31 Days Of CCS, #3: Ana Two, Iris Gudeon

Ana Two is one of the most exciting artists to emerge from CCS this decade (and I believe this so fervently, that we will be publishing book by them soon). This little mini, Storm Drain, came from this year's Riff Raff anthology, which in turn is edited by CCS alum King Ray. This is only a 4-page, but so many of Two's interesting storytelling elements are at work here. This is a two-track narrative, with the first arc being about a nameless narrator leaving behind a journal on a napkin that yearned to be drained, washed away, and become a new person. This accompanies the distorted, psychedelic imagery of a body wasting away, becoming skeletal, and finally being reformed. The bottom third of each page is taken up by big text, acting as a sort of call-and-response with the rest of the narrative. Every gesture and statement Two makes in their comics is big. The emotions are over-the-top, bursting out--uncontainable. The desire to live, to die, to control, to be controlled, supercedes everything else, and the exaggerated art reflects. 

I find Iris Gudeon's strange little comics to be utterly baffling in a way I enjoy. The figures (usually animals) are simple and cute, the humor is often corny in a deliberately labored way, and it all amounts to what you see is what you get. There's no larger message, no intricate character work, no intense drawings. It is purely strange and cute gag work, but less in terms of having punchlines and more in terms of one artist's fancy flowing smoothly and freely on the page. All of this is true about Standing Cats, whose sensibilities are somewhere between Dr. Seuss and B.Kliban. Drawn in what looks like colored pencils, there's a vibrancy to these yellow cats going about various activities, including building chairs (with or without a sense of obligation), doing taxes, and staring at the sun. It's just a bit of nonsense, but I always look forward to this kind of nonsense from Gudeon. One thing I did notice is that their line is much more confident here than it was in their earlier minis. 

31 Days Of CCS, #2: Daryl Seitchik & Ellie Liota

Daryl Seitchik has built up an impressive body of work since their first minis over a dozen years ago, and I was especially excited to see another "Missy" comic. These comics are adapted from her childhood diaries, and Seitchik seamlessly works that material into a visual presentation that offers up ironic, funny, cruel, and deeply sad juxtapositions against the original text. As the title suggests, the new Missy 9/11 is Seitchik's impressions of the 9/11 terrorist attack as an 11-year-old in middle school. An entry a few days before the event finds her lamenting her body image and slow going through puberty. The next entry is two days after 9/11, and she's already moved on. The rest of the comic is structured as a news report, starring Daryl as a newscaster clad in a red jacket, first commenting on the school cafeteria's food and then moving on to 9/11 itself. A later story where that particular date had its own family meaning is a fascinating anecdote, and young Seitchik's attempts at creating a sense of gravity with her text are painfully earnest. Seitchik's cartooning, as always, is fluid and assured, and the red, white & blue color palette adds an additional satirical touch. 

Ellie Liota's Foreward is an older comic, done as part of the Ed Emberley assignment at CCS. This assignment calls for students to draw a comic in the style of Emberley: built on circles, squares, and triangles. It's a reduction of line to its basics that asks a cartoonist to focus instead on the cartooning that can be created through this simplicity of form. Liota further constrains things by rendering everything within a six-panel grid. She deliberately plays around with negative space by not introducing any kind of backgrounds--the reader is asked to focus on a tiny figure and what they have to say. Liota essentially turns this into a meta exploration of Emberley's technique, focusing on formal elements as the character brings forth various colorful objects. Later, it becomes meditative, as the figure asks the reader a number of questions. It's playful all the way through, and that sense of play through the motion on the page is the essence of Emberley's work. 

31 Days Of CCS, #1: Colleen Frakes

Kicking off another year of reviews of alumni and students of the Center for Cartoon Studies, it's fitting that I should start with Colleen Frakes. This is the 20th anniversary of the school, which is frankly astonishing. It points to the need for and viability of a focused curriculum for comics, as comics have become a more pervasive medium in the past twenty years. Frakes was one of the first graduates of CCS, and she's maintained a steady practice even as she's had to go through a few odysseys in order to get published. I've always enjoyed her take on fairy tales and myths, as well as her autobiographical material, and she produced quite a bit in the past year. 

After a delay to finish her graphic novel Knots, Frakes finished another long-running project, Iron Scars. That was originally released as a series of short minicomics, but she finished the back half in a nearly 200-page collection. A lot of Frakes' work is informed by her unusual childhood growing up on a prison island off the coast of the state of Washington. Iron Scars reimagines that island as originally having been claimed by faeries until humans stumbled upon it and settled it without permission. In the first book, it's established that faeries were not only stealing human children and turning them into changelings, they were also making their parents forget that they even had children. Opposing them were the witches of the island, including the bizarre, doddering Sea Witch. She was one of many fun character designs, as she was essentially a humanoid pile of seaweed and fish. 

The action of this book starts with some kids who managed to open a portal to the Faerie realm in order to rescue their missing siblings. The more interesting part of the story is the multi-generational conflict among the witches, especially as it's revealed that a war between Faerie and the witches traumatized the family and led to a couple of deaths. Frakes did some very clever world-building in setting up how each witch was different: a sky witch and a wood witch, but also a book witch and a math witch. Frakes never skimps on putting her characters in danger and creates some stakes that have teeth, and the action sequences in Faerie are harrowing and unpredictable. The changelings really play to Frakes' strengths as an artist, as their simplicity is amplified by essentially being little piles of black ink. 

Possibly due to the delay in finishing the book, Frakes' style noticeably changes about halfway through, as she refines her normally chunky line weight into something thinner. The lettering also changes from all caps to mixed-case, and it's also thinner and clearer. The change is a little jarring, and I don't think it was an improvement. Indeed, that chunky line was one of the things I liked best about her art. Iron Scars has a lot of characters, and they're sometimes hard to keep track of, but Frakes keeps the narrative pretty steady even with such a large cast. I'm glad she finished it, especially as it touched on a lot of images from her old Tragic Relief minicomics series. 

Frakes' new series is called Cursed, appearing on her Patreon. You can see her new style in its full form here, no doubt influenced by making Knots. This is in full color, and that thinner line makes a lot more sense with color. The first chapter finds Baba Yaga (a recurring character in Frakes' comics) turning a village girl into a horse after she revealed the girls went to the nearby city to have children.  The second finds a witch rejecting a local woman for fear of what a romance between them might bring, as well as various talking animals and some odd quests. This one's just getting warmed up, but I really like Frakes' use of decorative touches and her use of color. Cursed also feels a little lighter and more whimsical than many of her fantasy stories. 

How Are You Doing? is Frakes' latest catch-up memoir. I've said it before, and it's still true--Frakes' self-caricature is one of my favorites in all of comics. There's a slightly rubbery quality to the way she draws limbs that's perfectly cartoony and fits snugly with her mix of sincerity and cynicism. There's also a sense of how profoundly upsetting and awful the world has become--how does one react? Make comics, raise your kid, try to teach others. There's also a bit of family drama in there, which is rare since Frakes rarely writes about her family in the present tense. As always, I prefer her heavier line weights, and there's plenty of these comics in there. 

Finally, there's Hourly Comics: 2020-2025. I find such comics gimmicks often have limited long-term appeal, but the aforementioned virtues of Frakes' line paired with year-to-year changes and similarities make for a surprisingly cohesive package. For example, one highlight each year was going on a walk with a friend and her dog with a gloriously lustrous coat. We also get to see Frakes & family deal with COVID and watch her daughter jump from being a newborn to a toddler. Frakes has worked on her line, her cartooning, and her storytelling relentlessly for well over 20 years now, and her commitment to her craft and joy in her storytelling are apparent on every page.