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!