45 Days Of CCS, #41: Meandering Realms

Filipa Estrela has long been a leading proponent of constructed comics made from unconventional materials. Meandering Realms is an anthology that she edited full of such comics. Be it woodcuts, clay figures, cut paper, pyrography on wood, or mixed media, this anthology is a fascinating read for fans of extreme formal experimentation in comics. The anthology has a mix of CCS artists and others; some are well-established in terms of cartooning while others primarily ply their trade in other media. 

Starting with the CCS artists, Issy Manley's pandemic story about taking walks for pleasure was done in cut paper and embroidery. It is a perfect union of form and content, with countless clever formal touches that are all in service to the narrative. Manley's page composition, done mostly in an open-page layout, is beautiful and contains surprising elements. The use of embroidery to depict center lines on roads was an inspired element, especially when they loop around. It all gives context to this meditation on walking when others would prefer to drive. 

Bread Tarleton's facepaint comic literally uses their face for a comic in panel after panel, with paint creating images and lettering. The story is totally absurd, yet Tarleton makes it work so effectively. The story is engaging enough that the gimmick never grows old. 

Allison Bannister's retelling of a Greek myth with a feminist edge was done in layered woodcuts, and this was an incredibly effective way of portraying this kind of story. Stacking and layering the images gave them weight and depth, as though one was looking at a fresco. The sepia tones feel like the reader is looking at something ancient. Bannister's drawing and decorative touches only further this effect, especially the detail on the tree that is so central to the end of this myth about unasked for romantic attention that drives the protagonist to transform into a tree out of defiance. 

Sage Clemmons does a highly expressive story using clay figures and mixed media. It's a story about how a beloved childhood family game was phased out because of the protagonist's brother's sensitivity regarding his teeth, and it evolves into how not understanding others can lead to fractures. 

Estrela contributed two comics. The first was about an elder seed who chose to stay underground, despite being cajoled by the roots around it. It was pyrography on wood, and the burnt tones mimicked sepia hues. The shading gradations being made by altering the intensity of the flame was absolutely ingenious. Once again, while the form was important, it was entirely in the service of content. Her other story was done with needlefelt and wool, and it was about an explorer giving a mushroom sentience and what the mushroom chooses to do afterward. The muted, fuzzy colors create an atmosphere completely different from her first story. 

Of the non-CCS cartoonists, Bryn Ziegler's re-telling of the story of Orpheus (done with paint markers on acetate) is the most successful. The sharpness of the colors go hand-in-hand with the dramatic content, creating an achingly beautiful set of images. Kriota Willberg's story, done with embroidery on painted fabric, is right in her wheelhouse. It's about an account of a medical procedure after an attempted murder in the 16th century. Willberg nails the medieval tapestry look. Roshan Ganu's "Chappal Diary" combines a leather sandal and photography; this one is more a novelty than a coherent narrative. D.T. Burns also uses cut paper, and while it's less sophisticated than some of the other stories, there's a solid gag at the end. Keren Katz's use of cut paper and wire sculpture to depict a scene at an art museum is not only beautifully constructed, it's also a compelling character study. The other pieces tended to be either too wordy or lacking in substance beyond formal play. Overall, the misses were just as important as the hits. This is one of the rare anthologies where the formal constraints are just as important as the narrative content, and the pieces that nailed both made for boldly distinctive and innovative comics. 

45 Days Of CCS, #37: Filipa Estrela and Allison Bannister

Filipa Estrela is one of the more fascinating graduates of CCS due to their interest in what they refer to as "unconventional material comics" or "crafted comics." These are comics made in whole or part with materials other than traditional pen or pencil. This includes photos, mixed media, felting, clay, woodcuts, etc, as they outline in their very useful mini Building Realms. This is a companion piece to Meandering Realms, the anthology they edited (and which I will be reviewing in a few more days), as well as a guide. Estrela lists some of their preferred supplies, how to plan and set intentions for such a comic, post-production tips, and much more--all with delightful crafted creations in the background. Estrela's specialty is felt and thread, and you could see them playing around with this here. 

Estrela is also quite adept at more traditional cartooning and risograph printing. Dream Of A Brighter Tomorrow, like much of Estrela's work, is aspirational. Using bold and cute figures along with bright and vivid colors, Estrela makes a claim and a wish for a better world, one where needs are attended to, radical acceptance is the norm, and collaborations are the standard. It's a lovely sentiment, and Estrela's imaginative character design brings a playfulness to the comic that prevents it from simply being a polemic. 

Little Friend, Big Feelings is the sort of delicate Risographed comic that is directly in Estrela's wheelhouse. Using bright pinks and darker blues and a cute character design style, Estrela talks about the "little one" that accompanies us all (a little fuzzy creature) that reflects our emotions, be they joy, grief, rage, fear, or even boredom. Whatever the feelings, the little one is grateful to feel them, no matter what. This is a beautiful sentiment and one that's a consistent theme throughout all of Estrela's work: feeling our feelings in a direct manner is essential to our health. 

Allison Bannister is currently working on a long-form comic called At The Inn, and she sent me the first 12 pages (the prelude and first chapter). This is an excellent example of world-building meeting character-driven narratives right in the middle, as she creates a rich environment and several memorable characters in the span of just a few pages. This is a fantasy narrative about an inn owned by a woman named Minerva who comes across a young wizard who steals food. Recognizing a proud but scared runaway when she sees one, she offers the adept (named Andreja) a job and passage to the city. While the dialogue in some of the talking heads scenes gets a bit thick, Bannister balances that with several pages that have minimal text. With a mixture of body language and knowing hints in the dialogue, Bannister imparts a great deal of information to the reader about these characters without being overly direct; the plot details are less important than the characters and what we see as their basic motivations to start with. Bannister's use of color is also tasteful and intentional, adding even more information to the narrative while also establishing beautiful, lush backgrounds. 

Thirty Days of CCS #20: Allison Bannister, Whiteley Foster

Allison Bannister’s previous big work was the subversive fairy tale Wit’s End. She’s one of many cartoonists from CCS who enjoy using fantasy tropes and deconstructing their sexist and classist aspects without losing the sense of wonder that surrounds them. Her most recent work has found her going in some different directions, as she explored a variety of genres and even methods.

Xiphactinus is a minimalist pencil-and-ink comic with a gray wash. It’s about the titular fish, or rather the titular fish as fossil. This twenty foot long creature with sharp teeth ate a six foot fish whole and then quickly died. What’s amazing is that the fossil find preserved both the Xiphactinus and the smaller fish within; it’s a fossil that’s a narrative, right before your eyes. Bannister notes that this is why when it’s on display, it’s so popular and compelling. It’s like receiving a message from another time.

CinderMecha is another fairy tale rewrite, this time a result of one of those classic CCS group projects. Working with Tom O’Brien and Ben Evans, Bannister wrote the script and did the inks for this amusing tale. The titular character mopes because she wants to enter the royal mecha tournament but doesn’t have one of her own to pilot. A Fairy Mecha Pilot Godfather shows up, gives her a solar-powered pumpkin mecha that runs out of power at midnight, and off she goes. The ending is especially clever, as CinderMecha wins the tournament but has to abandon the glass and pumpkin mecha. When the king calls for the true owner to come forth, she is able to activate it and rather than become a princess, she becomes the king’s loyal pilot. I love this story because unlike Cinderella dazzling with her beauty, CinderMecha wins because of her skill. That concept was very much Bannister’s, though Evans really brought her ideas to life with his designs and O'Briens’ colors were delightful.

Ghost Room is a twenty page mini that delves into a regretful slice-of-life story. In a story that starts with brown tones for a reason, a woman in a car named Leigh stops off at her old college on the way to somewhere else. She’s immediately confronted by a spectral version of her friend Julie as she was in her undergrad days, and is drawn into the past, which colors everything blue. Or should I say covers it, as Leigh ignores her ringing cell phone, the brown of the phone vibrating under the light blue illusory skin of the past. Reliving old conversations, Leigh slips in and out of brown and blue, sometimes being in both colors at once when she says “I miss you”. What follows is a tearful confession of love that she never dared to confess, with her fantasy past version of Julie expressing it right back at her. The conflict for Leigh is whether to stay in that fantasy world or else come back and face her responsibilities as a friend. This is a sensitive, humane story that really makes the audience feel for Leigh as she deals with impossible and unfair emotions, and Bannister’s innovative use of color is what makes it work so well. The last line of the story is a killer, as something that popped up in Leigh’s fantasy emerges in real life as well. Bannister’s line is functional as she focuses on body language and gesture above all else, but she’s wise to keep it simple and let the color do the heavy labor.

Some artists come into CCS with crude drawing skills at best. However, cartooning and drawing are two related but separate disciplines, and I’ve noticed that CCS is happy to admit artists who may not be able to draw in a naturalistic style, but who do know how to tell a story and have a lot to say. In the case of Whiteley Foster, you have an artist who came to CCS armed to the teeth with an array of drawing, coloring and storytelling skills. It was also clear that she needed training to become a great cartoonist.

I’ll briefly run through a few short stories on her website before focusing on a couple of longer ones. It’s obvious that Foster’s greatly influenced by animation, including Disney films, anime and other things that aren’t immediate touchstones for me. Frankly, she could probably get a job storyboarding fairly easily. She’s clearly more at ease drawing digitally, but her pen and ink comics are just fine and she shows a strong command over her line as well as all of the usual techniques like hatching and cross-hatching. Yet, when I read her comics, I can’t help but feel like I’m reading a storyboard at times. Take the very well-written story “The Unknown Insane Girl”, which is about the first undercover journalism story. A young woman named Nellie Bly deliberately gets herself sent to the insane asylum for women to check out rumors of poor conditions and winds up with a sensational story. Her page composition, character expressiveness, etc. are all quite effective. However, the transitions between panels feel like the transitions between frames and there are almost no single panels containing interactions between characters. Even the ones she uses feel like still images rather than depicting action. It gives the story a static, rather than dynamic, feel.

The same is true of her adaptation of the folk tale “The Cow’s Head”. While there is walking in the forest, she zaps from face to face, without having bodies in the same panel interacting in space. Reading her children’s book, Milo’s Blue Umbrella, this tendency really stands out, because there’s not much difference in this well-drawn and pleasingly colored illustrated effort and her comics. When there are multiple characters in a single panel, they are often rendered quite small, like in the two pages she did in adapting “The Murders Of The Rue Morgue”. This is not to say that’s incapable of doing this; indeed, the classic CCS application (where you have to include a robot, a snowman and a princess, among other elements), saw her use an unusual page layout but did feature a few shots of the protagonist and antagonist in the same panel. She’s not averse to using something resembling a grid, like in her early work Cessus, a funny and violent story involving artifacts and people wanting them. Indeed, these are the most traditional looking of all her comics in terms of layout, yet she once again avoids having characters sharing the same panel and interacting except when she shrinks them greatly.

The exception to this rule is Manifested Destiny, about an ancient king bringing the Zodiac signs Pisces and Aries to life and then threatening to destroy them after they give him a bad reading. It’s no accident that the comic the Foster drew that had the most person-to-person interaction was also her most dynamic, exciting early comic. Her sharp wit and playfulness lost nothing in this construction of the page, and she still was able to use multiple panels to keep characters apart most of the time—just not in climactic moments.

Looking at her more recent work, Hank shows Foster working on both creating longer narratives and refining her skill as an illustrator even further. In this sweet tale of a girl running away with the circus in the early 20^th century, her facility as a draftsman made each page come to life with snapshots of beautiful image after beautiful image that were just rubbery and cartoony enough to “bend” in the reader’s gaze instead of dying on the page as antiseptic but perfect recreations. There’s no question that Foster walks on the right side of that divide as a cartoonist. Once again, however, every panel is still too static. There are no interactions between characters in each panel; they are separated by panels, as though their gaze and ability to interact in space is being caged. There are tantalizing moments where we see hints of this, like when she bumps into someone or a kid is yelling next to her, but then it’s not followed up with a solid panel-to-panel transition.

This leads us to her second year thesis project, the in-process Vervain University. It notes that her advisor is Donna Almendrala, who excels at two things: comedy and conventional storytelling. All her characters do is interact with each other in panel after panel. It’s what makes her comics work and is essential to making them funny. In this comic about a vampire who’s managed to not graduate from college after a hundred years, Foster’s overall presentation is a little sloppier than usual. It’s certainly looser than the exquisitely crafted Hank, for example. However, she puts in more character-to-character interaction in the first two pages than in the entire rest of her output combined. This seems like Almendrala’s suggestions at work here, as Foster decided to get out of her comfort zone and take some risks as a cartoonist.

The writing, as always, is sharp. Foster delivers the story’s high concept, starts it off with a hilarious bang as some frat boys threaten to “sun” the vampire protagonist Alfie, and then expertly introduces the supporting cast. Foster uses a simple narrative device where Alfie talks to the camera, as it were, turning that into something that’s both funny as he monologues and useful to quickly and efficiently revealing pertinent information. There’s a simple panel where Alfie is saying goodbye to his housemate Scharlotte (a vampire permanently stuck in a little girl’s body), and their affection is made obvious by the way she’s standing in relation to him and his gesture back at her. Things go awry for Alfie at the school in a carefully planned gag by Foster.

What I like best about this story is that it’s not a lazy vampire parody designed to get cheap laughs. Instead, it’s clear that Foster has thought through her characters and their motivations and builds her humor from that foundation. While the result thus far may not look as refined as some of her other work, this is a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good. This project is precisely why Foster is in graduate school: to give her as large a range of opportunities and skills as possible as a cartoonist. There’s no doubt that she will emerge as a better artist overall after this experience and be in a position to succeed at a high level. 

Thirty Days of CCS #17: Allison Bannister

Allison Bannister takes an avid interest in revisionist fantasy, but unlike many other CCS grads, her take is a lighthearted one. Her recent Kickstarter-powered project, Wits End, is a book that sees her essentially getting her real comics education in public. It follows an astute young man who begins the story taking his new job as Royal Scribe to young Francis, a whimsical and silly young woman who is nonetheless quite sharp when it comes to actually ruling the kingdom. In a world where magic is quite real, the scribe, immediately dubbed "Scribbulous" by the queen and her wacky court, does his best to do the queen's bidding while trying to figure out what's causing the weird goings-on in the castle. There's a knight/wizard who's in love with the queen, the absent king who's left the kingdom to his daughter so he can play golf, the queen's best friend who is an endless supply of bad jokes, and the servant who's related to the queen and resents her openly.

Characters get turned invisible, love potions cause chaos, a cursed book almost causes disaster, and there are lovelorn characters all around. This book reminds me less of a standard fairy tale and more like a Shakespeare comedy of errors, where mistaken identities and silliness abound. The pacing is leisurely, as Bannister makes sure that the reader really gets to know each of the characters in detail before drawing together plot points. What sets the story apart is that the characters are deeper than they initially appear, as Bannister uses that initial silliness and confusion to mask their real emotional complexity. It's not at all heavy-handed, but that emotional depth is what makes the story's ending especially satisfying.

In terms of the visuals, Bannister's draftsmanship skills are basic and rudimentary. Her character design is not especially distinct, but she makes up for that with her use of color and easy-to-differentiate items like clothing and hairstyles. That use of color helped to differentiate characters and even aided with visual effects that related to specific plot points, like magical potions or magical glimmers. That color at times oversaturates the page and detracts from the more dramatic use of color, which is one danger of computer coloring. On the other hand, it's obvious that Bannister clearly understood her own limitations and stuck within them, not trying to overcompensate by drawing too much. Instead, she focused on clarity of page design, panel-to-panel transitions and the ways in which bodies in space interact. There's still quite a bit of awkward negative space, but the color at least drew the eye away from that. The end result is a charming, amusing fantasy caper.