45 Days Of CCS, #25: Adrienne Adkins

Adrienne Adkins' cartooning and storytelling are smart and expressive, even if her line is a bit rough at the moment. Adkins certainly has no lack of imagination and a pretty wide range of storytelling interests. Be Not Afraid Of Bella Vol 1 posits a relationship between a person and what turns out to be an angel named Bella. The angel's form is hideous: a giant eyeball with wings, teeth, hands, and feet. However, its personality is like that of a highly insistent dog who's trying to steal meat from its owner's plates. However, this dog can bend time and space (as cleverly personified by the angel reaching around and between panels), until the person relents and hands over some steak. This is a clever, well-paced comic, even if the actual drawing isn't all that interesting. 

XxStarwolfxX is about a girl named Emma playing an online fantasy game with a friend where the characters are wolves. Her Starwolf is about to get revenge on a player named Redwolf for burning down her forest when the player behind Redwolf has to do something for their parents. It's revealed that Emma has been suspended for assaulting a boy at school but won't tell her parents why, and the boy's family is suing. The beauty of this comic is the way in which Adkins provides clues as to why she did it without explicitly saying it, with the metaphor of the forest being burned down echoing the forest design on her shirt. She's desperately trying to escape the rage that led her to beat the boy down and the words he said to her to spark that fury. Once again, the composition and cartooning are excellent, but the execution (especially the lettering) is a little rough. Those aspects of Adkins' work will be sharpened over time, but they already have a lot to say and know how to say it. 

45 Days Of CCS, #21: Crank Case & Iris Gudeon

Iris Gudeon's comics are odd and funny. Using a four-panel grid and a deceptively simple line, Gudeon's storytelling leans into a cute, upbeat aesthetic in order to disguise the sheer weirdness of what she's actually doing. In The Warm (worm farm), for example, the reader meets a farmer who works on the titular worm farm. What Gudeon is doing here is a shaggy dog joke, as the initially cute concept (a worm farm!) gets weirder and weirder. The farmer, desperate for human (or really, non-worm) contact, gets increasingly awkward until it's revealed that EVERYTHING is worms. I laughed out loud at the surprise punchline when I turned the final page. 

One of my favorite CCS assignments is when students are put together in order to collaborate on a particular genre assignment. They divvy up responsibilities like traditional mainstream comics. In the example of Crank Case, the team was Adrienne Adkins, Amelia B.C. Dutton, Fern Pellerin, and Fernanda Nocedal. Adkins did the designs for two of the characters, layouts, and lettering. Dutton did character and style designs, pencils, and the book design. Nocedal designed another character and did character inks. Pellerin was production manager and did background inks. 

The team decided to do "90s style science-fiction shonen manga," and the result is pretty solid. The story is told in a Western style (left-to-right), and it merges futuristic dystopian sci-fi with very familiar fantasy tropes. The story follows Poco, an engineer/scrap-seeker, and their robot dog K-9, as they meet an elven sorceress named Phae who was banished to this realm. Most of the comic is a chase scene, as Poco's competitors chased them down before Phae unleashed a nasty spell. The character design for Poco and Phae was by two different artists, but it was a clever idea to make these characters from completely different genres. It highlighted how weird and alien Phae seemed in Poco's gritty, junk-strewn environment in a dump. The composition was all over the place on every page: dutch angles, two-page spreads, inset panels, and other dizzying, disorienting choices typical of shonen. This was one of the better examples of this kind of collaboration that I've seen.