. Carroll is a big influence. However, Two uses Carroll as a launching point for their own themes, interests, stories, and visual expression, rather than directly imitate what Carroll does. This comic is a great example of a story where much is hinted at but little is revealed, other than what is directly needed to resolve the character narrative. Here, that narrative is simply a price that must be paid; all other motivations and world-building remain unspoken. Two's panel design frames the work with unusual shapes, and the concave construction of many of them leads to a feeling of things closing in on the protagonist. 

Their latest project is Darkroom, published by the Shortbox Comics Fair. (Full disclosure: there is a longer version in the works that Fieldmouse might become involved with.) The story follows a vampire named Seraphina, forever in a young body despite her many years. She's in love with a photographer named Lynn, who is obsessed with trying to capture her on film. The story flashes several decades to Seraphina and another lover named Esther who was also obsessed with trying to photograph her. The other member of the cast is a mousy detective named Ira who has found a trail of bodies following Seraphina, and they are closing in.

Ana Two's comics explore a lot of aspects of power relationships and exchange vis-a-vis kink. That's part of what's going on here, but the main thrust of the character narrative is objectification. Seraphina is clearly a monster, but she is capable of love. Feeding for her is like a shark eating its prey; it is an amoral act of survival. Two gives some hints about how Seraphina lives with herself; memory for her is not a linear process, but instead "swimming upstream a river." What she remembers is "blood, tastes, scents." This explains why she doesn't completely recall how the older photographer, Esther, used her in the same way Lynn did. All Seraphina wanted was a connection, no matter how fleeting they all tended to be, but what the photographers wanted was their own version of immortality, through their work, using Seraphina as the means to get there. Ana Two's use of color is brilliant: grayscale wash (with spot color) for modern-day scenes, sepia wash for the older scenes, and a dark red wash for the darkroom. Two's work is thoughtful, subtle, and forceful all at once. 

45 Days Of CCS, #14: Colleen Frakes

One has to admire Colleen Frakes' persistence. One of the original CCS students from the class of 2007, Frakes is one of the few from the class who has continued to do comics since graduating. Knots represents her first book with a big-sandbox publisher after many attempts. It's interesting that it's a quasi-autobiographical book, considering that much of her output throughout her career has been fantasy comics with a feminist edge. The main exception was Island Brat, about spending part of her childhood on a prison island where her parents were guards. I've always loved Frakes' self-caricature, thanks in part to her pen-and-ink mastery and use of gesture. 

With Knots being a book from a big publisher, it's not surprising that it was in full color, which was done by Mercedes Campos López. I've read several comics from López in color that looked great, but the color in this book feel perfunctory at best, and a lot of it drowns out Frakes' linework. Indeed, her line weight feels a tad thinner than in her other work, leading to a sketchy spareness that is ill-served by the color filling up space in the blank backgrounds. Considering that the plot follows a disaster when Frakes' stand-in character dyes her hair, the use of color for hair looks surprisingly flat because of the variety of background color fills. I wish this book had a 2-color wash or used brighter spot colors to emphasize hair. 

That said, Frakes' cartooning was still top-notch and the story was so surprisingly raw. Most middle-grade memoirs tend to focus on friendships and/or romances, but Knots is a story about a family going through a difficult time. Frakes was wise to make this quasi-biographical, because it allowed her to smooth over certain narrative elements to make the story flow well, while still retaining key elements from her own experience. The story follows Norah, entering into sixth grade, who is trying to find ways to express herself. She lives her parents and hellraising younger sister Lark, and it's established that her family has had to move multiple times because they kept getting transferred in their employment as prison guards. 

The plot device of Norah giving herself a bad dye job and wrecking it a few times is the story's visual hook. The real story comes when Norah's mom is transferred yet again, which leads to her parents deciding to split the family up. Her tempestuous mother would take Lark with her to their new city, while Norah would remain with her easygoing father. Frakes completely sidestepped predictable formula work here with a tremendously vulnerable, revealing, and frequently absurd portrayal of a family that was trying to do its best but was struggling. In this portrayal, there are no villains; however, there is a major critique of both parents who don't listen and Norah, who is afraid to speak up and express her needs. 

Frakes does a marvelous job in portraying Norah's anxiety and fears surrounding her parents' jobs working in law-enforcement, often in hilarious ways. At one point, Norah has a nightmare that her teacher calls the cops on her, her parents divorce as a result, and she goes to prison with her quarrelsome younger sister. When she's told it's a spider prison (a huge fear), Norah bolts awake and wonders "What is wrong with my brain?" Norah's awkwardness is as relatable as her wanting to expand her horizons and get out of her comfort zone. The intense loneliness she feels after her mother leaves, with her father working constantly, is portrayed in an almost palpable way. Hooking the narrative into a classmate who was sent to live with his grandparents after a casual admission of neglect in class added another level of very real pain in a way that is unusual for this kind of book. In the end, Norah is able to express herself more clearly when her parents want to move again, and they finally start to listen. That said, she noted that things didn't magically change, either--everyone just tried a little harder, but at least they were together. It's that sense of authenticity, even in a work of (mostly) fiction, that sets Knots apart. 

On top of that, Frakes' catch-up mini So What's New With You? talks about Knots, her husband and daughter, video games, and doing an event with cartoonist Laura Knetzger where she affirms that she plans to continue to self-publish. It certainly provided that pen-and-ink fix I missed in Knots!

45 Days Of CCS, #13: E.B. Sciales and Gabrielle Tinnirello

There is something delightfully old-fashioned about E.B. Sciales' comic Sal #1, featuring "Sal, the Tiny Artist." This pen-and-ink collection of gag strips feels like something I might have seen in a "Best Cartoons of 1957" book that Lawrence Lariar put together back in the day, but they also feel delightfully fresh. Wearing a jaunty beret and sporting a thin handlebar mustache, Sal is always feverishly at work on a new painting. Whether he's spilling a lot of sweat over a single dot or fretting endlessly over someone possibly making money with a painting he through away, Sciales' expressive cartooning makes Sal an instantly compelling character. Every gesture is meaningful and intentional, and Sciales is especially adept at using space in interesting ways. Frequently eschewing a standard grid, Sciales flips between open page layouts, squiggly panel borders, panels that are puffy-bordered dream sequences, and a host of other techniques. Sciales has the chops to do any kind of gag or humor comics she wants.

Gabrielle Tinnirello's zines are consistently beautiful, colorful, and emotionally vulnerable. I'm not exactly sure that they are comics in any traditional sense. Her extensive use of mixed media does convey a sort of emotional narrative even if there's not any kind of grid or familiar use of an open-page layout. J'Obsessed features a cavalcade of photos of Tinnirello in a bikini, surrounded by a whirl of collage images that include name stickers, photos, decorative hand-drawn patterns, her own hand-lettered commentary, and other colorful images that express Tinnirello's unabashed and unfiltered sense of joy. Local Whorish is a much more dense diary comic following Tinnirello's self-described "boy crazy" summer and her various crushes. The feeling she captures here is one of tantalizing possibilities, the thrill of desire and being desired. She rides that wave throughout the comic as she employs her exaggerated, looping line that centers her intense use of decorative elements. Those elements dominate every page, as though Tinnirello is inviting the reader to frolic inside her journal or vision board with her. That said, her figures (a mix of cute and distorted) still stand out and fit snugly with the other elements on her page. Her comics are more about a feeling than narrative, and one can't help but feel the sweet pangs of her almost innocently portrayed crushes along with her.

 

45 Days Of CCS, #12: Wayne Carter and King Ray

Wayne Carter is a humorist. The comics I've seen from him have been absurd and well-designed, with sly surprises. His comic The Saddest Angriest Black Boy Anywhere initially seems like a joking tribute to Robyn Smith's classic The Saddest Angriest Black Girl In Town, down to the use of a vellum cover with an image that overlays an image underneath it. However, it is most certainly its own thing apart from what Smith did, even as it describes a similar experience: being a Black person in the extremely white White River Junction, VT. Smith talked about how othering this experience was, and did it in her own poetic, sensitive style. Carter addressed similar issues in his own style, which is satirical and blunt. He uses a fluid open-page layout and begins with a slavery "joke" that someone made at a bonfire he held. 

Carter then lists a bunch of microaggressions, just plain aggressions (like a cashier who refused to acknowledge him), and the essential point of just how exhausting it is to live in an environment like this. This comic is a seething, unapologetic expression of how angry he is at this exhaustion, but it is also a love letter to Smith, who was his professor at CCS. As he said, "She made it feel less lonely." That said, the comic focuses less on outright, in-your-face racism from that cashier and more on his white peers who see him as someone to foist all of their insecurities about race upon. Part of that anger is that their feelings are not his problem. The comic is also a statement on his own identity, mixing sequential anecdotes with full-page text stops for emphasis. He ends by noting "Here is a place where my anger is good. My anger leads me through the bad." He makes no claims for anyone else, which is one of the most important points of the comic: Carter doesn't presume to speak for others, so why do others presume to speak for him and project their fears on him? Carter makes a statement here, and he does it in style.

King Ray's comic Birds vs Planes is typical of Ray's quirky storytelling and the way they integrate word and image on the page. It manages to include the crazy tale of pilot "Sully" Sullenberg, who famously managed to land a plane after geese flew into his engines, as a sort of patron saint figure who brings peace to the warring factions of birds and (sentient) planes. As it turns out, the conflict between birds and planes was heightened when a bird named Claudia and a plane named Steve fell in love and later broke up. This triggered all-out war before Sully stepped in to promote peace and announce that Claudia was pregnant with Steve's child. Ray cleverly transfers soap-opera tropes to a ridiculous scenario that nonetheless has its own internal logic.

45 Days Of CCS, #11: Amelia B.C. Dutton (ABCD)

Amelia B.C. Dutton has the awesome pen name of ABCD, and this first-year student has already stacked up a few impressive-looking minis. Leading the way is Arcana Arena (Chapter Zero), the first part of what clearly seems to be her long-form project going forward. Done in what appears to be extremely dense digital color, it follows a character who has been invited to be on a "televised tournament of skill" wherein each participant represents one of the 22 major arcana. The protagonist is the Chariot, and she furtively leaves home under the cover of night on her motorbike Rhonda to travel cross-country in order to participate. This comic essentially sets up the basics: it's a competition of some kind, and the judges are the four Aces (Wands, Swords, Cups, and Pentacles). The Chariot is a little stressed about the competition, and the judges are stressed that one member of the Arcana is missing: the Fool, naturally. Dutton lays character exaggeration and expression on thick, and the project feels like it's heavily influenced by animation. Most of the time this looks interesting, but some of the figures have the stiffness of illustration instead of the fluidity of cartooning. I suspect this will change in future chapters where the contests actually begin. 

Error 404 is a short mini done solely in pencil. It dips once again into Tarot for the cover, and it follows a character whose computer stops working. Taking it to a strange shop for repair, she gets a very nasty surprise from the repairman. It's a shocking end to a 9-page story, as the poor protagonist never has a chance. Dutton's pencil work is expressive and dense, but her sketchy characters have a lot of life. The final mini here is bittercold, which is about a breed of insect called the "bittercold moth" that swarms on trees and carries pathogens that cause depression. This is a beautifully-cartooned comic that is a sort of compromise between the denseness of the first comic and the sketchiness of the second. It's also somewhere between a body horror comic and an emotionally resonant metaphor for mental illness, especially in cold, isolated places. Dutton packed a lot of punch into three short comics, and their ambitious visual storytelling got my attention in each comic.