45 Days Of CCS, #5: Daryl Seitchik

It's been enjoyable to follow Daryl Seitchik's ambitions as a cartoonist and publisher. With partner Dan Nott, their Parsifal Press has released some interesting comics. That includes Seitchik's fantasy series Follow That Doll, which leans heavily on Russian folklore. The second issue follows young Elena, who must endure her new stepmother and two daughters. Elena has a magical doll that looks just like her (a sort of matryoshka doll) that her stepmother discovers, and she forces Elena to make dresses for her daughters so they can marry wealthy men. The doll helps Elena do this as she's thrown on the fire every night, only to return in the morning with colorful thread. A strange young man haunts her dreams and appears outside of her window, delivering a message that says, "The witch is watching you."

Baba Yaga, the witch figure of Slavic folklore, has always had multiple guises and interpretations. Given that one of the people Seitchik thanks in the acknowledgments is Baba Yaga herself, it's pretty clear where they come down on this issue. This series is one of many stories seeking to rethink witches' tales from a feminist perspective, instead of seeing witches as being unequivocally evil. That's a narrative pushed by men and patriarchal religious hierarchies, while witches had more to do with women's health and well-being than anything else. Baba Yaga is both a creator and destroyer, and in Follow The Doll, that ambiguity plays out with regard to Elena's deceased mother and her stepmother's revulsion toward anything that remained of her in the house. Of course, the stepmother was willing to play with metaphorical fire if it meant she got what she wanted, and Seitchik hints at an interesting comeuppance. 

What sets this apart from Seitchik's other projects is their beautiful, meticulous use of color. In this story, color has a decorative purpose as well as a narrative purpose. Seitchik's storytelling has always had a muted, deadpan quality to it, especially with regard to character design and even lettering. This visual restraint has always been in contrast to the subconscious and emotional turmoil their characters experience. You can see that play out here in the early going, as even the brightness of the dresses is muted by the dour quality of the stepmother. However, Seitchik later just goes for it, with a spectacular splash page featuring a burning bed on a black background. They follow that up with an interstitial page with decorative features with a shell motif, which segues into Elena having a dream about meeting a mysterious young man underwater. Elena makes a comment about understanding that she is compelled to "stitch her inner chaos into a pattern," and one gets the sense that this is what Seitchik has always done as a cartoonist.