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.