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.