45 Days Of CCS, #4: Iris Yan

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

45 Days Of CCS, #3: Chuck Forsman

Chuck Forsman's career has seen a lot of unpredictability. Even his most extreme genre projects were always oddly paced and filled with many moments of reflection. In a fantasy anthology like Snake Oil, the demons had their own side conversations that had nothing to do with the humans they were torturing. In The End Of The Fucking World, the small moments defined the relationship between the two leads to an achingly painful extent. Even in his hyper-violent ode to 80s action b-movies, Revenger, Forsman had long stretches of flashbacks and monologue time in between his carefully crafted fight scenes. 

That said, I still wasn't prepared for his ode to John Stanley comics filtered through a sleazy, nasty lens called Here Comes...Chesley. The title character, Chesley Gooseneck, is revealed to be an orphan whose parents hanged themselves. Young Chesley keeps a noose around his neck as a reminder. He pals around his rich pal Morty Sweetstock and gets into adventures that are like demented Harvey Comics. In the opener, we meet the appropriately named Bert Crime, a homeless grifter who accidentally kills his dog in the first story and then tries to swindle Chesley and Morty with a "candy mine." Morty tricks Bert ala a Richie Rich scheme, but Chesley is genuinely beside himself with sorrow for making Bert feel bad. In a subtle way, this story and the comic in general are a master class in how to use subtle details to create atmosphere. Forsman's use of a flat, four-color color scheme that mimics the sort of comics he's doing an homage to, complete with dropping out background details in flavor of bold color swashes. His character design feels like it's something old fashioned without there being a particular artist or style he's referencing. The way he draws hair, for example, is highly stylized: three swoops for Morty, an unruly mop for Chesley, and a Josephine Baker-style hairdo for Myrna. 

Forsman does something else that's interesting: he follows Chesley as he gets older. First, he and Morty bribe a clown to let them into the "Lurid Exotic Ladies" show at the carnival, only for the dancer (Myrna Lovely) to chastise them for sneaking in. As it turns out, she's Morty's lover. The running theme of Chesley constantly being traumatized by everything to the point of total surrender but being attracted to people cooler than him leads to painfully wistful encounters with a skateboarder and a weird girl at school.

 There's an essential sweetness to this sad sack of a character that is brought into sharp relief in the story "Extremity." Here, an older, teenage Chesley is going down on his girlfriend, who stops him because she's not in the mood but notices fork marks on his hand. He recounts the cops picking up him for graffiti, his cruel grandmother drugging him, and then stabbing him with a fork when he had trouble waking up. There's a matter-of-factness to Chesley's acceptance of his misery, yet there's an agency that suggests that he will only tolerate so much. His essential sweetness is unchanged and he's still very much a clod of a teenager, but no matter what happens to him, he's always surrounded by people who like him and even stand up for him. Despite all the mayhem, it's one of Forsman's less nihilistic comics, even if the road to meaning is difficult. 

45 Days Of CCS, #2: Bread Tarleton

It's been exciting to track Bread Tarleton's development as a cartoonist. (Full disclosure: Fieldmouse Press will be publishing their book, Soften The Blow, early in 2025.) The writing and concepts have always been there, but Tarleton has notably sharpened not just their drawing, but their entire vocabulary surrounding cartooning. You can see how confident they are now on the page as they start to enter their mature period as a cartoonist. Tarleton's comics are about suffering, growth, and love, and the ways all three are connected. 

That's certainly the case in their one-person anthology showcase Ponyshow. The opening story is a conversation in a diner from the point of view of an otherwise unseen person. Tarleton uses an unusual angle in order to emphasize the story of the person who arrives and does most of the talking. It's a quiet story about empathy and human connection, and it features Tarleton using cartoony, distorted anatomy to further emphasize point of view. The second story, "Perfect Life," sees Tarelton going in a more surreal direction. An anthropomorphic marble is "born" and goes down a chute to live his life. He's privileged from the start, with a Rube Goldberg mechanism ensuring that he's born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He offers commentary the whole time, as he goes through the "Adult Happiness Machine" after having a baby and then through the "Making Peace Machine" when he felt empty ("Got it! That was easy!") 

The best story was the hilarious, strange, and touching "24 Hours," which is about a man capturing and releasing a fly. Of course, it's not that simple, as he reveals to the fly that he was once a fly but for some reason turned into a human. A reverse-Kafka, if you will. The fly-human gets clothes, a job, food, an apartment, and even a woman (from FetLife, of course) who would let him "fertilize her ovipositor." Things take a dark turn when someone sees through his horrific disguise, and even the released fly comes to a tragic (but hilarious) end. There's a sad, droopy quality that Tarleton gives to the protagonist, and this is a story where you can see the ways in which Tarleton's cartooning has leveled up. The other stories are brief anecdotes about an older man at a beach with his family recalling ritually humiliating someone in the army, a cigarette that lasts all summer, a "lone wolf" desperate for attention, and a series of floral gifts from an abandoned bouquet. Tarleton exquisitely captures moments in time: absurd, cruel, painful, loving, and tender. 

Horse 2 goes in a different direction, as Tarleton takes on the challenge of one of the more infamously difficult things to draw and turns it once again into a choose-your-own-adventure story. It reminds me a bit of the extreme absurdity of a Jason Shiga story in the same vein, where things can get out of hand very quickly in extreme ways. This isn't just a story about a horse; it's about a horse who finds a time machine. In addition to being funny, the whole thing is clever, as traveling forward or back in time has different implications. On top of that, going back and doing different stories gets you the code for a secret page which is wonderfully meta that ends the issue. Even in the silliest of stories, Tarleton still has a way of making an emotional connection with their readers. Sometimes this is dramatic, and sometimes it is mundane, but the feelings of Tarleton's characters are always every bit as important as the narrative itself. 

45 Days Of CCS, #1: Emma Hunsinger

If you're a cartoonist and you're trying to make actual money in the profession, it's been fairly well-established that the only genres that are growing and paying real money are middle-grade and kids' comics. Even the young adult genre was long ago oversaturated in the market, especially as more and more young cartoonists have emerged. As such, while I was happy to see that the very talented Emma Hunsinger got a middle-grade deal with Harper Collins, I was also a bit sad to see her perhaps limited in a genre that has fairly exacting rules. 

I needn't have worried. Her debut How It All Ends is not only one of the most sharply-realized narratives about the middle-school years I've ever read, it actually feels like it's on the same continuum as her CCS thesis project, Chunk. That was a beautifully-cartooned, emotionally complex, and nuanced story about awkward love relationships and friendships at art school. How It All Ends is a similarly layered story about a young girl trying to establish her identity after skipping a grade and going straight to high school. Hunsinger's loving depiction of Tara Gimmel, her sister Isla, and Tara's delightfully overactive imagination is a visual feast and a master class on how to write dialogue. 

Hunsinger's style is a delightfully expressive series of scribbles and scrawls that emphasizes gesture, body language, and the relationship of bodies in space above all else. She avoids a traditional grid in favor of a more fluid open-page layout, but her attention to story flow is impeccable. Her big gimmick for the book is that Tara is a daydreamer, imagining all sorts of fanciful (and sometimes anxiety-inducing) scenarios that allow Hunsinger to really cut loose in fun ways. Tillie Walden did the colors for the book, and Hunsinger wisely used a mostly two-tone scheme. When Tara is engaged with the world, the color wash is a foam-green. When she's off on a flight of fancy, the wash is a variant of red. Happier fantasies are lighter shades of red, but anxiety is closer to brick red. This simple distinction does so much work in the book, both narratively and emotionally. 

Hunsinger gets out of her own way with regard to the plot. She keeps it bare-bones simple, as the narrative is entirely about Tara adjusting to going from 7th grade to 9th grade, and how difficult this process is. Her own anxiety is in the way, but it's less a plot device to be overcome and more a chance for Tara to deeply examine herself. Her older sister Isla (two years ahead) is a crucial character: something of a guide and a mentor, but she's going through her own stuff. The way that Tara relates to her family is joyful, especially being able to play pretend with her toddler brother. Having that loving foundation makes a later conflict with Isla feel raw and real. They fight (physically and otherwise) the way that only siblings can fight. 

Hunsinger's attention to detail with regard to every character allows the book to breathe and develop in a way that feels organic, instead of seeing the Lesson inherent in these sorts of books from a mile away. The rowdy boys in Tara's English class who slowly come to love the material, the put-upon teacher who learns how to respond to the aggressiveness of the boys, Isla's friends interest in Tara's blossoming friend Jessup all give Tara meaningful characters and situations to bounce off of. Isla is a secondary character (albeit an important one), but she is fleshed out in such a specific and delightful way that I would have been perfectly content reading a book entirely about her. 

All of that sets up the most important parts of the book: Isla's crush on a boy named Joel, and Tara's budding friendship with a girl named Libby. It's clear to the reader regarding Isla's crush, but Tara is not only oblivious to it, she's oblivious to her deeper feelings for Libby. Hunsinger depicts this ache in such a beautiful way precisely because these feelings are messy, complicated, and Tara is clearly not ready for them. Much of the book consists of her confronting the idea that she's not ready for high school and not ready to grow up. She vacillates between pretending she's something she's not at times and feeling as though she's doomed, with a level of catastrophization that is frequently hilarious (but also very much a symptom of OCD). Learning to come to terms with her identity along with pumping the breaks on the idea of romance was such a well-suited ending, and I especially liked the way that Hunsinger avoided romantic cliches and plot entanglements. This is a remarkably assured debut that could easily be part of a series, or I could see Hunsinger doing something completely different but equally compelling.