45 Days Of CCS, #42: Sandy Steen Bartholomew

Sandy Steen Bartholomew, a supremely skilled cartoonist and illustrator, submitted four different items for review. First is a kids' book, Blue Roo, which is a comic but does have some sequential elements. It's about a girl named Albina, who is obsessed with the color white and overall tidiness and order in all things. Her most prized possession was her white kangaroo stuffie Roo. When her messy little brother Jojo accidentally gets Roo dirty, he panics and sends Jojo down the laundry chute, where he gets mixed in with colors and turns blue! This provokes a crisis for poor Albina, until Jojo returns Roo to her and Albina learns to loosen up. Blue Roo is a pure delight, and I especially like how Bartholomew uses lettering as part of the storytelling. I've rarely seen text incorporated in such a way with the drawings in a children's book, and it's clear she means to delight readers with both aspects of storytelling.

The minicomic Fish takes the prompts from an Inktober challenge and combines it with the 24-hour comic challenge. Most 24-hour comics are terrible, but Bartholomew manages to create an odd narrative about the titular fish finding the body of a mouse king and endeavoring to free his spirit. The king returns the favor by saving him from horseshoe crabs. Bartholomew kind of uses brute force to string together the otherwise unconnected prompts without any other text, but it works because of the surreal quality of the images and the propulsiveness of her storytelling. Learning To Surf was the result of a 30-day daily drawing exercise done spontaneously each day. Bartholomew's characters are often versions of herself from childhood, and this is no exception, as a girl is swept along into the heart of a whale and discovers the fish from the previous mini there to help her. The mix of black & white and spot color is very effective as the quest goes in interesting directions.

From these two comics, I get the sense that despite her talent and imagination, Bartholomew struggles without structure. This is evident in issue six of Begin Again, her autobiographical series that shifts from diary comics to gags and in this issue, a year's worth of drawings of her extensive toy collection. While this isn't really a comic, it's still interesting to focus on how much comfort Bartholomew drew (and still draws) from these toys. They were companions at some points of life that were clearly lonely ones, and it was obviously deeply meaningful for her to honor them by way of her craft. Bartholomew is still trying to find herself as a cartoonist and creator, but her ability to comfort and delight herself with the joy of her own art is quite evident.