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.