Ruby Carter's I, Candy

Ruby Carter's I, Candy reveals another side of the artist. Her bird comic (published by Fieldmouse Press) featured minimalist cartooning, deadpan humor, and low-level anxiety throughout. However, her other work (often in color) is often colorful, weird, and grotesque. I, Candy explicitly purports to be about objectification and consumption, and those elements are certainly evident. The title has a double pun regarding both of these elements. There's another word that Carter uses on the back-cover blurb, and it's the most applicable: visceral. 

The comic features the titular performer in fishnet stockings and squeezed into a tight outfit before a crowd of leering eyes. Carter uses a repeating motif of her lipsticked lips twisting, biting, and distorting themselves. The effect is not just visceral, but deliberately lurid. Over the span of the comic, Carter subverts the image of not just a performer on stage, but of any woman enduring the gaze of society at large (and not just a male gaze). The titular Candy complains that she is "always left hungry," and the implication is that she is left devouring herself. That's until the very end, where she pulls her tampon out and munches on it, completing the performance and sating herself at last. 

Carter's commitment to the bit and subversion of burlesque imagery helps punctuate what is simultaneously a solid gag, a political statement, and a howl. Making red the only color seen in the comic helps play up the performative aspects of the comic--both from the perspective of the character and Carter's technical choices. 

Jonathan Baylis' So Buttons #15

Jonathan Baylis has been writing comics for about a decade now, working with cartoonists to relate anecdotes from his life in the tradition of Harvey Pekar. What's changed for him over the years? Well, as evidenced by the latest issue of his anthology series So Buttons, he's starting to think like less as a writer and more as an editor. What I mean by that is that the way he sequences has become more sophisticated and his themes are more emotionally resonant. 

In So Buttons #15 (with a cover by C.M. Campbell that pays homage to a Barry Windsor-Smith cover from a Machine Man miniseries in the 80s), Baylis quickly establishes his theme as fathers and sons. Frequent collaborator Noah Van Sciver is a perfect choice for a loose and expressive story about a younger Baylis going with his father to visit his father's old neighborhood in Brooklyn. The message of the story ("be yourself") was a little pat, but the details of his affection for his father, along with how Baylis was frequently mystified by him, are what linger. The follow-up story, where TJ Kirsch draws a brief anecdote about solid advice on take-out, is a good gag strip that gives further color with regard to their relationship.

Baylis is a film and TV guy, having worked in the industry for a number of years. As such, he often drops interesting anecdotes about various encounters but also describes how and why film has had an impact. Sometimes, like in this issue, it leads to interesting stories, like how David Lynch's films and shows made him feel like a little less of an outsider but also indirectly helped him land a job. (Bhanu Pratrap's angular, distorted cartooning was a perfect match for this subject.) When Baylis stays away from played-out, tedious references like Star Wars or superhero stuff (essentially, Kevin Smith territory) and focuses instead on more personal and meaningful work, it's easier to see how and why it is so resonant for him. 

The stories about his time as an intern at October Films (as drawn by Danny Hellman, Karl Christian Krumpholz, and Nathan Gelgud) are not only interesting on their own as anecdotes, but they also reveal a lot about what's important for him aesthetically and how it bleeds into his personal life. That focus on movie segues into a beautiful story about his recently-deceased mother's love for West Side Story, drawn by Becky Hawkins. What represents a step up for Baylis as a writer is that this isn't simply a sentimental, emotional anecdote (although that is part of it); it's also an examination of the lacuna that now exists about why his mother felt a certain way about things. It's something he will never really know, as there are many mysteries that parents leave behind. The single-page drawing from Eleanor Davis about his mother-in-law is the single best page in the whole comic; it's a beautiful visual explication of not feeling one's own age. 

The only real misstep was Baylis' text explaining his themes at the end. I get why he might have done this, but it felt unnecessary. The themes and how they connected were clear to any reader willing to read closely. That aside, Baylis was right in asserting that this was his most cohesive issue of So Buttons to date. As a writer and as an editor, this is a clear sign that Baylis has hit his stride, and I'm excited to see his work continue to evolve. 

K. Woodman-Maynard's Tuck Everlasting

Adaptations of prose works into comics form can be tricky. How much of the original prose should be kept? What should be trimmed? How does one transform one medium into another while doing justice to both? In the case of K. Woodman-Maynard, it's her use of layout, page composition, and especially color that sets her apart from similar, more visually mundane attempts at adaptations. 

That was true for Tuck Everlasting: The Graphic Novel (written by Natalie Babbitt) as well as her prior adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The evocative metaphors of Fitzgerald were taken to whimsical visual extremes by KWM. For Babbitt, KWM chose to use certain concrete metaphors (like life as a wheel) as a recurring visual motif, and it made each occurrence all the more resonant. 

The story, which concerns a young girl encountering a family made immortal by a spring in a forest near her home, raises all sorts of fascinating philosophical questions about the implications of eternal life. Meeting the immortal Tuck family and being asked to keep their secret while having to contend with the sinister and avaricious Man in the Yellow Suit is all secondary to the protagonist of the story, young Winnie Foster, being forced to examine her deepest beliefs. Beyond simply having an adventure and stepping out of a highly-ordered life, Winnie must think about death and its implications. Interacting with Ma and Pa Tuck, as well as their sons Jesse and Miles, gives her a number of points of view about immortality. Is life just an adventure? Is a life without roots meaningless? As Pa Tuck says, is immortality essentially throwing you off of the wheel of life?

KWM gives each character their own wheel motif; the fun-loving Jesse has a rollercoaster, for example. Winnie's own dilemma is often spelled out in an omniscient narration that's written in the clouds, the trees, and other background elements. It's a clever trick that allows KWM to retain a lot of the original text without making it feel clunky. Indeed, she endeavors to make the lettering part of the art in a number of ways, like the sinister, persistent line of persuasion the Man in the Yellow Suit uses on Winnie's family, as the tails on his word balloons literally ensnares them. KWM's clever page composition often turns tree branches or roots into panels, creating a beautiful flow that allows the reader to process a lot of information very quickly.

However, it's KWM's use of watercolors to set tone and mood that does most of the storytelling work here. Shifting between the naturalistic hues of summer to highly expressionistic uses of color meant to depict emotion allows her to shift the mood in the comic without needing to make it obvious with her other storytelling. The result is something both lush and heartfelt, exciting but bittersweet. 

31 Days Of CCS, #13: Liz Barker

Liz Barker's first-year CCS comics are both very interesting variations of two time-tested assignments. The first, Fox Chicken Seed Bag, is the Ed Emberley assignment, using simple shapes like squares, triangles, and circles to tell a story. This is a hilarious expansion on the old problem of the farmer who has to take a fox, a chicken, and a bag of seed across a river, but can only take one at a time. The logical piece that Barker adds is the chicken saving the fox in the early part of the story, therefore incurring a life debt. This bit of ridiculousness extends to the chicken owing a life debt to a bag of seed, and a quest ensues that also somehow wraps in the old "one guard lies, one guard tells the truth" trope. What makes the comic work is Barker's talent for dialogue and comedic timing. 

The Rooster And The Maids is a variant of the Aesop's fable assignment. Here, Barker goes heavy on dense pencils in this story of an imperious woman and the three young women she has in her employ as maids. The maids first blame (and kill) the rooster for waking their employer, then realize that she's totally unhinged and apply the same solution to her (the axe). The dense pencil hatching in the margins serves to emphasize the loose expressiveness of Barker's gestural drawings. The whole presentation feels rough in the best possible way--a lot of first line, best line. 

31 Days Of CCS, #12: Jeff Lok

Most of Jeff Lok's career was spent on extremely dark, bizarre humor comics. His scratchy line was a big part of the appeal of those strips. We at Fieldmouse Press published his memoir Totality, which represented a big step forward artistically and narratively. Lok didn't lose any of his bleak, acidic sense of humor in a memoir that was essentially a takedown of the American Dream.

His most recent comic, Fifth Time's A Charm, continues his focus on memoir, this time turning back to his childhood. Lok picks at old, strange memories, unspooling creepy but otherwise not totally events. Much like in Totality, where crazy events are told in a matter-of-fact, deadpan style, so too does this comic start with Lok sucking on a strap-on dildo before he gets pegged by a woman. The gag here is that it's in a seedy motel, but both of them were surprised that the bed wasn't bolted down. Lok's roly-poly character design and scratchy line obliterate any trace of the erotic from this scene; it's meant to be absurd. 

This causes him to reminisce about his childhood friend whose father recorded him constantly (and creepily) and threw him down the stairs randomly. His friend's behavior was weird enough to suggest that there was some kind of horrific abuse going on, but it stayed just outside young Lok's awareness. Much of this comic focus on core memories but also memory gaps, implying that trauma is the cause for a lot of these gaps. What's most interesting about this comic is that just when it seems like Lok is rambling discursively with an anecdote, he suddenly ties it back into this central, vague idea that there's a mystery he can't quite unravel. An anecdote about being trapped in the Dartmouth library at night was a way for Lok to explore the idea of fate, as he uncovered a book that he not only never saw again, he was unable to prove that it even existed. There's a David Lynch quality to all of this: the dark underpinnings of a childhood that had certain utopian qualities, like his parents building a treehouse, a swimming pool, and more in their expansive back yard. The presence of his friend undermined all of this somehow, yet Lok freely associated with him. Lok has really hit on something here, and it's exciting to see him work in the same vein as Totality. 

31 Days Of CCS, #11: Short Comics from Faith Cox, Ashley Jablonski, August Driussi, Michael Albrecht, Coco Fox, Mercedes Campos Lopez

Some short CCS reviews for some short CCS comics: 

a berry silly Love Letter, by Coco Fox. Fox is really good at cute, pun-based comics, and this tiny comic sealed in a tiny envelope (sealed with wax!) is no exception. The puns here are based on food, and it's reflelctive of the kind of kids' comics that she's best known for, as well as her penchant for art and craft projects. 

Life Is A Hiiighway, by A. Driussi. This is a hilarious mini about how doing a Lightning McQueen drag king act changed his gender identity. Hilariously, it caused him to want to be a car, but he settled on being a man instead. The drawing of Driussi in that drag is completely ridiculous, and the whole thing is a very lighthearted (yet true-to-life) account of deciding to transition. The almost lurid color scheme is what makes it work.

The Long Game, by Mercedes Campos Lopez. The thing I immediately noticed about this short bit of autobio is how much smoother her line has become. This is a story about growing up with two brothers and how they were all obsessed with the game pieces of a Pokemon-themed Monopoly game. Campos Lopez detailed sneakily pillfering them from her brothers until they were missed. The segue into adulthood, where her brothers wondered whatever happened to the pieces, led to a very funny wink by the author at the end. 

Laundry & Marginalia, by Michael Albrecht. Albrecht is another CCSer with enormous promise; all of his longer form comics thus far have been very interesting. These short minis show off his cartooning in different ways. Laundry is about a ghost who goes to a laundromat, washing itself in a machine and then coming home dripping wet, hanging itself on a line to dry. Albrecht's pencil work here is just lovely, all in service of a gag. Marginalia is just that: doodles, scribbles, half-formed ideas, exhortations, and moments of despair. 

Life As An Elementary Ghost #4 & #5, by Ashley Jablonski. I love the genre of teachers writing comics about the ridiculous things their kids say in class, and Jablonski's twist on it is drawing everyone as ghosts. It's a clever idea because it conveys the spirit of the idea with simple, stylized drawings without adding too much identifying detail. 

How to be: Mysterious, by Faith Cox. Cox is another big-time talent, and this purports to be the latest volume of a larger How To Be series. Using a delightful rabbit character (doing this like posing in front of a mirror while saying "I am a sexy enigma"), the illustrations belie the dubious instructions of the "manual" in amusing ways. For a quick one-off gag, this was executed with considerable care. 

31 Days Of CCS, #10: Ana Two

Full disclosure: Fieldmouse Press will be publishing Ana Two's horror comic Dark Room next year. A running joke I have with Ana is that, regardless of the subject of their comics, they are always inevitably about power exchange and power relationships in kink-oriented relationships. Even their delightfully deranged comic for Diskette Press, Girl Yaoi, starts with a ridiculous premise but then inevitably gets down to the same kind of exploration Ana Two has done in their other comics. This isn't a criticism but rather an amused observation; the artist just can't help themself!

Girl Yaoi is unhinged from the very first page, and while I am not the target audience for its subject (women who read boys love comics, aka fujoshi), Ana Two deftly and hilariously gives all the context for the story that a reader might need. Aster Zhou is a yaoi enthusiast with a magic ring that allows her to enter the stories she reads in her dreams and allows her to fuck to her heart's content. This is quickly complicated when her new next-door neighbor, Summer Li, gets ahold of Aster's favorite yaoi and magic ring. This leads to them fucking each other, in boy form, in a series of shared dreams. 

There's backstory that includes Aster's teenage crush on Summer and feeling betrayed when Summer read Aster's highly sexual journal. They become neighbors thanks to the whims of fate, but Aster doesn't reveal her true feelings because getting to experience a different yaoi every night is too much of a draw for her to turn down. This is the best part of the whole book--Ana Two's warped genius in crafting so many different yaoi stories is hilarious and yet completely true to the genre. There's a frantic quality to their storytelling, with big, thick, angular lines and crazy angles for the panels. Sometimes, this leads to confusion while reading, as the order of the panels is not always clearly laid out, and this is a distraction. For the most part, the context clues usually sort out such problems, and Ana Two's use of spot color (yellow for Aster, pink for Summer) cleverly allows the reader to quickly identify the identity of each woman in the many, many sex scenes in the book. 

That speaks to the excellent production values from the new stewards of Diskette Press, Dylan Box and Robin Rowe. Their offerings have uniformly been a huge step above the previous iteration of the press, and Girl Yaoi is one of their greatest triumphs in that regard. Ana Two's writing is so sharp, especially in the way the reader comes to be deeply sympathetic toward both characters, even as issues of desire, consent, betrayal, and kink all come to the fore. This isn't a story about kink or power exchange as much as it is two vulnerable, sensitive people who eventually find a way to let the other in. 

31 Days of CCS, #9: Iris Yan

Iris Yan, on occasion, will engage in a solid gimmick for her comics. In The Story Of Some Objects, the cover depicts photos of 11 seemingly random objects. However, Yan spins stories about how each of them came into her orbit, using her typical anthropomorphic animal style. The list included a ring adorned with Legos, an eraser that changes colors in the sun, an uncomfortable pair of panties she had bought to make herself feel inwardly sexier, an electric bug zapper, and a delicious bag of potato chips. 

The mundanity of these stories is the point, as they serve to illustrate the quirky aspects of her life and the lives of her friends and family. There is a matter-of-factness about every aspect of her life that makes her comics so funny; whether it's food or sex or work or the meaning of life, Yan approaches it without exaggeration or florid language. The art in this comic feels less rushed than some other recent efforts, especially with regard to lettering and line weight. It's a great introduction to her work overall, as she keeps things light and on theme. 

31 Days Of CCS, #8: Cuyler Keating

While Cuyler Keating's comics have fantasy elements, it would be more accurate to say that she's really a medievalist. What that translates out to is a great deal of misery, death, disease, and squalor. That's certainly the case in the first two issues of her series Oblivioun, but Keating takes that a step further. The setting is a world where the empire is in ruin, plagued by a disease that ultimately results in the afflicted losing their memories. This is worse than death for some--the utter obliteration of self and memory. 

Keating centers this around two scavengers: a one-armed former knight named Ollie and his young friend Remy. They pick over battles and gravesites in an effort to get enough metal and jewelry to get food and lodging. Their relationship is familial, with an easy sense of teasing between the two. The first issue sees them finding armor and weapons they can sell, but encounter an armored knight who begs them to tell him what his name is. The second issue finds them selling their scavenged loot, with Ollie attempting to woo the daughter of the smith. 

Keating's line is fluid, with a focus on sharply delineated character work. Ollie is drawing with a rakish grin but also an occasionally hollowed-out stare. Remy is still young and full of hope, but one gets the sense that Ollie sees no future. Indeed, the red-soaked flashbacks, full of violence and past battles, reflect that Ollie welcomes the idea. One gets the sense that Remy is the only thing keeping Ollie tethered to reality and day-to-day survival. It feels like there's a long way to go in this series, and things are only going to get worse. Keating has a strong sense of design on top of everything else, and the decorative aspects of the cover and inside covers adds to the overall aesthetic of the comic. 

31 Days Of CCS, #7: Ruby Arnone

What's most interesting about Ruby Arnone's Frankie & Jam is that, despite its origins as a formal cartooning exercise with some formal constraints, the actual comics are fluid and funny. It follows a trans woman anthropomorphic bunny named Frankie and a hoodie-wearing kid named Jam, with most of the strips featuring their observations, gags, and general quirkiness. One of the reasons why the comic is so enjoyable is that Arnone doesn't force things. Some of the strips aren't funny; they're just small but important moments in the lives of the characters. It reminds me a little of certain Peanuts strips that have small epiphanies, or like Pablo Holmberg's book Eden.

There are absurd and surreal strips as well, like the anthropomorphic college professor dog whose academic specialty is the habits of staplers, which he views as sentient entities. There's the imperious and threatening Lizard Queen, who is reduced to washing her clothes in a laundromat and eating at cheap restaurants after ruling a kingdom. Arnone's cartooning is sophisticated, but I also see a lot of experimentation here with grid vs no grid, multiple line weights, and silent strips that depend on flow vs gags that depend largely on the text. This is fertile ground for future ideas, as Arnone generated half a dozen characters and ideas that could be explored for a long time. 

31 Days Of CCS, #6: Melody Calderon

With Arroyo, Melody Calderon does the best kind of horror comic: one that is almost entirely dependent on its visuals to tell its story. This is a story about the Latinx horror urban legend La Llorona, the "Weeping Woman." She was said to have drowned her children in a fit of rage against her husband's infidelity, and now she lurks around bodies of water, looking for new victims. An arroyo is a narrow gully formed by fast-flowing water. In the story, a man drinks from a fountain that is a statue of La Llorona in an almost flip manner. He falls asleep, only to awaken to a flooded house and city (an arroyo) and the long hair of La Llorona telling him to give her his hands to receive her blessing. As one would expect, it does not go well. 

What makes this comic so good is its attention to detail. From the elongated lettering for La Lloronna to the use of paint for spot color to depict her bleeding forehead, Calderon's willingness to lean into the exaggerated aspects of the story gives it power. Her page composition is innovative, especially as she has a repeating motif of hands being plunged into water. The outstretched hands initially seem to be praying hands, and La Llorona's similarity to the Virgin Mary in the story is not lost on me. There is no mercy to be had here, as her "affections" are arbitrary and merciless. Calderon's got it all working here, and this makes me want to see much more. 

31 Days Of CCS, #5: The Final Dot

The Final Dot is one of the CCS group anthology projects. This one features Dylan Sparks, Ellie Liota, Michael Albrecht, and Anna Passlick. I was excited to get a copy at SPX, because I've never seen one of these outside of the library at CCS. Looks like the take on the assignment was a take on Harvey Comics characters. The artists, who shared tasks like in an old mainstream comic, chose to do a dark parody of Little Dot. The results, which include multiple pages of fake ads, are absolutely unhinged. Little Dot, for those unfamiliar with the concept, really liked dots and things with dots on them. In the first story, she meets an appaloosa (with speckled "dots"), and it kicks her in the face. In a later story, she accidentally puts her friend Little Lotta in the hospital stirring up a beehive, and her parents take away her dots..

This leads Dot to skin her dalmation, show up to visit Lotta, and realizing that the colors in the strip were actually Ben-Day dots. Dot starts absorbing all of the color dots in a bid to be eternal, but Lotta grabs a shotgun from a hilarious Daisy rifle ad and shoots Dot in the chest. The quartet of artists takes the concept absolutely all the way, using metafictional humor in a way that feels earned by diligently building up not just the basic premise but also the presence of the ancillary material. Some of the line art is a little wobbly here and there, but they otherwise just nail the features of your average Harvey comic before turning it into a sci-fi/horror story. I'm curious as to the division of labor here, especially since I know and like the work of Sparks, Liotta, and Albrecht. 

31 Days Of CCS, #4: Sierra Edwards, Wayne Carter

Kiki is a small departure for the talented Wayne Carter. This 8-page mini is done in full color (I think it's a Risograph comic), and it packs a lot of punch. It's about two brothers who play a fighting video game on a day when the weather forces them to stay indoors. The real action of the comic is hearing a fight between their mom and dad, as the former accuses the latter of cheating. There's a loaded question about why "Kiki" is calling the house, with a response that she's "keke'n" (gossipping) with everyone. The competing narratives (visual vs the unseen fight between the adults that the kids keep trying to drown out with the TV but find it doesn't get loud enough) are heartbreaking precisely because the kids aren't all too surprised. The last page is a splash after a lot of 4-panel grids, and we see police cars pulling up to the house. This is a great example of working around a narrative without showing it; the pink and purple palette is the color of bruises. The visual of a fighting game standing in for the actual conflict, especially as a way for the boys to work out their aggressions and frustration, was extremely affecting. Carter was already good, but this represents a real levelling up.

Man Rock Lake looks like another Riso comic, and it's by Sierra Edwards. Each page is a splash, starting with the titular man on a rock in a lake. From the very beginning, it's an ontological query, as the man wonders if anyone else is there. He receives an immediate answer of "no," which then turns into an eventual negation of reality. It's cleverly done, as the final negation doesn't even have language--it's simply a dark page minus all of the original elements. The cartooning seems pretty basic here, but the real meat of it is more conceptual than visual. I'd love to see more of Edwards' work. 

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. 

Suzan Colon's Wrasslin' Centaurs

Suzan Colón was a student of mine at SAW (Sequential Artists Workshop) last year, and she hit on an ingenious concept that she's working to bring to a longer form in her series Wrasslin' Centaurs. (Full disclosure, she listed me as an editor of this comic.) The concept is, on the surface, a silly one: a world where mythological creatures like centaurs and cyclopes are real and living in the modern day. This is a possible setting for a high-fantasy narrative; instead, the titular centaurs are struggling pro wrestlers in an independent league. The in-ring narrative does provide a lot of action, but this comic is really a romance narrative above all else. Colón has a strong ear for dialogue, but it's her visual eye for detail that makes this a fun comic. 

Her figures are cartoony and appealing, drawing from a Dan DeCarlo Archie tradition. However, Colón is something of a maximalist, often layering lots of extra gags and details beneath the clear action of the character narrative. That extends to the details on the cover, easter eggs about the extended world they live in, and decorative/humorous details on the inside and back covers. What's most important is that Colón  quickly establishes the set-up and the character motivations, though one of the three centaurs is not named until the very last page. Various romantic configurations are also established, and they are all filtered through a fantastical lens (they are creatures) in a manner that reflects everyday concerns (concern over dating a centaur because he doesn't have a stable job). Within that fantastical lens, Colón draws in a mostly naturalistic style, leaning into exaggeration to enhance humor or action. Upon reading this short comic, one immediately wants to know more about the characters. 

Tanya Dorph-Mankey's Count The Lights #2

The second chapter of Tanya Dorph-Mankey's queer wrestling epic, Count The Lights, ratchets up the tension between the intense heel wrestler Alan Jacobs and his infuriatingly casual rival Ryan Roberts. The story is told from a kayfabe perspective; that is, that the matches and stories behind them are real. Dorph-Mankey works big: big pages, big panels, big fights, big emotions. Wrestling here serves a function not unlike the songs in a musical: when the emotion of a situation is so overwhelming that mere speech no longer suffices to express it. As such, the actual wrestling moves all feel authentically drawn, and Dorph-Mankey is careful to pay a lot of attention to detail in how the men move in the ring. Jacobs is ambitious and clearly has a lot to prove in returning to the East Coast, and he can't stand how Roberts treats things like he's indulging in a punchline only he understands. 

The attraction that one would normally be subsumed in this kind of narrative is made plain and then demystified by the other members of his wrestling faction. The ridiculously bearded brothers Max & Jeremy are simultaneously his friends, his supporters, and also his enablers. The cruel leader of the faction, Caelum, tells Alan to fuck Roberts and get it over with. Roberts starts getting in his head and in his dreams. In one sequence, it's difficult to tell what's an actual match and what is the dream that he wakes up from. It's obvious that the lack of clarity is part of the point, but it felt a bit like cheating to advance their flirtation that far with so little warning, only to negate it. That thread is picked up again more effectively later, even as Jacobs continues to deny not just attraction, but his deeper feelings for Roberts as well. There are also signs of jealousy, as the easy friendship of Roberts' faction is very different than the survival-of-the-fittest quality he has with Caelum. The chapter ends with Jacobs once again trying to sublimate these feelings in the ring and challenge the champion, the mysterious masked wrestler Orion. There's a classic wrestling face-off, as Dorph-Mankey blends wrestling conventions with comics storytelling conventions in a way that feels both bombastic and organic. 

Comics from SAW Week: Meg Lentz

Meg Lentz is a SAW graduate whose work focuses on queerness, mental health, and social justice. Working through their alter ego, Lenny Ditz, Lentz's comics are usually very funny. Working through their assignments in SAW's year-long program, Lentz stretched into poetic comics as well. The second issue of their Lenny Ditz comic continues on the memoir track, with Lenny graduating from comics and getting a retail job at a certain popular grocery store chain here nicknamed as "Raider Rob's." 

What they thought would be a fun and queer-friendly experience turned out to be a nightmare as they endured typical corporate bullshit, mandatory "fun" like synchronized dance routines for customers, and a concussion when some stock fell on their head. Lentz exaggerates this in a pirate motif, as each employee gets a parrot and a "box-cutlass" and their boss talks like a pirate. Lentz makes a lot of clever & funny cartooning decisions, with a potentially tricky open-page layout paying off as it allowed them to pack a lot of gags and information on each page. The final gag, where a "flash jig" results in Lenny getting hit in the head with a plank and being trod on by their co-workers, works well because it pushes the concept to its limit. 

Lenny Ditz #3: Lenny Ditz Meets Sappho is even funnier, as it tells a tale of high-school Lenny, who had yet to come out but considered themselves to be a "good ally." Tongue is firmly in cheek here as young Lenny struggled to write a research paper about the famous poet whose work is mostly fragmentary. Falling asleep in front of an altar to Sappho, Lenny "gay magically" appears in ancient Greece and happens upon Sappho and her admirers. The genius of this comic is that because so little of Sappho's work has been translated, nearly every bit of dialogue in this part of the comic consists of lyrics from Abba. (Mamma Mia, indeed!) Lentz has a knack for wringing out every bit of humor from the premise of "Oh, I'm not gay, I'm just an ally" and pairing it with the absurdity of the Abba references. The front and back covers feature familiar uses of the famous vases that had images of Sappho--a clever decorative feature. Lentz's cartooning is just plain solid throughout, especially the way they depict bodies interacting in space using an open page layout. Lentz's figure drawing is a bit on the plain side, though the humor in their pieces comes from their concepts and storytelling, and less from the drawings themselves. 

A Girl Without Skin is a total departure as a two-track narrative showing a worm but featuring narration by a girl born without skin who is tortured by her constant pain and inability to feel the touch of another. The visual track looks like it was done as a print, with stark black & white illustrating a worm being picked up, crushed, and flicked away. It's a double-barrelled misery explosion presented in a concentrated and beautiful format. It's entirely hand made, with the lettering being taped on. The darkness inherent in Lentz's more humorous work is on full display here. 

Finally, there's I Like To Draw...With My Eyes Shut!, a fun like sketch zine that's exactly what it sounds like. It's a great exercise, because it forces the artist to trust their hand instead of their eyes. Unsurprisingly, when Lentz was drawing action sequences (like figure skaters), the shapes were fluid, dynamic, and immediately recognizable. Their self-portraits, on the other hand, were far less coherent and recognizable. I'd recommend this to any cartoonist who wants to draw more expressively. 

Trondheim & Sfar's Dungeon: The Early Years

Lewis Trondheim & Joann Sfar's Dungeon (or Donjon, in the original French) is my favorite comics series of all time. It's a giant, sprawling epic that's both a love letter to and a send-up of fantasy spectacles. It spoofs overly convoluted world-building and plots while establishing its own deep lore. The essence of the story is this: there is a dungeon, run by its Keeper, that actively encourages adventurers to attempt to take its treasures. Of course, it's full of horrible monsters and traps designed to murder any party, which means the keeper takes all of their treasure as well. All of its characters are anthropomorphic animals, which makes sense since Trondheim drew most of the early series, and that is his style. 

The main title, nicknamed "Zenith," shows the dungeon at its height and introduces an idiot duck named Herbert trying to get a job in the dungeon. He befriends the Keeper's top man, a dragon named Marvin, and accidentally acquires a sword that demands he go on a quest. It's funny but also satisfying as a solid piece of genre fiction. The conceit is that Dungeon would run for a hundred volumes, but Zenith only had 10 volumes.

Trondheim & Sfar didn't want to do a conventional narrative. They wanted to play with the story in fun ways, asking the question, "Hey, how does it all wind up?" So they zoomed ahead to volume 101, starting a series of stories called "Twilight." Years later, we see what became of Herbert, Marvin, and many others, and it's a surprisingly grim story, still leavened by lots of slapstick. If that wasn't enough, they zoomed back in time to volume -99, called "The Early Years," which introduces us to the keeper in his youth. (There are also Antipodes + and -, which go way further into the future and past, but those haven't been translated into English yet.) 

NBM had originally published these in small digest format, which hurt the reproduction of the art, which was originally published in France in the oversized album format. NBM finally reprinted them again at the right size and published all of the Early Years stories. The six original French albums have been published in two editions: The Early Years Vol 1-2: The Night Shirt, and The Early Years Vol 3: Without A Sound. Overall, these volumes are a great improvement over the previous editions. There are still some quirks; there are lettering errors in the translation, for example. It's still exciting to see so many volumes of Dungeon translated into English, though NBM's recent shift to mostly doing biographies would seem to indicate there won't be any more forthcoming. 

There is a consistent character arc in the series that is reflected by the protagonist of each of the main series. The hero initially is highly naive and idealistic, but they are eventually worn down by their experiences and become corrupted and cynical. This happens to the Keeper, aka Hyacinth de Cavallere, and it happens to Herbert (and it's shocking when it does). Marvin the Red, the hero of "Twilight," is certainly naive at the beginning, but as the world literally falls apart, his narrative goes in the opposite direction: from a wannabe hard-boiled killer to a family man. 

"The Early Years" focuses on Hyacinth's journey from pampered son of a warlord to cold-blooded assassin. Both Early Years and Twilight depict an old order crumbling before the eyes of the protagonists, and the stories are that of adaptation and finding a new steady-state. In "The Early Years," the old world of knights, warlords, and chivalry came to an end, symbolized by the fall of the capital city Antipolis. It's the seat of all knowledge and law, but it's being undone by its own corruption, greed, and squalor. The first three volumes (-99, -98, and -97) detail Hyacinth becoming a sort of bumbling vigilante named "The Night Shirt," who fights for justice in the corrupt city. His undoing is falling in love with a snake-woman assassin named Alexandra. 

The narrative then jumps ahead to volumes -84, -83, and -82. Hyacinth is rich and powerful, and secretly the head of the assassin's guild, but he is in mourning because his lover Alexandra has murdered his sweet wife. His own greed helps settle the city's destruction, and he's forced to flee to his family castle. By the end of the last volume, he's assembled the crew that would make up the foundation of his dungeon, including a five-year-old Marvin the Dragon. Christophe Blain drew the first four volumes, and he was an outstanding choice as someone who has done so many action epics. Working within the Dungeon style, Christophe Gaultier brings a darker, grittier quality to the story than the others, but it's fitting for how nasty his chapter was. Stephane Oiry's chapter is brighter and clearer, which was also befitting a more optimistic story. Selecting the right artists for the job showed that Trondheim & Sfar were smart editors in addition to being great artists. "The Early Years" might be my favorite entries in the whole Dungeon saga, as they are satisfying in how they create the character narrative as well as having tons of fun lore-related easter eggs for fans of the rest of the series.