Thirty-One Days of CCS #12: Alexis Frederick-Frost

Alexis Frederick-Frost continues to produce beautiful, off-beat comics. He's a great stylist and storyteller, and though he's from the first graduating class of CCS, he remains one of its most distinctive artists. Hugh is a great example of Frederick-Frost's abilities working without text, as he alternates between a highly stylized, smudged pencil approach (almost a charcoal approach, not unlike Peter Kuper) and a vibrant, more naturalistic use of color. This is a simple story of a beleaguered accountant who accidentally stumbles upon a plant exposition at a local museum. He also stumbles upon a beautiful woman, as his perception of the world switches from the dreary black & white and numbers into a world of colorful flowers and beauty. Once he crosses over into that world, there's no going back. Frederick-Frost's storytelling is simple and elegant, while his character design is both rounded and angular, making the main characters especially interesting to look at. Frederick-Frost clearly works from life quite a bit, but he bends what he sees to his lively sense of design, where very few panels have a static feel to them.

Missiles Of Montgomery County reflects Frederick-Frost's interest in history. The comic is about the various missile bases that used to dot the country but are now long-abandoned after various treaties. Using a brush to draw buildings and figures, Frederick-Frost here turns to greyscale to add weight to his panels. Here, the images are in service to the central concept of the comic: that these missile bases were once in remote locations but are now surrounded by suburban sprawl. He details how the bases worked, what sort of missiles they housed, and the threats they were meant to counter, displaying his thorough research in a way that was easy to absorb and understand. Presenting the base as a kind of modern-day archaeological relic of a bygone era was an interesting approach, demonstrating the ways in which even recent history becomes archaic. At the same time, it's a reminder that there was a long period of time when the possibility of nuclear annihilation was an ever-present fear that weighed on the minds of everyone, but especially children who were raised in that era. Frederick-Frost contrasts the old bases with the parks and malls that are now near them for that very reason. This mini reads like a chapter in a longer book about American history that I wish Frederick-Frost would write.

First Second For Kids: Sturm/Frederick-Frost/Arnold, Reed/Flood, Wicks

Ogres Awake!, by James Sturm, Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost. This is the latest in the Adventures In Cartooning! series headed up by the head of the Center for Cartoon Studies and two alumni. Ostensibly designed to teach the basics of cartooning to kids, the trio of artists has also released a series of fun adventure books starring the knight who popped up in the actual instructional books. I had the benefit of my seven-year-old daughter asking me to read this book to her, sight unseen, and she loved the book's humor and sheer "loudness". The book opens with the crisis of the knight seeing a meadow full of giant, sleeping ogres, and the rest of the book is essentially a mad dash by the knight in an effort to thwart the crisis. About midway through, the artists come up with a counter plotline, wherein the knight's clamoring for battle is funneled into the knight helping to harvest food from a garden and chop vegetables, as the wise king beats the ogres by feeding them. The book is chock full of verbal and visual jokes, and Frederick-Frost's thick, brushy line sturdily carries the narrative without being overwhelmed by the book's bright colors. The endpapers, which contain brief tutorials on how to draw the characters and funny poses they can get into, were a particular favorite of my daughter, who loved the natural progression from utilitarian suggestions to sheer silliness, like a horse as a space explorer. It's the rare kids' book that goes all-out in an effort to be simply funny, without worrying about anything else.

Science Comics: Dinosaurs: Fossils and Feathers, by MK Reed and Joe Flood. The Reed-Flood team's last collaboration was the character-centered romance The Cute Girl Network. Flood's preferred thing to draw is more in the realm of monsters, which makes this clever and page-turning account of the history of paleontology right in his wheelhouse. Kicking off First Second's Science Comics line, each cartoonist will have the conundrum of just how to present their given subject in a way that draws in younger readers. Reed's solution was to create a narrative based not so much on the history and qualities of dinosaurs (although that's all here as well), but rather on the history of how scientists (as well as grifters, hucksters and thieves) have understood and classified dinosaurs. Reed focuses on the colorful personalities that populated the world of paleontology in the early days, like amateur fossil collector Mary Anning (who did not receive the credit due her), arch-rivals Gideon Mantell and Richard Owen (the latter of whom sought to discredit the former in academia), and arch-rivals Othniel Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope (whose field teams threw rocks at each other).

Reed didn't separate the book into chapters per se, but rather reset things based on the changing nature of scientific paradigms. Starting off in 1800, for example, it is considered to be a fact that the earth is 6,000 years old, that dinosaurs perished in the Great Flood, and there are no examples of them today. Every reset changed those assumptions dramatically, as science not only became more sophisticated but also started to admit to the ways in which new evidence can shatter old paradigms. Amusingly, that was backed up when Reed wrote a chapter that noted how the brontosaurus never really existed, only to have to add an endnote that said that the bronto's existence had been proven. Flood went to town drawing double-page splashes with dinosaurs but was equally up to the task of drawing historical figures. Reed keeps the narrative going with an arsenal of fascinating anecdotes, both about dinosaurs and the people who discovered their fossils. She even manages to explain some of the basics of geology along the way, thanks to her wit. While there are the occasional funny asides, Reed doesn't overdo and trusts in the narrative. Starting off a series about science that demonstrates how science is actually carried out was a smart move, as the clash between staying true to the scientific method and the human need for certainty is key to understanding paradigm shifts and the ways in which human bias can affect knowledge.

Science Comics: Coral Reefs: Cities of the Ocean, by Maris Wicks. Wicks had a taller order than Reed in talking about the science of coral reefs. Without a narrative to latch onto (other than the ecological one that essentially amounts to "Recycle and ride your bike!"), Wicks was essentially reduced to narrating a slightly whimsical nature documentary. The essence of that documentary was that despite coral reefs occupying a tiny portion of the earth, they are home to a majority of the earth's biodiversity. Once that point is made, she goes into a basic biological explication of the various phyla that can be found in and around coral reefs, all narrated by a fish wearing glasses. It's page after page of slightly cartoony drawings of sea life with amusing asides, scatological jokes and witticisms from the creatures themselves. The book picks up again when it gets into facts about the water cycle and ecological concerns, which is presented earnestly but without preaching. It's simply a matter-of-fact presentation of facts, one that presupposes a great deal of faith in the reader to do the right thing. A bit more restraint on forcing jokes might have made this a smoother read, though as I noted earlier Wicks was in a tough spot and relied on her storytelling instincts to work her way out of it. It's just that at around 120 pages, the book simply flagged once she started rattling off different species and felt padded.

Thirty Days of Short Reviews #8: The Little Grey Spot, Sleepless Knight, Lolly Poppet's Lousy Year

Lolly Poppet's Lousy Year, by Lupi McGinty. The talented cartoonist, best known by me for her contributions to Cartozia Tales, has crafted a book with irresistibly-drawn characters. It's not comics in the sequential sense, but each page is most certainly cartooned rather than illustrated in the typical sense. There's an amusing progression from page to page as the titular character has all sorts of failures in her efforts to have fun during the year, from a spilled popsicle to getting covered in grass clippings that she hoped would scatter like leaves. The winning expressions of Lolly are what make the book work, along with that cartoonist's sense of creating motion with just a single image. The book is translated into both English and Spanish, and my main quibble with it is the printed text. Hand-drawn text would have been warmer and more in keeping with the rest of the book's aesthetic.

Sleepless Knight, by James Sturm, Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost. The latest entry from the Adventures in Cartooning! narrative/instructional series for kids, this book is heavy on the story and light on instruction. If there's one lesson the book is trying to impart, it's learning how to draw a particular character engaged in a number of different activities. Finding out how the character moves in space, what their body language is like, and simply experimenting with them doing different things can help young cartoonists solve a lot of problems on the page and make their characters come alive. The actual narrative is a funny story about a series of self-inflicted woes, as the titular knight is out on a camping trip with his horse and can't get to sleep because he can't find his teddy bear. It's a sort of hero's journey in reverse, as the knight meets a rabbit and a bear but manages to anger both of them instead of creating new allies for his quest. Indeed, the knight's tale winds up being incidental to the outcome, as the poor, beleaguered horse winds up having fun and eating marshmallows with the other animals. I read this one along with my daughter, who is learning to read. I was impressed by how the images provided excellent scaffolding for her to look at a word and instantly understand its context, giving her the confidence to shout it out. She also appreciated the humor and empathized with the anxiety caused by losing a sleep-comfort object. The brushy line of Frederick-Frost is a key to the book's success, as he keeps things simple but rock-solid in terms of storytelling.

The Little Grey Splot, by Nicholas Alan Straight. Published by Jordan Shiveley's Grimalkin Press, this is a straight-up kid's book without a specific comics narrative. Like McGinty's book, however, it is very much a book that was cartooned. Straight uses a cute design with the titular figure being greyscaled in contrast to the other bright blobs of paint that make up the other figures. Every other page of the book encourages doodling, scribbling and drawing in the book itself, giving the young reader examples to model and then encouraging them to use their own imaginations. The Little Grey Splot draws faces, bodies in motion, fears, ocean creatures and aliens and overcomes its lack of color with its imagination. I like the idea of a kids' book that encourages such active participation, with the added innovation of not being a coloring book but still giving kids direction and restrictions.

Thirty Days of CCS, Day 2: Laurel Lynn Leake, Alexis Frederick-Frost, Laura Terry

Poly Morphous 1-3, by Laurel Lynn Leake. Leake specializes in writing about sexuality and forest-related fantasy stories, and this little trio of minis combines those two interests. Each eight pager contains a poetic narrative caption along with images of Poly, a cute critter who explores different desires. In the first, Poly lives up to her name as she wants to "be the conduit for your current" for a couple in their forest. It's an expression of wanting to absorb and be part of the energy of a relationship, frustrated by the couple's total lack of interest in the idea. The inherent sadness of the narrative is mitigated by the cute and funny nature of the drawings. The second issue comes from an entirely different place, as Poly is consumed by obsessive thoughts that she worries might spread to her loved ones. This leaves her to be alone, even if solitude is the worst thing possible for obsessives. The third is about the tension between consciousness and sleep and the difficulty of inhabiting either world fully. Hear, the melting drawings do a spectacular job of supporting the text instead of working in tension with it, as Poly can't quite cohere to a single form. These are fascinating little workouts about mental health, curiosity and desire.

The Aeronaut, by Alexis Frederick-Frost. Frederick-Frost specializes in comics about travel adventures, so this silent account of a one-man balloon expedition to moon based on a variety of fanciful newspaper accounts is right up his alley. He's a master of economy on the page, as the quest is set up in the span of just three pages, leaving lots of room for the perils of the voyage itself. He goes from an information-dense four panel grid to a two panel set-up during the journey itself, giving the reader a chance to drift along with the balloon in question. An encounter with a large bird who thinks the balloon is one of his lost children is salvaged with a handy set of giant feathers, enabling the explorer to fly up to the moon, wherein he encounters gigantic and deadly vegetation, intelligent and friendly anthropomorphic beavers, and lighter-than-air dandelions that allow him to get home. This is a charming if slight bit of imagination, an extended and detailed doodle daydream inspired by the tall tales of past adventurers. It's lovely on its own but would look even better in a hopefully future collection of Frederick-Frost's short stories.

August Chase Volume 1, by Laura Terry. Terry has become an ace with regard to fantasy stories with a tinge of emotional regret. Her character design lush but restrained use of color and storytelling is simply top-notch, and the first chapter of August Chase is something that I could being a huge hit in a different format. The story follows a lone hunter in a forest wearing goggles and an animal cloak. It's a striking bit of character design that's simple but instantly memorable. The other character designs range from anthropomorphic ducks, bulls and monsters that are drawn with a great deal of tenderness as well as other humans that are far more harsh.

The first chapter gives the reader a lot of backstory without actually dumping much text on them. We know the hunter with the bow is August, we learn that he's a renegade and hunted by his cruel father, and we know he's not much of a joiner. By the end of the first issue, his fate gets tied to that of a group of forest adventurers, entirely against his will. There are beautifully staged chase and action sequences, moments of humor, and instances of deep emotion. What I admire most about the comic is that despite its obvious young adult target range, it's a comic that doesn't talk down to readers, nor does it telegraph its immediate themes. Starting the book in the middle of a hunt gives the reader a great hook, rather than saddling a reader with a lot of backstory. It works because the reader is meant to feel and empathize with all of the relationships in the book: betrayed son, vindictive father, tight-knit group of friends and a general fear of the unknown.

Thirty Days of CCS #28: Adventures In Cartooning, CCS Booklet, Jai Gronofsky, Dan Archer, Ian Richardson

The newest book in the First Second line of Adventures in Cartooning, Characters In Action!, returns to the original's tactic of doing a full story and then explaining its techniques for imitation at the end.  CCS chief James Sturm once again teams up with grads Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost (who handles most of the art chores) to create a charming, funny and ultimately useful guide to character generation. The story follows the knight who's been the protagonist of each book, trying to figure out why her castle is under assault by a host of weirdos. A Hollywood director named "Otto Airs" (ouch) is casting his new movie, which leads to all sorts of shenanigans. It was quite clever of the team to compare casting a movie with creating one's own comic book characters, which made it natural to discuss "wrong" fits for roles, what a "right" fit looks like, etc. When it came time to actually discuss specifics, the reader is ready to absorb the highly useful tips on how to design simple characters that are easily reproducible from panel to panel, how to tell characters apart using only body language, how to draw different character expressions, etc. There isn't an emphasis on more advanced ideas like panel-to-panel and page-to-page transitions, just a grounding in the basic skills to encourage a fledgling cartoonist to draw a story with confidence. In that respect, it's the most useful book yet in the series.

The promotional pamphlet for CCS has traditionally been a strong comic in its own right. This year's pamphlet, drawn by Brandon Elston, is no exception. His style is a mix of underground exaggeration and alt-comics cartoonyness, drawing from the same sort of classic comics and kids comics that folks like Terry Laban, Jaime Hernandez, Peter Bagge and Robert Crumb did. His style is in the same ballpark as fellow underground enthusiasts Joseph Remnant, Ed Piskor and Noah Van Sciver. However, Elston's art is much more rubbery and clear-lined than those artists. Elston uses cross-hatching when appropriate, but his work is nowhere near as dense as those peers; instead, he prefers to use strong black and white contrasts to heighten his goofy, grotesque character work. This is a talented artist still cycling through his influences but already demonstrating he has the chops to do any kind of work he wants.

Let's take a further look at a trio of CCS cartoonists who sent me word of their on-line efforts.  First up is Jai Granofksy, who's doing a traditional webcomic called Waiting For Baby. It's just 29 pages in at the moment, but there's something wonderfully earnest and intimate in the way he's revealing both himself and his relationship with his girlfriend, Shira. The story starts with his courtship of Shira, one that spanned a number of years, and has stopped with Granofsky encounter a minefield of self-doubt and depression as he's wondering if he's a fit candidate to be a father. His character design is fleshy and cartoony, with lots of big bodies and expressive faces. He reminds me a bit of Mike Dawson, who employs a similar style of expressive realism in his comics as the reader always knows that this is a story with real emotional stakes that's given just a hint of distance with character design and expressions that occasionally get rubbery and distorted. His use of color is mostly muted and restrained, until he needs to emphasize something like a bedbug infestation. That restraint allows him to occasionally use color as a sort of exclamation mark,and it's an effective storytelling tool. Granofsky's story is one that's as much about his own painful self-exploration as it is (at this point) about the pregnancy and fatherhood, as a family dynamics experience hammered home his terror that he might pass on bad genetic traits. The framework of the pregnancy takes it out of the realm of simple autobio navel-gazing, as does his honest devotion and care for both his girlfriend and the future baby.

Second is Ian Richardson, who sent me links to three stories. All three are about prey and predators to some extent. "Prey" is the most visually direct version of this kind of horror story, as a creepy man follows a young girl (complete with balloon) down into a deserted subway stop, only to find out that prey that was too good to be true certainly was. This comic is interesting because of Richardson's interesting use of weird angles to create a disorienting effect for the reader. "Husk" has a visceral quality not unlike that of a Tom Neely comic (without the same level of polish), as this time the predator is a former companion: a black, mossy substance that has sharp, needle-like edges. That substance protected a mariner who happens upon a magical island (that looks not unlike human skin), but when it looks like the island's magic will free him of it, the substance acts violently. The least successful of the three stories is "Alpha", an overly talky comic about a dog that eventually takes revenge on an old woman who kills her husband (and the dog's master). This revelation is not made explicit, but is telegraphed way ahead of time like an old EC comic. That's the oldest story discussed here, and the subsequent stories feel like Richardson attempting to explore the same kind of idea in more subtle and visually exciting fashion. "Prey" in particular is especially promising  because it succeeds in providing the kind of visual shock that "Alpha" does not.

Lastly is the prolific Dan Archer, the cartoonist/journalist whose work is everywhere these days. His "Introduction to Comics Journalism" is a useful an d visually fluid overview of the discipline/art, one that gets to the heart of the "objectivity" debate in journalism. Archer makes up for his limited rendering ability by trying to think of innovative, interactive ways comics can relate a story, like in this account of the 2007 Nissor Square shootings in Iraq. Archer uses a slide show to advance the timeline on top of a map with simple icons, and the reader then clicks on "hot spots" to read a brief comic describing the action. It's an amazingly effective way to get across eyewitness accounts of a complicated and awful incident. This strip is a more standard approach, as Archer uses the effective device of using one person's anecdotal experience to bring the global slave trade into sharper relief. When Archer uses a single shade to accentuate his drawings, it gives his comics power and consistency. However, when he tries to use too much color in too small a space, like in this strip about the US banking crisis, the result is a cluttered and fussy looking page that's hard to read. That strip about the shootings in Iraq was like nothing I've never seen before; it had some small elements of animation but its design and heart was all about comics. I'd love to see a similar kind of comics/map/timeline combination for other events in the future from him, as it really takes advantage of technology without simply having bells and whistles for their own sake.

Comics For Kids; Toon Books, Adventures In Cartooning, Anna & Froga

The latest batch of comics for kids definitely skews toward the alt-comics neck of the woods this time around, with several new releases from Toon Books, a new volume in the Adventures in Cartooning series and an English translation of a book by Anouk Ricard.

The Toon Books line is an interesting success story, given that editor and publisher Francoise Mouly was initially unable to sell her idea of comics for very young readers to a single big publisher.  Fast-forward a few years, and the line has sold a lot of books and won several awards, and is now an imprint of a larger publisher. Mouly still retains control, but she's started to farm some of the work out ever so slightly to her daughter Nadja, who was a "guest editor" on a couple of the recent books. Mouly has expanded her initial vision for the line, concretizing the notion that some of the books are aimed at pre-K kids and others are for more slightly advanced readers. As such, a couple of the books here are longer and more challenging than any of the prior volumes, but Mouly is also careful not to abandon established formulae, like the beloved Benny & Penny books of Geoffrey Hayes.

Let's start with Hayes. His latest Benny & Penny book is called Lights Out!, and it's once again an evocatively drawn story about two siblings at bedtime.Hayes has an incredible knack for portraying their relationship with great affection yet still understanding the ways in which children squabble and generally enjoy making each other miserable at times. Here, the mischievous Benny can't settle down at bedtime, annoying his sister in every way imaginable, until he has to go get his all-important pirate hat from the playhouse outside. Throughout the series, Hayes has loved folding back a story's conflict onto the aggressor (usually Benny), putting them in the sort of situation that they taunted the other about. Once again, Hayes masterfully balances his background as a traditional illustrator of children's books with making this work as a comic, including finding ways to lead the reader's eyes across the page as simply as possible. At the same time, he provides a wave of eye pops, as characters bleed off-panel or tiny bugs pop up in the same place. For the youngest of readers, these are perfect story and art objects.

Frank Viva (an illustrator for the New Yorker) takes a completely different approach in A Trip To The Bottom of the World. Drawn in Illustrator, this book is much colder and starker than Hayes' work, filled with a confluence of basic shapes and colors that pop off the page.This book is actually based on Viva's own experience on an Antarctic research vessel, as the things that the explorer's mouse sees are things Viva spotted. The plot (with the mouse constantly wanting to go back home, until the trip is over) is fairly boilerplate for this kind of thing, but it's Viva's visuals that make this one worth a look.

Mouly switches things up once again with David Nytra's pen-and-ink comic The Secret of the Stone Frog. It's more than a little influenced by Lewis Carroll (and of course the illustrator John Tenniel) by way of Winsor McCay, as a girl and her younger brother try to find their way home in a mysterious forest, aided by the immobile but loquacious titular frogs. This 80-page book is  the longest of the Toon Book entries and is billed as the first Toon graphic novel, and as such it's obviously aimed at a six or seven year old as an early "big" book for them. The book is beautiful to look at and carries the line's usual sterling production values, even if it does feel derivative.

The gem of Toon's fall batch is Rutu Modan's Maya Makes A Mess. It's a pure visual joy and has some of Modan's best-ever cartooning. It's about a messy little girl with bad table manners who is called to eat with the Queen, and her uncouth nature (done because it's more fun to eat with your hands) has a surprising effect on the Queen and her court. Modan's line is crisp and clear, and her already highly-developed color sense makes every page a treat, without going into too much pyrotechnics. There's also a running gag at the bottom of the page that appears to simply be a visual flourish at first, but is revealed to simply be a time-release joke. I love that this book does not desire to teach any sort of lesson about good manners but rather is all about pursuing a joke to its logical end.

The Center for Cartoon Studies team of James Sturm, Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost return for their third book in the Adventures In Cartooning series, this time with the every-sturdy Christmas Special. This book really does have "stocking stuffer" written all over it, as it's by far the least interactive of the three books. The first one taught cartooning basics and the second volume was pretty much a cartooning workbook, but the Special is mostly just an extended series of (effective) gags and rhymes about Santa struggling to deal with giving gifts in the digital age. All the reader gets to do is write a comic strip for Santa about something cheerful, and they are then encouraged to send it to CCS ("Halfway to the North Pole") for Santa's benefit. It's a clever idea, and I'm curious to see what kind of responses they will wind up getting. The book takes a while to warm up, but once the cartooning elf summons forth the cartooning knight of the first two books, the gags start flying and the visual storytelling of the trio starts popping. I'm still not quite sure what the division of labor is like on these books, but it does seem like I sense Frederick-Frost's hand most strongly. I'm not sure where this series goes next; does it try to teach a more advanced lesson, or will it stick with concept books like this one? I'm hoping for the former (at least another challenging activity book), but I'm guessing the latter would be an easier sell.

It makes sense that Ben Jones blurbed the translation of Anouk Ricard's Anna & Froga: Want a Gumball? That's because her figures look a lot like Jones' own weird, crude and ugly drawings. Like Jones, however, those figures have an enormous amount of personality and power on the page, thanks in part to what looks like a lively application of magic marker. I've never seen a book that had so many ugly drawings on it that made me want to stare at it for hours. Part of that is Ricard's judicious use of negative space on every page, saving the reader from being overwhelmed by the drawings and the colors. Indeed, the use of white made it easy for anyone to follow the characters across the page and zero in on the gags at hand. As interesting as the art is in this book, it's Ricard's skill as a humorist that makes this book endlessly readable. The title characters, plus dog friend Bubu and cat friend Ron form a kind of Seinfeld gang that milks a lot of humor from awkwardness, vanity, self-deception and a healthy sense of mutual aggravation. On some pages, Ricard goes from her crudely-drawn comic strip to beautifully painted full page strips that comment on the previous story. One of the best things about this book is Ricard's storytelling rhythm. With each story running about three or four pages, that allows Ricard to pack a lot of gags into this forty page book. She ramps up the awkwardness in each strip until the climax of the final punchline, gives the reader a palate cleanser with her paintings, and then repeats the process ten times. The result is a highly meaty forty pages, though I found myself wanting more by the end. This is a truly outstanding book for kids, one they will be able to follow with ease as well as appreciate the jokes, which generally wind up with a chase scene, things being thrown, or something gross or cruel happening to one of the characters. I hope this sells well enough for Drawn & Quarterly to publish many more volumes.

Quick Comments On Kids' Comics

I receive a lot of comics to review, and the next few weeks will be devoted to playing catch-up. First up is a survey of the many comics aimed at kids and teens. It's common knowledge in the world of publishing that the only segment of the book market that's still thriving is the young adult category. Scholastic is the publisher that caught lightning in a bottle with the Harry Potter franchise and later duplicated that feat (albeit on a much smaller scale) by reprinting Jeff Smith's Bone series in color. As such, they are still very much all-in with regard to comics aimed at various age groups, as this survey will indicate. Other publishers, like First Second, have also achieved success by concentrating a great deal of their output on all-ages material. Let's take a look to see what approaches are in vogue with regard to story and art, from roughly youngest audience to oldest:

The Super Crazy Cat Dance, by Aron Nels Steinke . (Baloon Toons/Blue Apple Books. Aimed at ages 3-6). This is modeled after Francoise Mouly's Toon Books line, right down to the shape and design of the book. Of course, those books were modeled after Golden Books and other classic book designs for kids, which are heavy on decorative properties. Steinke has an idiosyncratic voice as a writer, a tone that winds up being perfect for a kids' book. That's partly because while he channels Dr. Seuss for the rhymes about cats that make up most of the book, he screeches to a halt to actually write about the title dance in a way that's genuinely amusing and unexpected. His line is simple but he adds a lot of detail and "eye pops" on every page, making this an ideal book for a child to read again and again as they take in new images. Lastly, the colors in this book are simple but warm & inviting, providing an interesting contrast to the predominant use of black as a background color. Steinke seems to have really found his niche with this book.




Gumby's Gang Starring Pokey #1, by Michael Aushenker & Rafael Navarro. (Gumby Comics. Aimed roughly at ages 7-10.) This is an agreeably dopey comic jammed with funny visuals, dumb puns and just plain nonsense. In other words, this time travel story is a snug fit in the continuum of strangeness that is the world of Gumby & Pokey. Navarro's loopy line and Lance Borde's garish colors give the reader something interesting to look at in every panel. Gumby and Pokey are funny-looking characters to begin with, but Navarro's drawings of Gumby & Pokey as Run-DMC, cube-headed people of the future and Gumby climbing the Trojan Horse are simply funny apart from their larger context. Aushenker's references to 80s rap, the Minutemen, and Suicidal Tendencies are meant to fly over the heads of any kids who happen to be reading the comic (sort of the way The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle did). Aushenker's frantic, silly and absurd style of humor is a contrast to the gentler, slower pace of the original cartoons, but creator Art Clokey designed these clay characters to be flexible in every sense of the word. Aushenker clearly respects the source material but exploits that flexibility to expand the world and references of its star characters. I don't think every kid who reads this would like it, but a certain kind of kid to whom absurdism is appealing would no doubt re-read it endlessly.



Adventures In Cartooning Activity Book, by James Sturm, Andrew Arnold & Alexis Frederick-Frost. (First Second. 78 pages, aimed roughly at ages 6-12.) The follow-up to the excellent comics/textbook for kids encourages cleverly disguises its exercises as fun activities. The book follows a knight in search of adventure who is encouraged by an elf to draw. The reader is asked to draw increasingly more complex objects, starting with free-form doodles to copying a simple horse to making up food items to draw in a fridge. From there, the reader is introduced to sound effects, decorative aspects of drawing, simple perspective, backgrounds, dialogue, sound effects, lettering, panel sequencing and transitions, motion, and the passage of time. To my eye, it looks like Frederick-Frost's line is responsible for most of the figure work, with his simple brush line and supple figure work delighting the eye at every turn. There's a warmth and approachability on every page that's designed to draw in readers, but the book also challenges its readers with the final exam of doing all the work (save panel design) for a 14-page story. Hopefully, there will be future activity books that up the ante a bit further.



Pilot & Huxley: Their First Adventure, by Dan McGuiness. (Graphix!/Scholastic. 62 pages, aimed at ages 7-9.) There's a reference to South Park in this comic, which I thought odd given its target audience. In many respects, the smart-ass give-and-take between the title boy characters and the deliberately crude, stilted art make this a sort of action-adventure version of South Park, minus the swearing and sex jokes. McGuiness does actually land plenty of good gags in this silly book about two boys hopping between dimensions, but the computer-drawn art is crude to the point of distraction and too many of the gags rely on gross-out humor. It's also surprisingly meta for a comic aimed at kids. None of that would have been a problem if the art (and that goes for the garish coloring) was simply more interesting to look at.


Missile Mouse: Rescue on Tankium3, by Jake Parker. (Graphix!/Scholastic. 158 pages, aimed at ages 8-12.) It's no surprise that Parker has a background in animation, given the clean lines and functionally attractive use of color in this book. This science-fiction story is an entirely tidy adventure that focuses on its episodic plot and simple characterization. Parker's anthropomorphic mouse hero is a triumph of character design, as is his primary antagonist in the book, the Blazing Bat. Parker skillfully introduces visual elements early in the book that either wind up becoming plot points or recurring bits of comic relief. The result is a smooth, pleasant read that is generic and not especially memorable, in part because the main character is such a generic action hero. Like many an animated action feature, the focus on action over character makes it difficult to create a connection with the titular character. Still, the clarity of action, simplicity of the humor and crispness of the color & character design will no doubt be appealing to readers at the younger end of its target audience.


Sidekicks, by Dan Santat. (Graphix!/Scholastic. 224 pages, aimed at ages 8-12.) This is a book about the super-powered pets of a generic (but older) superhero named Captain Amazing. It's got two chief assets: the chunky & blocky drawings are expressive and funny, and Santat lets the characters dictate the action at all times. The plot is simple and the twists are telegraphed, but both serve simply as a stucture for the four animal characters to interact. The emotional plot of the book involves three of the animals (a dog, a hamster and a newly-arrived chameleon) wishing they could spend more time with their master, a hero on the verge of retirement. The hero decides to get a new sidekick, and the dog (Roscoe) decides to try out for the role. When the hamster (Fluffy) and chameleon (Shifty) decide to do the same, they encounter the cat (Manny), their former "brother" who had run away from home after a long stint as the hero's sidekick. That emotional structure is imbued with genuine warmth to go along with slapstick, and it's the key to the book's success. The story is otherwise pretty silly superhero boilerplate, but each character's personality drives the book in different ways. The dog is loyal but stubborn, relying too much on brute force; the cat is prickly but clever, slowly letting his guard down with regard to his brothers; the hamster is good-natured and relentlessly loving; the chameleon is a bit baffled but eager to fit in. Santat's use of color is expressive and appealing, spotlighting his idiosyncratic visual style. This was the best of the Scholastic books by far.

Ghostopolis, by Doug TenNapel (Graphix!/Scholastic. 268 pages, aimed at teens.) I've always found TenNapel to be a clever cartoonist whose comics tend to wind up being all over the place. This book is no exception. It's a love story about a shiftless ghost hunter and a clever ghost. It's a family rapprochement story. It's a sick child story. It's a monster story. It's a quest. It's an action/adventure story with fantasy elements. It's a story about belief. Gross-out gags are mixed with cloying sentiment. It's not complex as much as it is cluttered, with some characters possessing rich backstories and others lacking enough depth to justify their heroic arcs. There's plenty to recommend in this volume (the character designs, unsurprisingly, are all top-notch, with clever variations on familiar designs), but it simply doesn't cohere--especially at an emotional level.

Bad Island, by Doug TenNapel (Graphix!/Scholastic, 224 pages, aimed at ages 10-13.) This book by TenNapel has a much tighter focus, following a family of four and their life-and-death adventures after they get shipwrecked on a mysterious island. Like Ghostopolis, this book concerns a dysfunctional family and how the extreme conditions of an adventure scenario provides a crucible for its repair. In particular, TenNapel zeroes in on wayward sons, and Bad Island provides a clever set of parallel narratives regarding two sons trying to assert themselves as adults in different but equally inappropriate ways. TenNapel quickly sets up the personalities of each family member before putting them on the island, and then jacks up the danger & action quotient steadily. The connections between scenes and flow of the action are reminiscent of Carl Barks at times, and his character design (as per usual) is elastic, animated and expressive. The one sour note of the book is the character of the mother, who is at first a sour scold and doesn't advance much past that. The female characters in both of his books are one-note: the wacky girl in this book, as well as the bitter mother & sadly scorned ex-girlfriend in Ghostopolis. Those latter characters go through what I call a binary arc, switching from unhappy to happy without the same sort of journey as the male characters. As a result, that change feels forced and unearned. On the whole, the action in this book is compelling and the family elements ring true without being too didactic.

Bone: Quest For The Spark, Book One, by Tom Sniegoski & Jeff Smith. (Graphix!/Scholastic. 218 pages, aimed at teens.) Smith's Bone series is the gold standard for young adult comics over the last twenty years after it initially garnered an enormous adult audience as well. While Smith won't be writing new stories himself, the Bone empire rolls on with a new series of novels written by long-time collaborator Sniegoski and illustrated by Smith. This book is right in the Bone pocket: sinister & mysterious force threatening happiness in the valley; a young and unlikely hero teaming up with a group of Bones; a desperate quest to find the one thing that can defeat the enemy, picking up strange allies along the way. Sniegoski's take on the Bone mythos is perfectly competent, but I've always felt that his writing was a bit on the broad side--which is saying something, because Smith certainly went for some broad punchlines throughout the course of his original series. In this book, he reins himself in a bit, but he lacks that certain quirky something that made Smith's series such a huge success. This being prose instead of comics doesn't help matters much, given that the kinetic quality of Smith's panel-to-panel transitions carried so much of the series' momentum. As a result, the book winds up being a pleasant visit with some old friends but not much more.

The Good Neighbors: Book Three: Kind, by Holly Black & Ted Naifeh. (Graphix!/Scholastic. 112 pages, aimed at teens.) This book is radically different from the others on this list, in that it's not a "boy's adventure" action quest. In terms of packaging and even certain story elements, there's a certain resonance with the mega-successful Twilight novels. The cover features a young woman clearly being torn between two different lovers (which is indeed the case, as the story reveals). How this book is radically different from Twilight is that the female protagonist here is a decidedly active one, as opposed to the more passive Bella. I had not read the first two books in this series and so missed the full emotional ramifications of the initial premise: an odd teenage girl named Rue learns that her mother is in fact a faerie and that she has all sorts of magical powers. The end of the second book finds her city being merged with the land of Faerie, with all of its attendant nastiness and a potential war brewing between the two peoples. Rue's struggle is being caught in-between, with no clear choices for resolution: between her mother and father, between being human and immortal, between her boyfriend and a newer lover, between her friends & the life she knew and a different life in a magical realm. Black, the writer, wrings every bit of angst possible out of these conflicts, rendering the entire book an overwrought series of pained internal monologues. After a while, this gets to be tedious. To her credit, Black doesn't cop out with any easy decisions at the end, and the choice Rue makes is a surprising one in many ways. Naifeh's work is excellent throughout; his shadowy pages are reminiscent of a slightly more cartoony Gene Colan. He does his best to add life and atmosphere to the story, contributing nicely to its downbeat mood. While I am far from the target audience for this book, I appreciate Black attempting to steer away from cliche' as much as possible while still including the sort of story elements that that audience expects from a fantasy series.

TCJ Post #12: Penina Gal & Alexis Frederick-Frost

My twelfth post on the Comics Journal website concerns minis by Penina Gal & Alexis Frederick-Frost.

Expanding Pedagogy: Adventures in Cartooning

Rob reviews the young readers how-to guide/narrative, ADVENTURES IN CARTOONING, by James Sturm, Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost (FIRST SECOND).



It's a golden age for comics in many respects, but it's especially a great time for comics textbooks. With schools such as CCS, SCAD, SVA and MCAD offering formal instruction and cartooning courses popping up everywhere, it makes sense that we should finally see some practical comics textbooks. From Ivan Brunetti's informal CARTOONING book to the densely-detailed DRAWING WORDS AND WRITING PICTURES from Jessica Abel & Matt Madden along with Lynda Barry's more general inspirational guide WHAT IT IS and Kyle Baker's goofy HOW TO DRAW STUPID, there's now an embarassment of riches for anyone designing a course for teens or adults. First Second, a publisher that has gone out of its way to publish a number of comics aimed squarely at children, has stepped up to supplement the Abel/Madden book with ADVENTURES IN CARTOONING, which is designed to both educate and inspire younger children as to the formal properties of comics while telling a story.



Not surprisingly, the book was put together by the head of the Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS), James Sturm, and two graduates of the school, Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost. Frederick-Frost has already won a Xeric grant for his LA PRIMAVERA, and all three artists have collaborated here with a pitch-perfect blend of pedagogy and fun. The book starts off by asking if the reader can draw simple shapes and promises them the ability to draw comics if they can. ADVENTURES simultaneously folds in an adventure about a knight trying to rescue a princess from a dragon into a lesson about the basics of comics, with the knight as a stand-in for the reader and a magic elf as the instructor.


The reader learns about the basic unit of the page, the panel; how to depict motion against a background, the way text influences the way we perceive image, word balloons vs thought balloons and other concepts--all within the context of a comedic quest adventure story. It's actually a delightfully meta sort of story, like a less malevolent DUCK AMUCK, as the characters find themselves able to manipulate the rules of their world as they understand more and more about comics. The end result is extremely clever, as the book surprisingly becomes an exciting adventure story, a brief comment about gender equity, and an open-ended invitation to the reader to create their own stories. The book finishes with a handy appendix of other comics concepts (like gutters), and a step-by-step series of instructions on how to draw basic characters like horses and people. It's hard to tell what the division of labor was between the three artists. I recognize Frederick-Frost's brushstrokes in how the figures are finished, but the way the action is depicted makes it seem like Arnold did the layouts. Sturm may well have written it, given his recent background as an educator, though I'm sure all three artists had input in every segment of the book.




I'll be curious to see what sort of effect this book has on children, and what the best age group would be for it. I'm guessing that the ideal group would be somewhere between seven and ten years old. The book is probably a little too simplistic for anyone older, but I'm not sure its ideas will sink in with anyone younger, unless they have an adult working with them. I do like that there's a sample of an actual child's story based on the book's characters in the back, showing a reader that their own work doesn't have to be as exact as the creators of the book. That said, the only flaw of the book is that it may not be interactive enough to really force the reader into making their own strip. The reader is introduced to a number of concepts, shown how they can work in a story, but then gets swept along with the story. At the very end, the book asks the reader to create their own stories, but this requires a bit of a leap for a child that doesn't already draw. On the other hand, the book could be a way to get children to "turn your doodles into comics!" as the front cover suggests. It's supposing that most children will have the raw material to want to start to draw comics, just not the tools. As such, ADVENTURES IN CARTOONING is more of a toolbox (or perhaps toybox) than a textbook, explicitly providing aspiring cartoonists with the fundamentals an implicitly showing them how to write the sort of story that they'd want to read.

Mini-Comics Round-Up: Sayers, Dinski, M.Hogan, R.Hogan, Trivial, Carcieri

Rob reviews another batch of interesting minicomics. Included are JUST SO YOU KNOW #1 by Joey Sayers; TRIVIAL, an anthology by Sean Ford, Alex Kim, Andrew Arnold & Alexis Frederick-Frost; MIND-MAPPING by Will Dinski; BEARD-GROWING CONTEST by Raighne Hogan; MANNY & BIGFOOT by Meghan Hogan; and PORTALS #1 & DREAM #1 by Nic Carcieri & Eric Dotson.



JUST SO YOU KNOW, by Joey Sayers. This mini is certainly a change of pace for the artist behind the "Thingpart" gag strips. Sayers generally employs a minimalist but nicely composed style for absurdist gags that skillfully subvert reader expectations. Her comics remind me a bit of Matt Feazell (in terms of the minimalist style) and Michael Kupperman (in terms of the quality of the absurd gagsmithing). JUST SO YOU KNOW is an autobiographical comic featuring anecdotes about Sayers' transition from male to female. I've actually read a surprising number of autobiographical comics about this subject, but Sayers' strips here are unusual because she takes great pains to provide every anecdote with a punchline. No matter how personal or serious a direction she takes the reader, Sayers always leavens the seriousness with a joke. The joke is frequently at her own expense. One gets the sense that Sayers was worried about being boring or preachy in a comic that was already (by definition) entirely self-centered. Pricking her own ego from time to time acts as preventative medicine for the reader who might think that Sayers takes herself way too seriously.

The impression one walks away with after reading this comic is that it's only because of the greater ease she feels in the world and with herself that she was not only able to write about this subject, but make fun of it. The first strip, "Freaking Out The Parents" starts off with some stiff medicine, as she tells her parents (and the audience) about the way she's struggled trying to live as a man, her depression and how she felt the need to turn to drugs. She kept going on like this for several panels, noting that she just wanted to be happy, until we are hit with her father saying, "Wait, you did drugs?" Sayers once again sets the reader up with one expectation and then pulls the rug out, establishing the formula for the rest of the comic.

Sayers gives us certain bits of the process of transition and the anxiety a transgendered person can feel, but isn't interested in presenting us with all the details. This comic is really about her own thoughts about transition, both funny and otherwise, as opposed to making a larger statement about it. There are vignettes about how hormones affect her emotional state (which create more than a little unease with both her and her girlfriend), being excited about growing breasts and getting a state ID confirming her new identity, and wondering if she's a bitch now in various circumstances. She closes things out by focusing on the relationship with her long-time and supportive girlfriend, as Sayers went from cross-dresser to transsexual. All told, this is a clear early front-runner for minicomic of the year for 2009, and I'm eager to see Sayers do more stories in this mold. She has a gift for relating personal details without being insufferable and of mining humor without forcing punchlines.



TRIVIAL, by Alexis Frederick-Frost, Alex Kim, Andrew Arnold and Sean Ford. The third of the Center for Cartoon Studies' "Four Square" anthologies is the strongest overall. Every quartet of artists in each issue works around a central theme, with this issue's being "trivial". That's a rather open-ended concept, which leads to four very different sorts of stories. Frederick-Frost's bold brush strokes and heavy use of blacks are a perfect way to open the book, drawing in the reader's eye with the starkness of his style. It's a style that fits the story well, being about the harsh beauty of Antarctica and a Shackleton expedition there. As he and his men trudge across the unforgiving landscape, the only way they could keep their sanity was by discussing the most inane of topics: conceptualizing new dishes and then debating their merits and originality. During a heated debate about the jam roll, Frederick-Frost underscores the nature of their struggle by printing the rather restrained text of Shackelton's account of the debate but showing a life-or-death struggle in the ice. It's a clever idea, well-executed.


Alex Kim and his weird, wavy line really go to town on a trivial conversation that turns into a graphic description of a weird nightmare. Kim throws us straight into a talking head with no explanation (not unusual in his comics), as the character is talking to someone we never see (one can surmise that the reader is really his conversational partner). The character talks about his obsession with hands and then relates a dream where he discovers his hands have become gigantic, sentient and murderous--eventually killing him, even as they were still attached to his body. What makes the story work is the way Kim uses panel-to-panel transitions, slowly panning down and around to up the horror content of the story. The effect is deliberately disjointed, creating an intense dream logic that continues until we slowly, creepily pan back to the character in real time. This is less a story than an image that Kim expanded and fleshed out, and it's the strength of that image that makes this chapter memorable.

Andrew L Arnold has an entry about a retired god/superhero who lives on a cloud. His day starts off reading a book, and he is then presented with a problem that is seemingly trivial at first but grows ever more problematic: a meteor heading toward a city that his explosive arrows just won't blow up. In the end, his luck (and aim) run just a little bit awry. This is a nicely designed chapter with a funny punchline that is deliberately stretched out like a shaggy dog story. It's a bit more conventional than the other stories in this anthology and less interesting to simply look at, but it's solidly crafted.



Sean Ford checks in with a couple of vignettes related to his ONLY SKIN series, featuring the odd ghost and new kid Clay. In the series, the ghost is mischievous at best and malevolent at worst, but he's more the former in these stories. In the first vignette, Clay and the ghost are mushrooming and the ghost urges him to give a poisonous mushroom to a nearby girl. When Clay refuses, the ghost mocks him like a grade schooler. In the second story, the ghost longs for nostalgic memories that are not really his, like drinking vodka and smoking cigarettes in a cemetery. The punchline comes when Clay actually does it for him and it's not exactly as exciting as he hoped. Ford's biggest strengths are character design and page composition. He solves the problem of what are essentially two talking head stories by varying his panel design, having the characters engage in visually interesting actitivies while they talk and dropping characters into shadow as a way of adding variety. All of that would be pointless if Ford weren't so adept at crafting dialogue. Clay acts as a nice straight man of sorts for the ghost, whose enigmatic nature lends itself to all sorts of possibilities. It's not surprising that a good chunk of the crew behind the SUNDAYS anthology would produce such a visually distinctive book with great production values, and it's clear that they all approached their contributions to this book very seriously.



MIND-MAPPING, by Will Dinski. Another winner from Will Dinksi, who always engages the form of his delivery system in new and exciting ways. This comic is about memory as it relates to pain, and the ways in which the things we recall tend to be very much by choice. It's about a map specialty store owner with a photographic memory, who laments that he is haunted by the specters of his memories, recalling them more sharply than most. He relates in excrutiating detail various incidents burned into his brain. Upon discovering that his store has been robbed, including of his laptop, he realizes that perhaps a lifetime spent dwelling on the mental recreation of trauma has left him more than a little unobservant. That realization perhaps let him realize that the ghosts he was haunted by were of his own making.



The comic unfolds like a typical Dinski work: crisply stylized characters, word balloons that act as individual captions and a certain economy of line and storytelling. The comic folds out like a map, which not only refers back to the main character but also the way he thought of memory as a series of grids that one could access. When one has finished the comic, Dinski gives us a little surprise: turn out the lights and then look at the glow-in-the-dark images that pop up. It's a clever flourish for a story that had a lot of punch and wasted no time to get there. Dinski's been on a real roll the past couple of years, and this mini certainly continues his hot streak. I like how he goes out of his way to create comics that are difficult to reprint in standard format, fully embracing the freedom and difficulties that creating minicomics provide.





BEARD GROWING CONTEST by Raighne Hogan and MANNY & BIGFOOT by Meghan Hogan. This is a pair of tiny minis from the husband-wife duo behind the excellent GOOD MINNESOTAN anthology. Both of these minis are beautiful, weird art objects; they're less stories than quick impressions. R.Hogan's BEARD GROWING CONTEST is a brief little vignette about a little kid straining to grow a beard and unleashing a fart instead, with the real punchline being what happens in his dreams later on. The full-color MANNY & BIGFOOT feels like a story fragment, as a man and his pet rabbit are threatened by a mysterious kidnapping note, while his sweater-stretching roommate Bigfoot messes with him. The soft pastels grab the eye and create an almost blurry softness for the visuals. The production values of both minis are top notch, even if the comics themselves are the very definition of "slight". Still, it's clear that that's what both cartoonists were going for: a slight, fun comic that served as a useful test for some eye-catching techniques.



DREAMER #1 and PORTALS #1 by Nic Carcieri, Rantz, Jason Flowers, Joel Cotejar, and Eric Dotson. There's something comforting about a writer who is so devoted to creating genre comics that he puts them out bit by bit in minicomics form. There's no pretense to being rich or famous, but rather an intense need to tell one's stories. As part of United Fanzine Organization, these comics have the appearance of work by enthusiastic amateurs rather than polished pros, but this is honestly what is most appealing about them. With both DREAMER and PORTALS, we get a tiny snapshot of a larger idea, the effect being watching the first five-minute segment of a 25-part movie serial from the 1930s. DREAMER'S about a guy who receives a weird artifact of his father's that has something to do with some kind of ancient struggle. I like the unfussy line of artist Eric Dotson here, even if it is a bit stiff in places. Every story in PORTALS is a bit of high concept: both "Kylie West" and "Hot Wings" involve big-boobed heroines engaging in adventure; the former's about an astronaut who winds up on a weird planet, and the latter is about warrior angels. The stylizations of artist Rantz veer between sloppy and fetishistic, drawing equally from manga and Image-style art. As such, it feels more like pin-up art than something that really tells a story. Jason Flowers' work in "Are We Dead Yet?" (about an immortal detective) tries for noir but winds up being muddy (including the lettering). "The London Fog" is the most ridiculous concept in the book (a magical Victorian-era vigilante preying on killers in the form of fog) yet Joel Cotejar's linework makes the idea come alive. I like the enthusastic fan ambition of Carcieri in that he's writing five epics at once (if in dribs and drabs), almost as if he's finding out what will stick best. It's that purity of enthusiasm that shows through, even if some of the stories feel like well-trod genre ground. Other than the loopy-but-serious "London Fog", I can't say that I'd be eager to read further installments of any of these series, but I'm glad that they exist.

Another Wave From CCS

Rob reviews the latest batch of comic from students and alumni from the Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS). Reviewed are comics from Penina Gal, Chuck Forsman, Caitlin Plovnick, Colleen Frakes, JP Coovert, Alexis Frederick-Frost, Bill Volk, Denis St. John and Alex Kim.


Time for another peek at some recent comics from the Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS).

THE FIRE MESSENGER 1, by Penina Gal. This first issue of what promises to be an extended fantasy series is most notable for its gorgeous use of color and the way Gal plops us into a fantasy world with no information given to the reader. We meet two boys named Aiden and Nik. We quickly learn that Aiden has the power to control fire, but that the friends were trapped in a big fire that Aiden couldn't quite control and somehow wound up in an unfamiliar forest. As they wander through the forest and desperately try to survive, we are slowly given clues through their dialogue about their lives. They both go to a school in a world where everyone has some kind of special magical gift, but Aiden's abilities make him a teacher's pet. The unfamiliar world they wind up in turns out to be our Earth, and the realization that they're no longer on the right world chills our heroes.

The way the story begins reminds me a bit of Phillip Pullman's HIS DARK MATERIALS novels, where we're thrown into a magical world with no context and are expected to figure things out through context. It's an effective strategy, because it forces us to concentrate fully on the characters instead of on the way the world is built. Gal favors pastels for both the color of her paper and the actual panels themselves, giving the book a fairy-tale look. The main problem with this approach is that the color fairly overwhelms her line throughout much of the issue. Her line is deliberately simple and basic and the emotions of the story are mostly conveyed through color, but a slightly bolder line would make the story's figures stand out a bit more. The thinner line led to a blurred, bleeding effect, especially between foreground and background. Still, her use of color is expressionistic and ambitious, and I'm curious to see where the story goes from here.


DEAD AIR #1, by Caitlin Plovnick. This minicomic miniseries about a group of 20-something slacker guys with a band is modest in scope and ambition. The story is a familiar one: directionless young men sitting around getting stoned, listening to music, going to dead-end jobs (or laying on couches all day), etc. What makes this comic worthwhile is the pitch and tone of Plovnick's treatment of her characters. That tone is equal parts mockery and affection, made effective by the pitch-perfect dialogue. The lazy guy who doesn't even want to get off the couch because "it's all gloomy out", the convenience store clerk whose smartassery gets thrown in his face by activists, the record store clerk whose passion for music is chewed up by retail are all examples of characters that could have been cliches. Instead, there's a respect for the way they interact (especially with regard to music) but also an understanding of how pathetic their lives are. The strip on the back cover shows of Plovnick's wit, which she uses in a restrained manner in her comic. The themes and characters we see in this book are certainly nothing groundbreaking, but Plovnick's developing skill as a storyteller made me want to see more. If anything, I'd like to see Plovnick simplify her line. She overrenders a few scenes that would have benefited from a clearer line, which gets in the way of the expressiveness of her characters.


3AM and A SMALL STORY OF LOVE AND DEATH, by Alex Kim. Kim's comics always have an open-ended and ambiguous quality. His stories rarely provide much in the way of exposition. The reader is thrown into a situation and forced to figure out how the characters he's introduced are interacting and why. 3AM is a comics adaptation of a poem written by Jessica Abston, an ode to those magical late night hours spent in diners where reality seems a little more fluid somehow. Kim's use of silhouette to depict the blankness of the narrator in all this was a clever move. A SMALL STORY... opens with a typical Kim setting: a conversation in a bar. A person tells a story about watching two rats living near a subway line rail and understanding that they were mates. He is drawn to their lives in ways he can't articulate and is shattered when he sees that one of the rats is dead and the other essentially commits suicide by waiting for a train to hit it. Of course, the friend he tells the story to is baffled by his obsession, and even the sympathetic bartender thought he was crazy.

This comic is not about the story of the rats, but that the man needs to tell this story. It reflects a deeper crisis in the main character that is just hinted at but never hammered at, and that emotional restraint is a hallmark of Kim's work. As always, Kim uses a wavy-line approach in his characters' clothing, giving them a rumpled look. I wish he had taken a different approach with the character design in this comic, because the main character needed to stand out a bit more from the others. That said, his use of panel-to-panel transitions was quite clever and resonant, especially when the protagonist has just witnessed the rat killing itself.


DAFFY, by Chuck Forsman. The SNAKE OIL artist presents a collection of shorter works here, mostly humor strips and other odds and ends. The bulk of the mini is a reprint of the "Jimmy Draws Cats" series of strips originally published in SUNDAYS. This was Forsman's best early effort, drawn with the feel of a classic comic strip with Forsman's own brand of absurdity. The scenes where young Jimmy is sent to "Art Skool", depicted as the most desolate and vicious place imaginable, still make me laugh. The book's first strip, featuring two characters hanging on a gallows, creates an absurd situation by contrasting the dialogue and the grimness of the situation. Drawing the characters as stick figures heightens the tension and humor even more.

The last pages of the book are devoted to what seems to be an attempt at doing a series about the life of Jim Thorpe's latter years. I'm not sure if this is a work in progress or a work abandoned, but it seemed intriguing. You can see Forsman's line developing in some of these earlier strips, where he didn't have quite the same control over his line that he does now. At the same time, it's clear that he has always tried to maintain a spontaneity of approach, and that organic quality of his comics is perhaps their greatest appeal.


WOMAN KING preview, by Colleen Frakes. I've always found Frakes' bold but spare line and composition to be her greatest strengths as an artist. There's a bleakness to her work that I also find appealing as she tells her own version of myths and folktales. This brief preview is no exception, a story told in another format in the NO! anthology that I reviewed elsewhere. Frakes' composition is bold and exciting in this story of a girl chosen to lead a clan of bears against a human village, but some of the rendering seems a bit rushed here. That's especially true of the girl herself; it seemed as though Frakes was trying to get at an iconic depiction of her but couldn't quite pull it off without adding some more detail. On the other hand, the way she constructs her bears embodied that bold simplicity perfectly. Given the way she altered her final version of the story she told in her Tragic Relief book, redrawing much of it, I wouldn't be surprised to see this mini as simply another draft. In any event, the prospect of a long-form work by Frakes is an exciting one.


INSIDES, by JP Coovert. This short, striking comic plays to Coovert's strengths: an understanding of how to create and solve visual puzzles on each page. He doesn't do this with a lot of formal pyrotechnics, but rather a thoughtful and clever approach on how to use images to tell a story on several levels. This comic is a great case in point, as it's literally about a man (presumably Coovert himself) purging and vomiting up everything that's touched, moved or inspired him. Whether this purging is at some level voluntary (it would seem not), there's a sense that, like any purging, one feels better afterward. That feeling faded quickly as the character whimpers that he needs the final person her purged: an important significant other. The realization that getting rid of everything inside is only helpful up to a point--especially when we're trying to purge memories, influences and feelings. Because of the strong specificity of the images purged but a lack of detail given regarding their meaning, it's easy for a reader to project their own memories and feelings onto these images. That particular tact was risky on Coovert's part, but the way his images from specific to general was impressively conveyed.


3 STORIES and MARIA OF MONTMARTRE, by Alexis Frederick-Frost. 3 STORIES is a cleverly designed mini that shows off a few different approaches from Frederick-Frost. His comics combine a looseness of figure with an almost diagrammatic approach. Those figures have a sharpness to them, as Frederick-Frost composes them mostly out of triangles and rectangles. The simplicity of form combined with the expressive sweep of what appears to be a brush makes one pause to admire each page before even reading it. "Letter" is the most clever of the stories, a circular narrative where the lovelorn protagonist meets a horrible fate due to coincidence. His love going up in flames becomes both literal and figurative. The simplified character design makes the backgrounds every bit as important to look at as the characters themselves. That gestalt of background and foreground established throughout the story makes the final panels all the more effective. "Haunt" is more conventionally designed, with a visual conceit that lacks subtlety. The reader understands right away that the protagonist is haunted by the ills of the modern world and can't do anything about it, but the on-the-nose depiction of this on page after page dulls the point. On the other hand, "Hunt" almost dips into abstraction in this story of a hunter in a forest. The way Frederick-Frost worked the hunter into an almost abstract forest of angles and jutting lines was quite striking, and the literally explosive climax continued to make use of this interesting visual approach.

MARIA OF MONTMARTRE is Frederick-Frost's second long-form work. It's based on the life of a model-turned-painter in Impressionist-era France. This is only the first volume of what would seem to be a much longer work. Compared to his first long-form comic, LA PRIMAVERA, Frederick-Frost's figures were much more expressive here. While maintaining his simplicity of character design, he was able to add just a few more flourishes to bring the likes of Toulouse-Latrec and Aristide to life. While his use of greyscale shading was effective in adding texture and weight to his panels and figures, I'm guessing that the eventual collected work will be one or two toned. This chapter is simply and leisurely told with few surprises, but it's the loving details of how Frederick-Frost imagined the life of Paris in the late 19th century that give this comic life. The idea of a story talking about the tension between artist and model and the muse seeking her own form of expression is a clever one, and I'm guessing the the eventual finished piece will be Frederick-Frost's most impressive output to date and really announce his arrival.


THE DEWEY DECIMAL SYSTEM IS DECADENT AND DEPRAVED, by Bill Volk. This is a 24-hour comic, one with an impressive level of compositional and drafting skill for such an exercise. There are certainly a number of rough spots, of course, but the cleverness of the artist and spontaneity of his approach makes up for the raggedness of his line and occasional clutter. The story is about Volk working at a library and wondering why the Dewey Decimal system files some comics all together, but others (like MAUS) in completely different portions of the library. This leads him on an amusing fever dream quest where he confronts Melvil Dewey, Art Spiegelman and dame Fortune herself and concludes that there's nothing wrong with MAUS being filed under World War II/Holocaust books, and that in fact all comics should be scattered "unto the four winds". Visual flourishes like Volk's fever-dream self morphing into an anthropomorphic dog to talk to Spiegelman's famous anthropomorphic mouse caricature was clever. A comic not just about comics but about how comics are shelved is a bit meta, but that can be forgiven, I think, for a student entering the comics boot-camp that is CCS. I'll be curious to see more work from Volk drawn under more ideal conditions.

MONSTERS & GIRLS: AMELIA, by Denis St. John. There's so much going on in this comic that it's difficult to know where to begin. First and foremost, it's a high-concept horror comic. It's about a girl in her early 20s who has a magic object (a box with a creepy, ornate eye symbol) and is seeking out two other objects that are related to it somehow, knowing that she needs to complete the set. That particular bit of high concept unifies all of the other weirdness in this comic and gives it a sturdy structure to rest upon. Second, the tone of the comic slips between laugh-out loud absurdity back to horrific, sometimes in the same panel. Third, sex is a key and visceral component of this story, and St. John blends in eroticism with humor and horror--again, sometimes in the same panel.

There's a scene early in the comic where the protagonist, Amelia, is seducing a much older man so as to steal his magic object (a writing tablet). The way she moves her body around so as to avoid the disgusting prospect of seeing his facial expression, only to be scared witless at a pair of eyes staring at her out of the darkness, and watching her body twist around on top of his, was squirm-inducingly funny. Later, when she confronts her younger brother, acting remarkably casual for someone who was in the room at the same time and seemingly in cahoots with the older man, she blurts out "Why do you look like a Nosferatu?" The weirdness and laughs never take the reader out of the story, because this is in no way a parody. Everything that happens here makes sense in the context of this world, and the reader is asked to immerse oneself in it.
St. John is ambitious in the way he uses expression, gesture and mood. He doesn't quite have the chops to pull it off on every page and in every panel. Amelia's big eyes are one of the book's foci; there are some panels where her face, given a greater focus by St. John's line, looks slightly raggedly drawn. There's a density to his cross-hatching that's sometimes at odds with his figures. At times, there's also an awkwardness in the way his figures interact. Some of that is intentional, I'm guessing, but some of it is distracting on the page. On the other hand, St. John's use of black/white contrast is quite clever, as is the way he renders the repeated skull motif. His greatest skill is his ability to render humor, discomfort and desire in the same panel, and that blend is what makes this such an intriguing comic. I've never seen a comic that blended all three and still managed to tell an engaging narrative, and it seems that St. John is well on his way to creating a significant long-form work.