31 Days Of CCS #3: Amelia Onorato and Daryl Seitchik

It's tough to describe Amelia Onorato's oeuvre sometimes. Something like feminist-fantasy-fairy tales sort of gets at it, with a strong undercurrent of horror and frequent use of historical fiction tropes. At the same time, even her grimmest stories have a whimsical element, and they are always humane above all else. Regardless, her minicomic Churn is yet another fine example of her mind at work, combining many of those elements. This time around, the setting is the Massachusetts Bay colony in the 1600s, and there is a love triangle between a blacksmith named Prosper Smyth and "sisters" Remember Goulburn and Obedience Bright. (Those names just slayed me!) The gimmick here is that Remember, a young native woman, is in love with her adopted sister Obedience, while Obedience loves Prosper--and he loves them both!

Throw in a monster who takes on the appearance of the person you desire most, and you have a formula for some solid horror soap opera. There is a scene where Obedience kisses Remember (for "practice", not knowing how much her sister desired her) that triggers a tragedy and then some bold moves on the part of the protagonists. Onorato knows how to draw a tense action scene, but the ending surprised me at first, before I thought about the humane core of her work. No one ever considers why a monster does something, and that proves to be a major plot point here. Once again, it's Onorato's attention to detail that makes the story so effective.

Daryl Seitchik may be best known for her quasi-autobiographical Missy comics, but I remember her breakthrough being a surreal mini called Sub. It was an exploration of her subconscious, partly by way of her childhood, but it established early on her interest in exploring symbolic and surreal ways of exploring ideas. That was certainly true in her sole graphic novel to date, Exits, but it's much more pronounced in her more recent work. For example, Waiting For Ariel starts off with Seitchik in an "after-life bar", waiting for someone named Ariel. Seitchik's line looks simple on the surface, but then you blink and she uses this interesting broken-line technique that fractures pages and panels like a broken mirror.

This is a story about running the gauntlet, about death in the tarot sense: transformation. Indeed, the Daryl character walks around the afterlife with an infinity sign over her head, like she was the Magician from the tarot. It's reflective of infinite possibilities, even as she clearly had unresolved ties with the material world. There are hints of unresolved relationships, unresolved gender questions, and a fundamental unwillingness to let go--to fall. A false fall finds her in her childhood room, berated by Matryoshka dolls, until she realizes that she possesses the agency to ignore them. What she has to accept and embrace is her childhood self: memories, experiences, and all. Once she comforts her childhood self (an essential element of all therapy and self-actualization is self-love, and self-love starts with going back and loving one's self as a child), she's able to finally meet Ariel. This is a supernatural lion being, showing her the ocean that represents possibility and infinite growth.

Seitchik emerged fully-formed as an artist after just a couple of minis. Her voice, her intellect and most of her technique were there from the beginning. What's different about her work now is that she's pushing the limits of that technique and expressing herself in new ways. That was true in Waiting For Ariel in terms of her daring and original use of line, and it's certainly true in the first issue of her new series Follow The Doll. This is firmly in the category of "revisionist fairy-tale" that interestingly also uses Russian religious and folk imagery. There's an ornate quality to that kind of imagery that lends itself to visual depiction, from architecture to clothing. Seitchik's use of color is spectacular and something I haven't seen from her before, but the watercolors at play here form the backbone of the story's narrative.

This issue follows a young girl at a time when her long-suffering mother has died. Her mother left her a doll that occasionally spoke to her. In the wake of her death and her father subsequently and quickly marrying someone new, the girl finds her entire view of the world in ruins, especially her belief in god. After a fantasy sequence where god (as a sort of Emperor tarot figure with a flaming sword) appears in the sky and she kills him with snowballs, the doll simply tells her, "There is no man in the sky." When the doll later throws itself on the fire, it reappears, Phoenix-like, flying across the girl's house. Her father thinks it's evil witchcraft, the work of Baba Yaga, but the girl suspects otherwise. What is the doll? The dawning of the age of reason, or the symbol of personal renewal? Is it the essence of the relationship between mother and daughter? All the girl (and the reader) can do at this point is to follow the doll.

Thirty Days of CCS #1: Sophie Goldstein, Colleen Frakes, Amelia Onorato

Anniversary/Food Chain, by Sophie Goldstein. This is a pair of horror stories from Goldstein, who really knows how to spin true drama out of genre fiction. "Anniversary" is particularly grim, as it begins with a bit of misdirection but it soon becomes quite apparent that a monstrous, spidery woman is slowly stalking a man who is courting another woman. When he walks her home and the spider woman crawls down the wall, her body bent at an impossible angle, Goldstein's use of negative space is especially startling. The contrast between the gray creature in the upper left hand corner of the page, the alabaster white skin of the woman sitting happily in the tub, and the jet-dark void in between them inspired true dread. However, the most disturbing thing Goldstein does is invert the trope of true love winning out, as she manages to trap him in her embrace (warping his appearance as he is strung up from the ceiling) forever. In just eight pages, she conjures up disturbing images and then continually manages to up the ante until the end.

"Food Chain" is even shorter, and it indulges her interest in presenting the hypocrisy of the thin veneer of civilization. The reader is presented with a scene of two quasi-humanoid creatures (part human, part sort of a spidery horse) having sex. Indeed, the female here bears a resemblance to the main character of "Anniversary", only slightly less bent. The story is a series of reveals: we first see that they are standing atop a pile of scrap; then we see her get shot for food by a group of "primitives" who are comically cartoonish; then we see that they are living in the shadow of a clearly technologically advanced city; and then we see a modern human taking notes. The pull-back is to him narrating his encounters to applause before a fancy audience, before he and his partner are served the same male beast from before, with his erect penis no longer serving its original purpose of pleasure and procreation, but rather as a sort of authentic delicacy for the upper class to devour. She manages to pack a lot into just six pages, with almost no dialogue. Goldstein makes a point of having the rich explorer/journalist and his partner look as much like the creatures as possible, demonstrating how little actually separates each of these groups except the establishment and use of force to maintain status. The starkness of the black & white contrasts here resemble her book House Of Women more than the first story does, which goes in for a lot of grays and shadows. 

The Eternal Rocks, by Amelia Onorato. Incredibly, Onorato drew this ambitious comic while recovering from wrist surgery. She spoils the premise of the comic on the back cover: "What if the movie 50 First Dates took place in the Edwardian Era between a proper English Lady and a shape-shifting, gender-fluid Sea-Monster?" What if indeed, as this comic is an excuse to draw the rolling English countryside that a sickly woman named Maude haunts. When we meet her, she's at last grown tired of being housebound with tuberculosis as she sees a rider on a horse signal to her. The rider is a monstrous centaur, its skin flayed off to reveal nothing but muscles, tendons and cartilage. This is a sly allusion to her own wrist injury, I would imagine, as the structure of the muscular system was something that was no doubt on Onorato's mind.

The comic is also Onorato's demented take on a "meet cute" romance, done as a genre mash-up. Maude is a character straight out of a Bronte novel who essentially cannot stop shrieking until she and the centaur stop riding and she discovers her long-decayed corpse. The creature, born of the ocean, has encountered Maude's ghost hundreds of times, but she can't remember any of them. With a great deal of tenderness and a bit of humor, Onorato explores the ramifications of this situation, as fear turns to sadness, which then turns to a sweet sense of affection and fulfillment. Onorato has explored interspecies romance before in her Rockall comic, which was about a man and a Selkie. Onorato's take on fantasy is always with a modern eye, especially with regard to issues of gender and gender roles, yet she never sells the original inspiration short. In this comic, one can see just how much command she has over each and every page, with an ingenious design for the creature and a series of funny, emotional expressions for the wispy Maude. Every detail works toward the story's premise, including things like lettering (upper and lower case for Maude, all caps for the creature) and the lush backgrounds in the establishing shots. One gets the sense that once Onorato had the story's premise in mind, she then attacked the story with a great deal of confidence. Every page is brimming with great drawing, fluid storytelling and an essential combination of send-up and sincerity.

Iron Scars Vol 4, by Colleen Frakes. One of the members of CCS's pioneering first class, Frakes has been extremely productive in the decade since she's graduated. Her current series may be her best work, combining autobiographical details with fantasy. Frakes' fantasy work has often been much darker and had considerably less dialogue; working with kids as the main characters has allowed her to interject much more whimsy and laughs into the story without taking away from its ultimate stakes. The central character is a girl named Tyee, the daughter and granddaughter of witches who avidly rejects her magical destiny. She lives on an island that mirrors Frakes' own experiences growing up on a prison island off the coast of Washington. With kids starting to disappear on the island, Tyee decides to try to catch another magical wishing fish, which she had thrown back in the previous issue because of her distaste for magical destinies. When she finally meets the Sea Witch, her great-grandmother (a design marvel, as she's made of seaweed and fish), she learns that the fish were meant for her as gifts and would be dangerous for anyone else. Horrified, she runs to try to catch her friend that she gave the fish to.

The next chapter finds her friend in peril, as well as her sister, as they've been captured by another witch underground. When one of the girls disappears in a puff of smoke while playing with friends, it's a moment that's both horrifying and yet strangely funny. The humor is aided by Frakes' usual dense brushwork and cartoony character design; Tyee in particular is short and all curls. Her mom is frazzled and frumpy, with unkempt hair. These chapters are essentially the establishment of the series' conflict after time spent establishing character and laying some narrative pipe in earlier chapters. It really does feel that Frakes' shorter works have paved the way for this narrative, as there are elements of her previous works as well as new directions to be found in this series. The use of humor is the most important way she's stretched herself, because she's rarely used humor unless it's autobio where she's the butt of the joke. She transferred that experience to various stand-in characters on the island, and the result is something that feels emotionally authentic. That authenticity is what allows the fantastical elements of the story to feel natural but also resonate as terrifying to characters that feel real.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #28: The Other Side

CCS alum Melanie Gillman noted in the introduction to The Other Side, the anthology they co-edited (with Kori Michele Handwerker), that as a young queer person, they were drawn to paranormal romance fiction. That's because most other kinds of fiction were so heteronormative, they felt that paranormal romance at least opened up the possibility of something different, something outside the norm. In tribute to that idea, and in the spirit of queer fiction that doesn't inevitably wind up in tragedy, there's a pleasant warmth that suffuses the book. In general, I found that the overall quality of the anthology was especially solid for a self-published effort, and a quick inquiry into the book's Kickstarter status revealed that the editors raised enough money to give everyone a $60 page rate. Remarkable that when you pay an artist for a passion project, they have the time and energy to put their best foot forward.

The pitfall of a themed anthology is the possibility of too many similar kinds of stories. Gillman & Handwerker gave their contributors a theme tight enough so that they made sense sequentially but loose enough to let them interpret "paranormal" in any number of ways. Fyodor Pavlov's "The Black Dog" is straight-up folklore-style fantasy, only it turns the fear of the black dog as a harbinger for death on its ear and restores the faithful-dog idea, only in lycanthropic form. Like most of the stories in the book, it was a story where the use of grayscaling was entirely unobtrusive. There are also several paranormal "meet cute" stories, like Sfe' R. Monster's "En-bae & Boo", which is about the romance between a cryptozoographer and a ghost that started on the internet. There did seem to be two distinct styles of visual approaches in the anthology: dense and immersive or cute and clear.

There were haunted-object stories ("Emma-FZR 400 RRSP" by Mary Verhoeven and "Appliance" by Handwerker), which wound up doubling as sort of meet-cute stories. The latter was especially clever, because there was a genuine mystery behind it and the end was one of the few stories where things got more complex instead of all tied up neatly. There were haunted house/apartment/lighthouse stories ("Bare Bones" by Britt Sabo, "Yes No Maybe" by Kate Leth & Katie O'Neill and "Pulpit Point" by Amelia Onorato), of which Onorato's story was the best. The other two were cute but also extremely telegraphed from beginning to end; they were less stories than character impressions. Onorato's story had a genuine surprise twist and an element of discomfort to it on behalf of the poltergeist who can't leave the sea behind that made its ending far more poignant than most in the book. There were stories where characters try to get in touch with loved ones beyond the grave, like the quiet "Rabbit Stew" by CB Webb, the overly treacly "Till Death" by Gisele Jobateh and the hilarious "Ouija Call Center" by Mari Costa. The latter story is conceptually clever (a Ouija doll acting as a sort of supernatural operator) and emotionally satisfying in an unexpected way, as the ex-boyfriend the protagonist is trying to contact is a jerk and the operator tries to ameliorate that.

Another common trope was a sort of supernatural debt. F. Lee & Rainy's "Halo" was interesting for the striking image of an angelic spirit who was visible to a preacher, though the character work was a bit wobbly at times. Unsurprisingly in a story where the writer and artist split duties, it was overly talky. The writer-artist team of Laurel Varian and Ezra Rose got that balance better with "Third Circle Pizza", where a spirit was bound to a family-owned pizza parlor until a love interest intervened. The romance in this story felt real because the characters were so well-developed, and Varian even threw in a twist or two down the stretch. Unfortunately, "Fifty Years" by Sarah Winifred Searle and Hannah Krieger as well as "Shadow's Bae" by Bitmap Prager and Gillman both succumbed to that sense of being overwritten despite attractive art, especially on the part of Gillman. The points that Prager was trying to make in an otherwise cute story were hammered home in a way that was unnecessary, given Gillman's skill. The vampire plot in the first story felt played out and predictable.The wild west ghost story "Tierra Verde" had an intriguing premise but the end felt off, tonally. On the other hand, the hypnosis/telepathy theme of Aatmaja Pandya's "Airspace" felt emotionally raw and realistic, especially as a metaphor for how difficult it is for a person to express their true feelings and the existential problem of never being able to truly know what another person is feeling.

Three of the best stories in the anthology dealt with a character's relationship with a higher power. Natasha Donovan's "Dive" is beautifully drawn in an immersive style, with all sorts of whorls and intense line patterns. It's about a woman and her granddaughter walking on the shore, passing by an abandoned village. When the grandmother reveals that she used to live there, the granddaughter wants to know the story. In a clever move, the grandmother knits while she talks, literally spinning a narrative yarn in all respects. The story involves a mysterious woman showing up to help her, a game of chance against a supernatural being in an underwater village, and a tearful goodbye. The story ends in classic "return to me" style as the grandmother descends into the ocean. The dialogue is sharply written and there's actually a compelling plot and mystery in this story that's absent in a number of the other, breezier stories in the book. Kou Chen's "Beneath My Breath Above My Gaze" is a beautifully designed strip about a young man who nearly falls off a bridge on a mountain, only to be saved by the mountain's god. The god falls in love with him and the man is drawn back to the mountain for reasons he can't understand until his death as an old man. It's a subtle, restrained bit of storytelling that doesn't worry much about background information and instead focuses on emotion.

Along the same lines, and certainly the best piece in the book, is Bishakh Som's "Threnody". An old woman in India finds herself increasingly isolated and out of step with the modern world and says a prayer to the goddess Kali asking if there was a place for her in the world. She decides to retreat to a shrine to Kali, where she encounters a loquacious young woman who gives her all sorts of advice about the proper way to worship until the old woman finally snaps and yells at her. In a nifty bit of transformation, it's revealed (as one expected), that the young woman was actually Kali, who kisses her devotee and takes her to the next world. It's a sensitive, restrained and poetic story by Som, whose pacing, design and dialogue are all in perfect harmony and lead to the ending that makes the most sense, even if there's a sadness to it. Even the least successful stories in the anthology were still fun to look at, and Gillman & Handwerker did a fine job in sequencing the stories in a way that created the greatest amount of story-to-story variety.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #16: Amelia Onorato

It was driving me bonkers for a bit, but I finally figured out whose work Amelia Onorato reminds me of: Caitlin Skaalrud. I doubt that they were aware of each other's presence until perhaps recently, but it's clear that they processed a similar set of influences with regard to character design as well as an impeccable ability to draw complex but engaging backgrounds. Throw in a mutual interest in subverting sexist fantasy tropes, and you have two artists who, in different ways, have tapped into an ever-growing zeitgeist that's absorbed fairy tales, manga and fantasy stories and is responding to them in very personal but also political ways.

The third issue of Onorato's breakthrough series, Burn The Bridges Of Arta, speaks to a number of issues: male privilege, the exploitation of children, and the ways in which class stratification hardens into cultural institutions of injustice. Young Apollonia Ford began the series wondering what had happened to her sister when she got married. Eventually, a lower-class artisan who worked for her father, a highly esteemed architect, the awful secret of their beautiful city: as a matter of ritual sacrifice, the cornerstones of all new buildings contain one of the family members of the architect who built it. In a society meant to mimic Victorian England (with a touch of Charles Dickens with regard to some of the colorful side characters), women are meant to either serve, be wives, or simply to look pretty--and nothing else. The intelligent and willful Apollonia is well aware of her eventual fate and knows that she can't avoid it, which is why her father taking her for a "drive" to see the other buildings he designed is so genuinely disturbing. His cheerful and almost nostalgic affect shows more genuine affection shown toward his buildings than the children he sacrificed. He's also well aware that this will be his fate at some point in the future, and this helps perpetuate the cycle.

The second main plot running through the story has involved laborer Orie Foster and his clever, vivacious wife Mercy. Artisanal laborers know only too well what's involved in the construction of new buildings, and Foster couldn't bear to let "Polly" not know. As grim as the main storyline is, Onorato allows for increasing rays of hope and humor in the way that Orie and Mercy relate to one another, especially after Orie tells Mercy. This issue sees a long, mostly comedic sequence that also lays a bit of narrative pipe where Mercy goes back to her old job to obtain certain papers. It looks like Onorato has particular fun drawing Mercy, who's loud, big and bold. In a book filled with delicate buildings and delicately-designed upper-class characters, it's Mercy's lack of such delicacy that makes her so distinctive. The end of this chapter looks like it's winding the story down a bit, and I'll be curious to see if Onorato salvages a happy ending for the main character and what form that might take, given the narrative rules she's established for herself.

Sorgin is a one-shot that's an immaculately-constructed and heartbreaking story about genocide. Onorato exercises remarkable restraint with regard to the specifics of the ethnic cleansing that occur in the story, focusing instead on the story's central plot point of their supposedly being a witch near the mountains who could make children disappear. The story revolved around a teenage girl named Rochelle who finds said "witch", who happens to be a man, and she brings him three children to "disappear", i.e, to lead them over a mountain pass to safe territory. Everything about this story is subtle, as Onorato uses misdirection (are there witches involved?) while adding small touches like ethnicity-identifying armbands that Rochelle and the younger children must wear. From there, each subsequent journey brings about more dangerous repercussions, as she's shot on one mission and he has to deal with soldiers. Ultimately, this is a story about refuge and paying back kindnesses out of a sense of duty and compassion, centered around that central idea of magic. As the man and later Rochelle understand, what they do is a form of magic, one centered around the idea of empathy. Onorato's visual approach is different here than in Arta, as she adds a lot of greyscale to add weight to a lot of panels that are filled with blank space. It's different from her other project's crisp black and white and painstaking attention to background detail, but it also goes to show how that detail served a narrative presence: an omnipresent reminder to the reader that the city was all around them, it could not be escaped, and it was built through horrific means. In Sorgin, the open country and freer composition underscored the possibility of freedom. The latter comic probably would have been more effective in color, but she more than gets her ideas across as her character design and use of body language filled the reader in on a lot of what was unsaid.

Thirty Days of CCS #9: Amelia Onorato and D.W./Kevin Uehlein

Ultima Thule, by Amelia Onorato. Onorato has largely made fantasy her genre of choice as a cartoonist, albeit with a very specific point of view and aesthetic. Onorato has merged dark but fantastical concepts largely from a feminist perspective, all while closely hewing to whatever overriding idea is present in the plot. Ultima Thule is something of a departure in some respects, as a Roman engineer named Marcellinus (of African descent, which I thought was an interesting touch) gets exiled from the mother country and gets shipwrecked. He washes up in Ireland, in a remote village that depends on its sheep and rappelling down cliffs in order to steal birds' eggs. He's viewed as a sort of curiosity, unskilled in any of the activities that kept the tribe alive, until he engineers a plumbing system that drew water down from a mountain stream to the village. Onorato neatly ties together a village custom, Marcellinus' increasing affection for the village and his initial rescuer in particular and a tense moment to bring the short story to a neat close. It's an incredibly effective little story, thanks in large part to Onorato's increasingly confident character design and remarkable efficiency. The mark of a maturing artist is that their work has little in the way of filler or overdrawing, and this exercise certainly shows that Anorato is at that point.

KJC #2, by D.W. and Kevin Uehlein. Written by D.W. and drawn by Uehlein, this is a slick, engaging and wordless anthropomorphic story about a bull-headed male sent off on a mission by an alluring female. Its virtues lie chiefly in Uehlein's dazzling use of blacks and fluid panel-to-panel transitions, speeding up and slowing down the action as the narrative called for at the time. Given no information other than what was on the page, we start out believing this to be a hero's journey, as the bull-headed male has to think and fight his way through all sorts of obstacles. What appears to be an undersea adventure in the wild suddenly turns into a city adventure, where the reader starts to get clued in that not everything is at it seems. Then the story takes an almost Tarantino-esque turn for the violent, as the reader understands that this is a delicately-balanced caper that simply needed one last man for the job--and he and his crew wind up taking their just reward in the end. It's a well-paced, clever and simple story whose twists are eminently satisfying.

Thirty Days of CCS, Day 6: Sean Ford, Amelia Onorato, Andrew Christensen

Burn The Bridges Of Arta, Pt 2, by Amelia Onorato. The cover of the second issue of the series "rhymes" visually with the first. This time, we see the laborer-with-a-secret Orie Foster leaning on a wall with a downcast expression, only we don't get to see his eyes. The protagonist of the series, young Apollonia Ford, appears on the cover of the first issue in precisely the same pose. The first issue followed young Apollonia in her quest to discover what really happened to her sister, who was supposedly on her honeymoon. It's revealed that the powerful architects of the city, as a sort of ritual sacrifice, offer up their own children to bury alive in the cornerstones of all new structures in the beautiful city. Foster did the job with her Apollonia's sister and is constantly haunted by the experience, such that when she follows him home, he obliquely tells her what's going on.

The fantasy elements in this series are light but present nonetheless, especially in terms of the horror of discovering that what seems beautiful and trustworthy is really rotten at the core. Onorato dips a bit into the Dickens well with the colorful neighborhood thieves, but this story is always about two shades darker than one would expect from a fantasy story. The morbid nature of Foster's job, the monstrous hypocrisy of the Architects and the looming nature of Apollonia's future, once revealed, make this an especially grim story. Even in the most Dickensian of scenes, when Apollonia is trying to deal with street urchins, she's rescued temporarily by the neighborhood pervert/pimp. Rather than couching dangers in metaphors, Onorato boldly lays out the bare truth of death and abuse, albeit in a manner that's incredibly restrained. Indeed, her fine line and attractive character design only serve to highlight the feeling of reading a Victorian-era story; the bows in Apollonia's hair, the rosy cheeks of Foster's wife, and most especially the detailed and laborered nature of the buildings are in constant tension with the horror that lies at the heart of the story. Similarly, Onorato mixes moments of humor and kid's-adventure with the truth the audience is now privy to. The class and gender overtones of the story are also unmistakable, but that's been present in all of Onorato's reinterpretation of fantasy tropes. This is a smart, attractively-drawn and simply chilling story.

The Stag #3, by Andrew James Christensen. This simple, understated and highly chilling three issue series concludes with the old man who killed a stag with a disturbingly human face coming face to face with an entire race of these beings. Using a carefully-paced four panel grid on every page, Christensen employs a highly deliberate pace of storytelling to heighten suspense. Making great use of white negative space to portray the desperation of the man's need for food in the midst of winter snows, the use of grey heralds the appearance of menace. Of course, Christensen is careful to show the reader that not all is quite as it seems, and the surprising end of the book highlights this. The use of a model boat as a sort of fantasy escape metaphor only serves to underline the ways in which the man is already psychologically doomed. The economy and overall restraint in the series is a mark of the artist's maturity as a storyteller.

Shadow Hills 2-4, by Sean Ford. This is Ford's follow-up to his Only Skin series, and he hits on a lot of the same beats as the series progresses. There's a weird, menacing presence outside of the town that's affecting the innocent. Someone comes back to town with a great deal of history there in order to settle some kind of family matter. The local police are weird and twitchy. There's a sense that the entire town is hiding some kind of secret. There's a large, sprawling cast which serves to both move plot along as well as provide narrative red herrings. The setting is a small, dusty town in the middle of nowhere. The main difference is that Ford is much more confident and skilled as a draftsman and storyteller this time around.

There are two primary supernatural/paranormal phenomena in the series. One is a young man who showed up and is being hidden by a girl in a barn. He seems to have some kind of connection to the earth that feels like a sort of psychedelic superpower. The second is this black-ink ooze that completely covers several characters. It's terrifying, both to the characters in-story, and as a reader, because that ink is the stuff of storytelling itself and here it acts as a highly visceral object of menace. Ford's line is perceptibly but slightly different on the whole; his line is finer and slightly simpler. The occasional over-drawing found in Only Skin has faded as he's become more comfortable. His pages are better composed and balanced, and still get across that sense of desolation and ennui without having to force details on the reader. Ford still has the ability to wow the reader with big splash pages, like a two-page spread of a huge hole that literally opens up underneath what appears to be one of the main characters of the story. Following the shock of that shot up with a two-page shot of a seemingly-benign forest (always a source of danger in his stories) is an incredible transition point in that issue.All of that builds to the introduction of a character mentioned with some air of menace, and his hulking body matches it. I'll be curious to see if the weirdness in this comic is scientific this time around instead of supernatural, but there's a tightness and snap to this comic that shows how much he's learned from his first foray into this kind of storytelling.

Thirty Days of CCS #23: Bingo Baby

Bingo Baby is touted as an "experimental collaborative comic book" at its home site, Penny Lantern. The script was the result of a collaborative role-playing game called Fiasco, which aims to be a RPG version of a Coen Brothers movie, where you play characters with "powerful ambition and poor impulse control". The players included CCS alums like Amelia Onorato, Denis St John, Donna Almendrala, Joseph Lambert, and Bill Bedard, along with professor Jason Lutes. After recording the game and turning it into a script, the group parceled out storytelling responsibilities in a mainstream "assembly-line" style. Onorato drew the characters and some backgrounds. Bedard, Lutes and St. John drew other background details. Almendrala inked the whole thing to give it page-to-page consistency. Bedard and Lambert did the colors, while Alemendrala and Lutes lettered it. The results are interesting, if uneven.

The story concerns a handful of intersecting characters in a small town, each with their own set of obsessions and delusions. Carol Anne is sensible but obsessed with playing Bingo, the central metaphor of the book. Her (technically) ex-husband Rob is a dreamer who fancies himself an actor. His brother Jake is a petty drug dealer living with his elderly relative Nan, and he's trying to find money that she may have hidden inside her house after winning a big bet on a horse race as a young woman. There's Missy, who's trying to negotiate being a single mother after being thrown out by her parents, and Goldie, a drug-addled older man who fancies himself the father of her baby. Each of the characters has dreams that directly or indirectly interfere with the others, which seems to be a product in part of the game's mechanics. It also conveniently lays down a plot as the players/writers try to find a voice for each of the characters.

The problem with the book is that some of the characters don't escape the confines of the game. Rob is a key character, connected in many ways to several other characters, but he feels more like a twitching pile of scribbled-down character traits than an actual person. The same goes for Jake, who at least is written as a sort of darkly comedic, incompetent character in the Coen Brothers tradition. Of all the characters in the book, only Missy operates on a level that approaches logical, calculating desperation, and it's fitting that she winds up as the only real "winner" in the story. The problem with many of the other characters is that unlike in a Coen Brothers or caper movie, where ordinary people are thrust into desperate situations, Bingo Baby features characters with more outlandish personalities (or non-existent personalities) who have things happen to them. Indeed, the real "action" of this story occurs when one character accidentally burns down the house of another; the only other true actions taken are by Missy. Yet Missy isn't thrust into the spotlight quite as boisterously as the story does the crazy Goldie or scheming Jake. That makes the story's climax more interesting but results in some wheel-spinning along the way. Visually, the team does a good job of maintaining page-to-page continuity, with Almendrala in particular doing a great job at designing distinctive-looking characters. There's a frequent dearth of background details, but the Lambert/Bedard coloring team helps make up for that by constantly varying background hues. There was definitely a strong group mind behind the concept of the book; just like in the game Bingo, things had to line up somewhat at random and fortuitously for Missy to make her getaway. Hopefully, future iterations of this experiment will yield more nuanced characterizations.

Thirty Days of CCS #8: Amelia Onorato

Amelia Onorato's comics are explicitly concerned with gender roles using mythological and melodramatic tropes. Her first series, Rockall, concerns a man named Kagan who buys a property on a remote island near Ireland who discovers that a woman and her son are still living there. The woman, Muirinn, is known to be a "selkie", a sort of sea lion that can take human form by temporarily shedding its skin. Hiding her skin allows one to control her, until she can find it again. When Kagan is told about this supposedly demonic creature, he refuses to believe local legend. The series plays out as he slowly gains the trust of Muirinn and her son, and all three negotiate fear and hatred. What's interesting about this series is that Onorato has her cake and eats it too, as the superstition regarding Muirinn is very much that of a town revolting against an independent, husband-less woman who doesn't kowtow to religion or social mores. At the same time, she is also a magical creature who has to confront that the reason she can't find her skin has more to do with her responsibilities as a mother and less to do with her deceased husband. This isn't a cheap cheat; indeed, Onorato plays by her own rules, as the only person in the story who doesn't believe that Muirinn is a selkie is Kagan himself. The point of the story is that all of the reasons why Kagan did not give in to fear were entirely valid; whether or not she was a magical being didn't justify persecution. Overall, this is a fairly simple story, simply told. Onorato seems greatly influenced by the way Jaime Hernandez spots blacks, but her overall character design here is on the primitive side. Some of the character drawings are rough, as though she didn't quite have the chops to pull of drawing a number of different characters. That's especially true when one compares the way that Muirinn looks compared to the other characters.

Her more recent comic, Burn The Bridges of Arta, demonstrates that she's brought her chops up to a higher level. It's more thematically complex and dense than Rockall, but it's the precision of the drawing that is absolutely essential to the success of this first chapter of a longer story. At its heart, it's about the love a younger sister has for her older sister. Her relentless inquisitiveness about why she hasn't returned from her honeymoon fuels the greater plot, which concerns a worker who quit a prior, horrible job to take care of the grounds at the little girl's house. Throughout the story, Onorato's drawings of beautiful buildings are impeccable, and this is no coincidence. Indeed, the sheer beauty of the buildings is a crucial plot point that doesn't get explained until the end of the issue, when we learn what sacrifices must be made in order to ensure that such beauty endures. Onorato's figures have more a Jason Lutes-style polish to them in this story, a stylization that makes sense given the beauty seen in the story. One can see touches of other influences in her figurework and especially gesture, as Onorato's characters tend to be effusive and demonstrative. The effusiveness of the young girl combined with the reluctance of the other characters to openly discuss how the world works forms an effective tension, as her questions are the reader's questions, until such time as the reader is shown how the world really is. This is an excellent opening chapter for what promises to be an interesting series that once again touches on the ways in which women are exploited and stripped of agency, and the steps other women take to claim it.

New Faces From CCS: Leake, Malig, Onorato, Steinberg, Dukes, Howard, Almendrala

This column gives me the pleasure of examining work by students from the Center for Cartoon Studies from the classes of 2012 and 2013, artists whose work is (mostly) entirely new to me.

All Rumors Are True, by Laurel Lynn Leake.Of all the comics mentioned here, Leake's features my favorite cover. The sneering, lipsticked figure whose hair obscures her eyes issues forth pink, pixelated pronouncements while the title looks like it was drawn in red lipstick.This comic follows Scratch, a "tiny little legend in the local drag scene" who is cast by a "metareligious hallucinogenic radical queerotica" video company Pansexual Pantheon. In a truly inspired idea, Leake posits this outfit as one that casts actors as gods and figures from a variety of religious pantheons from across history and has them fuck each other, all told through the details and history of those belief systems. Scratch is cast as the Shinto goddess Amaterasu and Leake tells the story of her experience through a series of behind-the-scenes clips, internet commentary interspersed as actual narrative, and bits and pieces of the film itself. She jams every panel with cartoony character interaction (her drawings of the zaftig actress who plays the goddess Uzume are especially eye-catching), whirling decorative flourishes, eye-grabbing text that has an almost visceral impact, or some combination thereof. This comic is successful because it's so highly stylized, a pure distillation of glamor, excess and sheer presence.

Stonewall #1, by Sasha Steinberg. This is a work of historical fiction about the famous Stonewall riots that sparked the LGBT movement in the US. Steinberg reminds us that at the start of the movement in particular, there was a strong emphasis on the "T" (trans) portion of the movement that got lost for a long time and has only within the last five to ten years become an accepted part of the overall rights movement (after considerable struggle). Steinberg draws this full-color comic in the style of golden age cartoonist Tarpe Mills, whose Miss Fury strip was very much a mix of drag disguise (for fighting crime) and fashion. It's a genius move to depict trans folk in that glamorous style, and I especially liked Steinberg's notion to create a fictional character (a 14-year-old trans person who called herself Miss Venus--especially clever given her resemblance to the golden age Bill Everett character called Venus) to go along with real figures like Sylvia Rivera. Venus is the sort of innocent new to a scene that allows veterans to play off of, a catalyst that causes the other characters to have something to react to. Steinberg skillfully creates an enormous amount of tension and drama considering that all of the action in this issue takes place in a cramped hotel room. The people in the room, he's careful to depict, were not saints or heroes. There were conflicts, jealousies and a frequent sense that many of them only associated with each other because they were all in the same boat.

The Stonewall riots were born out of frustration above all else, and Steinberg amps up that level of frustration and weariness in the form of people like Rivera, Ivan Valentin and Tammy Novak. Years of random and indiscriminate police raids and persecution made living and expressing themselves acts of boldness, even if being bold was less on their agenda than simply being. Venus represents the power of youth and hope that fuels every movement, the younger generation that has yet to be jaded and demands more. She's the focus of this first issue and so the figures here are representative of how Venus sees the world and the scene: glamorous, tinged with a hint of danger and excitement. Steinberg has really done his research here and transformed facts into a living, breathing story in a clever and innovative manner. Given that this is part one of ten, I'm eager to see how the series proceeds and what other visual representations he chooses to use.

Anything Is Anything, by April Malig. This is a bit of comics-as-poetry that takes the reader through Malig's sensation of falling as she tries to go to sleep and extends that metaphor through a number of experiences in her life, especially those that involve relationships. Malig has a strong sense of composition and design and works hard to make each page a poetic construct of is own and does a nice job of using blacks to create a dizzying sort of dream world. Her figurework is a bit stiff, which renders some of the key scenes lacking the kind of emotional power that I believe Malig intends. In particular, her use of gesture and the way her figures interact is stilted in a way that draws unwelcome attention from the reader's eye. I think this is simply a matter of experience, and that her figures will fit better with the rest of her graphics as she continues to draw, because otherwise it's obvious that she displays a great deal of nuance and emotional sensitivity as a creator. I especially liked her lines about communication, like "Words don't always hold, if they are even caught at all. It's hard not to feel like we're all just thumping glass upon glass". The image here are two people in bubble space helmets, frowning as they try to communicate. If anything, I'd like to see Malig go a bit more abstract on the page, breaking down figures more as shapes and seeing how that works with her strong decorative and design sense.

Chimps In Space #1-3, by Donna Almendrala. These three comics are Almendrala's way of exploring genre stories using the titular chimp characters, mixing extreme silliness with a genuine affection for each genre. The first issue is an outer space story where we eventually learn that the captain of the ship (who is narrating the story) is a complete idiot. It actually is less of a space adventure than a locked-door murder mystery whose resolution is also quite silly, especially when the captain tries to tack on a Star Trek-style moralistic message at the end. The second issue follows two of the crewmembers on a planet where they engage in Western-style hijinx; the beginning of the story is taken from an anthology story Almendrala did a while back. This issue was the most forgettable of the three, as it was really all over the place narratively and in terms of tone. I liked the third issue best, which featured the adventures of a dead crewman in the afterlife who is recruited to join Hermes, Ulysses, Hercules and Achilles to go on an adventure. He is reluctant to join this motley crew, which is why generates both narrative friction and humor. Almendrala really seems in her comfort zone with this comic, easily navigating fine details regarding mythology while reworking them for comedic purposes. There's an easily-detected Ernie Bushmiller influence in her figure drawing and use of spotting blacks, making each page a pleasure to read and giving each image a certain comedic charge. Even before she sets up a single gag, I found myself being amused by the figures themselves. I'd love to see her take on more mythological stories in a comedic tone because of the fluidity of that third issue.

Rockall #1, by Amelia Onorato. This is the first issue of what is shaping up to be a fantasy/romance story set in an island off of Ireland. We meet Tommy Kagan, a young man who has purchased property on the island is rowed out there at the beginning of the story. He quickly discovers two things: like all small communities, the island is a place where your business is everyone's business; and there are two inhabitants in the house he has bought. One is a woman accused of being a "selkie", a seal who takes human form who can be captured by a human who happens to see her dance. She can only be freed if she finds her skin after her human master has stolen it. Onorato wisely plays coy as to whether the woman is actually a selkie, though she is indeed searching for something and is trapped on the island after her husband mysteriously died in a fishing accident. That's an event the islanders blamed on her ("calling up the sea"), sparking mutual distrust and loathing. This is obviously a groundwork-laying issue, but it's one that's well-structured and built in part on a patois that is at once distinctive but not confusing. One gets a real sense of time and place very quickly in this comic. Onorato's line is simple, cartoony and expressive. The comic did cry out for color, however; a light green wash or even some kind of blue-green duotone would have looked much better than the grey wash used on a number of pages. I'm quite curious to see how the story proceeds.

"All Coons Look Alike To Me": The Life of Ernest Hogan, Father of Ragtime, by Luke Howard. In dealing with racism and the realpolitik of exploiting one's race for profit at a price, Howard manages to use a lot of highly emotionally charged images with a thorough degree of sensitivity and context in telling the story of musician Ernest Hogan. This book is told in black and red (two colors that wind up having considerable significance in the story) with single-page panels meant to emulate silent movies, complete with full pages devoted to dialogue or narration. Howard depicts Hogan's tale as one of a devil's bargain in an era where choices were few. There's a sense of joy and triumph early in the story as Hogan first hears and then later develops the musical form that would come to be known as Ragtime: melodic, upbeat, exciting music dependent upon the piano as its driving force. When he finds he can't sell his music to anyone (and white people in particular, because they're the ones with the money), he happens upon a minstrel show and decides to combine ragtime with minstrel show imagery, all in an effort to amuse white audiences.

He writes the title song, which is an immediate smash hit that trades in on white stereotypes about African-Americans, and immediately becomes rich and famous. Of course, this doesn't earn him actual respect from caucasians, who take it upon themselves to repeat and laugh at the racist imagery he celebrates while they're hanging out with him. More to the point, when fellow black folk stare at him with a mixture of disdain and deep disappointment, it causes him to create something more uplifting, "something the next generation can look up to". But it's too late, as he's locked into being a minstrel show man for life. There's a powerful scene where Hogan has trouble getting off the blackface and red lip makeup he uses for shows and has a nightmare that white men wearing minstrel masks chop off his own face and replace it permanently with a grinning mask. The last chapter shows him dying of tuberculosis (the red blood on the white handkerchief showing it all), finding a black man playing piano in a bar and being invited to play with him. Howard sides with Hogan in this question: if someone makes a devil's bargain, do you blame the person for being naive or the devil for being evil? In this case, Hogan got what he wanted--fame, success, money and simply a chance to play a new kind of music. The price he paid was severe, but he could never go back after establishing himself, even though he desperately wanted to. The stereotyped, grinning black imagery that Howard employs here is even more powerful than the hateful words--and Howard doesn't hold back from depicting it exactly as it was, from showing just how white folks saw black folks. It reminds me a of a quote from Kyle Baker's Why I Hate Saturn: "Black music is in, black culture is in, but black people will never be in." It's a phenomenon that while not as nakedly racist as it was in Hogan's day, continues to persist in the overall culture (cf Robert Townsend's film Hollywood Shuffle). Howard is successful in evoking the aesthetics of the day without for a moment indulging in nostalgia in a book that is provocative, intelligent and striking to look at..

Comics Cardigan, by Rachel Dukes. Dukes is no newcomer to comics, after having edited and published a few music-related anthologies (Side A and Side B) as well as operating a small-scale comics distro. Going to CCS, I'm guessing, is a way to settle down and work on her own chops. Her Comics Cardigan package certainly displays her skill as an editor and publisher in terms of packaging and all-around attractiveness as an art object. A cardboard sweater snugly holds all sorts of little treasures. Let's unpack them one by one:

* "Hello Sweetie", a promotional notebook for her new mixtapecomics.com website. There's an attractive, single-tone screenprinted cover.

* A priority mail sticker-stamp with the Mixtape Comics symbol screenprinted on it, with the motto "No worries. just keep drawing."

* An 8 page mini called Adventure Story. Done in the style of Ed Emberley (he of the simple, geometric how-to-draw books), this is a cute story about a cat that goes overseas to try to rescue its beloved teapot, only to find a surprise.

* Frankie's Busy Day, a 32 page full-color mini aimed at kids, about a confused cat unsure of why all her toys were being taken away by her people, until she is taken to a new apartment. The very simple line (drawn on a computer, perhaps?) is nonetheless expressive, and the use of color makes the characters pop off the page.

* A 20-page mini consisting of one-page autobio strips, process pages, and an excerpt from a longer ongoing series that seems to be an intense family/high school drama.

It's easy to tell that Dukes has a strong work ethic and is constantly compelled to not only create nice-looking comics and zines, but to get them out to the public. What is not clear to me is what sort of cartoonist she is at this point. None of this is related to her first-year thesis project, for example, and I get the sense that her "real" work tends to be in the naturalistic style she displays in "Primary", her ongoing series.Reading the Comics Cardigan package certainly made me want to find out more about her cartooning, but I only wish there was something here that I could have really sank my teeth into. That aside, her children's book was really well-done and contained a number of moments of sly humor.

Mini Anthologies: Candy or Medicine, Fuzy, Holy Shit

Candy or Medicine #16, edited by Josh Blair. Blair has been putting together this entry-level anthology that takes all comers for several years now, and the results have always been decidedly (and understandably) mixed. From beginning to end, #16 is the best issue of the anthology, with every entry worthy of attention. From the clever cover by Emi Gennis to single-page drawings by Andy Nukes and Robert Dayton, Blair manages to put together a wide variety of styles and storytelling approaches. Jim Gullet's story about a bounty hunter going after a lizard man has deliberate echoes of Gary Panter, and it's told with a touch of wit to go along with its grim reality. Nate McDonough's excellent, strange character designs add a lot of energy to his story of the ways in which a very tall man and very short man conflict on the street. Finally, Harry Nordlinger's story about a kid going into a forest filled with monsters has a certain Edward Gorey quality to it in the way he lists the various sorts of monsters that he might encounter. Like the other work in this comic, that strip has a lot of energy, even if the line is a bit thinner than some of the other strips.

Holy Shit, edited by Sean Knickerbocker, Katie Moody, Dakota McFadzean, and Amelia Onorato. There have been a number of attractive anthologies from the Center for Cartoon Studies over the years, but this is one of the best. From small details like the biblical appearance of the book with Gothic lettering, gold-leaf tipped pages and a ribbon bookmark to the stories themselves, this is an anthology that holds together at every conceptual level. As one might expect, the anthology centers around religion, with four different takes on belief. McFadzean's strip is a sort of shaggy-dog story about a schlubby older guy who goes through his morning routine, down to popping a zit and beating off in the shower. The final reveal as to his true significance was funny, even if the joke felt a little easy. His attention to detail was crucial for making the strip work. Knickerbocker relates an anecdote from his childhood where he was trying to fit in with a church youth group because he was so lonely and desperately wanted friends. The sinking feeling he experienced when he realized he was around crazy people shattered any number of belief systems, especially social ones.

The best story in the collection is Katie Moody's long explication of growing up Catholic and how she decided to reject her faith. Focusing on a childhood incident that festered until it became a source of constant guilt and anxiety, she overcompensated by trying to be perfect in order to combat that guilt. When she realized that she and the church no longer shared the same values, she left...but it wasn't easy. Her cartooning is extremely sharp and innovative here, with a lot of decorative lettering and unusual visual cues. Onorato's exploration of how religions evolve out of each other (framed as a discussion between her and a "cute" Jehovah's Witness), her take on the tragedy of the Children's Crusade and the wonder felt by the Western discoverers of Easter Island reveal an artist whose work isn't as personal as Moody's or Knickerbocker's, but do reveal a sharper satirical point of view than the other artists in this book. The fact that there isn't a unified approach or point of view regarding faith (other than deep suspicion) makes this a stronger anthology.

Fuzy, edited by Mark Thisse. This is a beard-related anthology consisting of stories contributed by members of the classes of 2007 and 2008 at CCS. Despite having such a silly premise, there's a surprisingly strong range of stories to be found here. Steve Seck's excellent sense of comic timing is on full display in "The Beard's Beard's Beard", an absurd story about a famous set of Hollywood facial hair who disguises his homosexuality by being married to a female beard, only to find out that his wife is having an affair with his boyfriend, who is in fact a female beard in disguise. This is every bit as silly as it sounds, but Seck manages to imbue his story with just enough pathos to give it some narrative weight. Baldemar Byars' "My Whiskery History, 1966-1967" is an account of the artist running headlong into facial hair and cultural expectations. This very funny set of anecdotes finds the artist called a Marxist by his family in Texas, but it's also assumed that he's ready to join up with bomb-throwing protest organization SDS. His drawing is a little on the cartoony side, and it's functional without standing out in any particular way.

Sango Imai-Hall contributes something rare for the average CCS graduate: a straight-ahead, sword-and-sorcery story, albeit one whose main character is a young woman with a red beard. Aaron Cockle adds his own version of a genre story, in which an imprisoned, broccoli-bearded man is visited by a man with a beard of bees. As with most Cockle stories, he alludes to events and scenarios that remain hidden, adding a level of intrigue to a story that has an unexpected punchline. Jeff Mumm's guinea pig comics are exquisitely drawn and jammed with sight gags, while Mark Thisse's comic about a magician who disappears his own beard, only to recover it when he least expects it. It's not an especially eye-catching story, both in terms of the drawings and the story. Still, there are a lot of gems from some artists whose work I've never seen before.