45 Days Of CCS, #8: Hannah Kaplan and Anna McGlynn

Hannah Kaplan is someone I hadn't seen in seven years, which was the last time I reviewed her work. I was happy to run into her at the Philadelphia Comics Expo and got a lot of work that was new to me. Kaplan's work is funny, frank, and restlessly smart. The work covered here is from 2017 to late 2022. 

We're All Gonna Die One Day is in the classic Kaplan style: philosophical diary strips done in colored pencil with an emphasis on sex, friendships, and creativity. Her strip from 5/22/17 talks briefly about the agitation of feeling horny, leading to her discussing why the show Twin Peaks was meaningful to her. its focus on the tangibility of evil, death, and aging allowed her a kind of comfort, in part because all of them are expressed as illusory to some degree. There's an extended sequence of going to the comics show CAKE in Chicago, including a particularly funny one where a tipsy Kaplan approaches cartoonists Kevin Huizenga and Gabrielle Bell to see if they remember her. Kaplan's use of color does a lot of heavy lifting for the emotional narrative of her comics, along with making them interesting to look at. 

Lately jumps ahead to 2018, done in the same style, with a lot of visual flourishes. This digs further into the essence of Kaplan's comics, which can be roughly summed up as "What is my purpose?" Finding a way to connect her desires with a need for meaningful interactions and a larger sense of what she can do in the world drives these comics. This is true whether she's hanging out with her close friends, feeling frustration over an interesting temp job ending after a week, going to therapy, and dating a new & odd guy. Kaplan's work reminds me a bit of Gabrielle Bell's, only she's much more open in revealing details to the reader. The main similarity is her sense of humor, both in terms of witty dialogue and funny drawings. 

Fantasy Land is an interesting comic that seeks to distance an author who usually (but not exclusively) works in memoir from the experience of a character (who bears a great resemblance to the author) who has decided to try "sugar dating" as a way to make money. Of course, this has been well-documented in M.K. Harkness' comics, though her circumstances were far different than the ones of the unnamed character here. It's an important distinction to make because Kaplan is revealing certain things here that are otherwise not discussed in her comics. This comic depicts the fledgling era of the character's career as a sex worker, and the ambiguity allows for Kaplan to show the awkward humor, the feeling of self-empowerment, and both the mundane qualities of sex work as a job like any other but also the ways in which it is dangerous. Using this bit of distance in the way that Phoebe Gloeckner does in her work allows the focus to be on the narrative itself instead of the voyeuristic qualities of the experience. 

Diary 2011/2021 is an interesting variation on the daily diary comic. Starting with January 1st, Kaplan does a page from 2011 that is immediately followed by a single panel on the same date, but ten years later. The entries are generally more mundane than her usual comics, but the point of this is to take a gestalt view of her life as a 25-year-old with a particular group of friends and as a 35-year-old dealing with the global pandemic in Philadelphia. Kaplan cleverly makes the images similar in each pairing, even if the life events they portrayed were dramatically different. 

August Diary was done a few years after her last comics as a way of working with her friend Anna McGlynn. The threads are interesting to pick up on here, as Kaplan is moving in with her boyfriend Kyler, someone first seen in comics from five years earlier during a time when her dating life was much more fluid and tenuous. Kaplan notes feeling a greater overall sense of solidity even as she remains unsure of precisely what qualities define her, and this feeling runs through this entire collection. While much of the comic is devoted to moving and creating a new normal in living with a partner, this is all contrasted by Kaplan contracting COVID and time taking on a weird, fluid quality. As always, her comics are less about specific events and more about someone living in her head who struggles to be in the moment. 

Finally, Alone Together/Together Alone #2 is a collaboration with McGlynn from 2018. Kaplan uses a six-panel grid in the style of Gabrielle Bell with a purple wash here, and the tone of the comics is similar to Bell's traditional July diary comics. There are more shenanigans than usual for Kaplan and her line is a lot more refined and careful than in some of her other work. Her droll sense of humor and ear for interesting dialogue are both working well here, but the slightly ramshackle and colorful quality of her other comics is what I tend to like most about them. That style is certainly a better fit for working with McGlynn, whose comics have a more structured sense of narrative than Kaplan's and are generally more polished. Her self-caricature is delightfully sloppy, giving it a cartoony contrast to everything else she draws. It's interesting to see where the two friends intersect as well as when they're completely apart, like when McGlynn goes to Amsterdam. Overall, Kaplan's comics are thought-provoking, experimental, and funny, which isn't what I tend to think of with regard to diary comics. Hopefully, she will continue to make more. 

31 Days Of CCS, #18: Anna McGlynn & Chuck Forsman

There are a lot of cartoonists who love to mine cheesy exploitation movies because it's easy to get a cheap pop by referencing kung-fu movies, blaxploitation films, grindhouse/revenge films, etc. Other artists might refer to it satirically, while still getting all the juice and frisson from the frequently transgressive or offensive content from the source material. Chuck Forsman is not one of those artists. His interest in downbeat, violent, and frequently nihilistic fare was there from the very beginning of his career, and he's refined it to focus on the most visceral and blunt aspects of this kind of storytelling in comics like Revenger. There's no irony or distance in that comic; indeed, the moral aspects of the story are essentially kill-or-be-killed, with the protagonist on a righteous path of destruction. 

With his new one-shot, New York Ninja (published by Floating World Comics), Forsman is doing something slightly different. The movie of that title was originally filmed in 1984 (right at the height of the ninja movie explosion) but wasn't released until 2021. The original footage had no sound, no storyboards, and no script, but the film restoration/home video company Vinegar Syndrom acquired it. The footage was edited and sound was added, but no additional scenes were added in a film that didn't really have a definitive ending. The story followed a TV news station employee named Liu who puts his martial arts skills to the test after his wife is murdered. He kills a serial killer named the Plutonium Killer at the end. The film gained an instant cult following--including Forsman.

He was so captivated by the film that he wrote Vinegar Syndrome and asked to do a comics sequel, in the style of Marvel Super Specials from the 70s and 80s. Forsman's comic is entirely in the spirit of the film, as the more ridiculous aspects of the film are played completely straight. Forsman simplifies his line a bit, using essentially the same kind of four-color palette of past eras and lots of effects like zip-a-tone. In the comic, Liu is still looking for his wife's killer, but one of the disciples of the Plutonium Killer has survived, as rats enter his body and he finds the radioactive hand of his master. There's a kid who wants to be the Ninja's student, a sleazy nightclub, absurd sci-fi/horror elements, and pretty much everything else you'd want from sleazy 80s entertainment. There's a heart-warming ending and an open ending for more Ninja fun. Forsman's sheer, sincere enthusiasm for the material is infectious, especially for anyone who's ever enjoyed discovering some bizarre bit of cult cinema. The total lack of polish and slickness (in both the movie and the comic) is part of what makes all of this work. 

**

Diary comics are a dime a dozen. What were originally designed as a way to get your pencil moving and not to fuss too much over one's line has become something of a cottage industry. I blame James Kochalka for this. Lynda Barry, who often talks about doing diary comics as a way of busting through writer's block, said that no artist should do them for more than a year straight, especially not for others to see. There are seriously diminishing returns for both artist and reader. I often advise young cartoonists that if you ever get to the point where you draw that strip about being at the drawing board and having nothing to say, you should quit doing your diary strip immediately. You can always come back to it in a few months, once something has perhaps happened. 

What is the central problem with diary strips? There's little time available to process the events that have happened, and that perspective is crucial in crafting a coherent narrative. Anecdote is not narrative. Quotidian details aren't stories. They're the fertilizer of stories. I say all of this to note that Anna McGlynn's 17 August Days is practically the platonic form of what a good diary comic is. It's not just that a lot of interesting things happen in the course of the diary comics (though they do happen), it's that there's a crackling immediacy to her work that reflects a commitment to getting back to the drawing board after three years while finishing up her last semester of nursing school. She jotted down these frequently hilarious stories in-between classes and hospital shifts, and while her line is crude, it's actually more dynamic than it was earlier in her career. I once described McGlynn's line as functional but not much else, but she more than makes up for it with smart cartooning and storytelling. Even her caricature is fun to look at, with freckles, glasses, hair up in a bun, and limbs that tend to flail around. 

This is classic closed memoir: McGlynn gives the reader nothing at first, throwing them into the deep end of their life as a student while giving very little narrative context as to who they are or why we should care. The sheer force of her character wins the reader over immediately, and she reveals an emotional narrative and even a through-line (a rarity for a diary comic) little by little. We learn that her divorce is final. We see her studying and then going to band practice (!). She delights in the legal demise of Alex Jones. She goes slightly crazy in the Philadelphia heat. She ponders community while visiting the Pine Barrens with friends. She goes to Ireland to visit her mother and stepfather. Her life is so busy that doing a comic seems to be a natural step, a return to something she used to love to do as she's learned to balance her life. Why is she doing this comic and publishing it? Because community and communication are everything, a lesson she learns over and over throughout the comic. Expressing oneself through narrative is an excellent way to create community and reach out to others, and the emotional and informational denseness of this comic sets it apart from others of its ilk.

Thirty Days of CCS #9: Girl Talk & My Pace 2

My Pace Volume 2 is an anthology edited by Iona Fox and Anna McGlynn under their Rod & Cone aegis.

Girl Talk is a classic CCS anthology: hand-made and aggressively bold in terms of its theme and structure. This time around, an artist adapted part of another artist's diary, fictionalizing it to create a narrative. The hand-cut cover with various punched-out skeletons is beautiful and a nice touch. Anna McGlynn took an entry from Fox and turned it into a visceral slice-of-life story centered summer in the city. Our protagonist, Vivian, is sick of being in her cramped, hot apartment while getting calls from friends smoking weed and hooking up with random guys. McGlynn drew Vivian in such a way that she was irritated with anyone having a good time with a potential romantic partner, eventually drawing in x's for eyes. When a loser guy she has a crush on won't even hit on her because her breasts were "consumed with sadness", that's her breaking point, one that only snack cakes will alleviate. The rawness of McGlynn's storytelling is a nice fit for depicting the kind of daywhere people feel like they're melting.

Fox illustrating Cooper Whittlesey's psychedelic insights was a particular pleasure, as her quirky character design, decorative touch and oft-sketchy line were perfect for a comic about walking around and listening to music. Whittlesey and first-time cartoonist Alyse Burnside were inspired by McGlynn's diary, an office story about a young woman named Jane who is frequently sexually harassed and humiliated by her boss. It's revealed that she's the result of her father having sex with his mother, a fact she tries to work through with fantasy (both in real life and with porn). The battle between her trying to assert her worth as a human being that deserves love and the abuse she receives culminates in her taking a bus to the end of the line and meeting a naked woman next to a run-off pipe and perceiving her as someone connected to her. Nothing is explicitly revealed regarding this identity or even reality in this situation, and that ambiguity charges the strip even more. With 16 panels per page, Whittlesey & Burnside pummel the reader with tiny print, grotesque drawing and oblique angles, yet the horror and absurdity of it all is strangely hypnotic in its own way. Kaplan drew a convoluted account of a story from Fox, as it's about a day she was supposed to get a stitch out from someone who turned out to be an ex-girlfriend of an ex-boyfriend. There are amusing rabbit-hole details that emerge from the story, but this story was fairly lightweight compared to the others. That's not surprising since it's just four pages, as it served as a digestive more than as a crucial part of the anthology.

My Pace, an anthology about marching to one's own drummer, had a tight seven-person lineup. It's not as conceptually interesting as Girl Talk and is more uneven, as the editors went wide and took some risks with their contributors, not all of which paid off. Sam Szabo's silly ant piece feels like something out of a 1980s Steve Willis minicomic, but the way in which she sticks to the premise of the ant janitor and its mystic implications won me over by the end, although this slight story was way too long. Collage artist Sara Hebert contributed clip art with statements about her anger about not asking for anything regarding her needs when having sex. It's short, stark and bold, and quite a shift from the first story. Sean Knickerbocker's crisp line art was another nice change of pace, as he wrote a story about a guy going back to the desolate area in which he grew up. Knickerbocker takes a wrecking ball to ideas like nostalgia and closure, as coming back to his old house was walking through a minefield of triggers. The kicker is that the friend who came told him that this was, in fact what he wanted--to relive the trauma instead of learning how to move past it.

Iris Yan's anthropomorphic autobio is always dryly witty, and even this story about the death of her mother is no exception. When she gets a wreathe "from the team", she imagines her mother was on a secret soccer team. Having her librarian mother's ashes on a shelf so she could read whenever she wanted was a sweet touch. Mississippi's text lettering was distracting, especially for a comic that was so roughly drawn. There were points where this meditation on loneliness was rough in a way that was lovely and expressive, and other points where it let down the story's flow. The more abstract nature of Megan Snowe's comic made that text feel more suitable, since it was a comic about texting, the hand and arm broken down in such a way so as to render them into almost abstract shapes. Finally Summer Pierre's piece about how she came to comics is one I've read elsewhere, but it was a perfect choice for ending this particular volume. It's a sweet, funny story about Pierre meeting "comics' (an anthropomorphic character accounting for all of the art form), having flirtations with music, art and poetry, and then one night coming back to comics ("It's you! It's always been you!"). Her use of the grid highlights her whimsical self-caricature design by featuring it in every panel, almost invariably in a different pose and position each time. It's a subtle way of making the reader work a little in every panel and keep their eye fresh when they absorb new text.

Thirty Days of CCS #20:My Pace

Rod and Cone is the publishing imprint of Anna McGlynn and Iona Fox, and My Pace is their latest anthology that's mostly from CCS students and grads. It's a very nicely curated anthology whose contents manage to fit together well despite veering from confessional autobio to visceral weirdness. There's a scrawled, intimate quality common to all of the work here, beginning with Hannah Kaplan's "Summer Diary". These are almost embarrassingly confessional in nature, as Kaplan lets her insecurities and her sexual encounters out into the open and on to the page. She's not afraid to plainly draw her own nude body as well as those of her lovers, but the effect is raw and immediate, as opposed to titillating. Kaplan deals with the loss of an important relationship, the confusion of sleeping with her boss and the emotional challenge of living around in a loose, freehand pencil style that's all about capturing emotion through image as quickly as possible.

Cooper Whittlesey's four-panel and one panel strips veer somewhere between intensely personal and intimate and absurd at a Sam Henderson level. His drawing style is a sort of frenzied scrawl, with lots of difficult-to-read lettering and smudged images. Like Kaplan, it's like he's trying to get these thoughts about sex and "photos of every man she's ever been with--with erections!" out of his head an onto paper as quickly as possible. After the harshness of the first two artists, Fox's own "November Diary" is a smooth counterpoint. It's a lovely account of a trip from Vermont to Quebec for a zine fest, though not before Fox (who is also a farmer) stops off to examine a farm in Quebec. These strips are every bit as intimate if not as revealing as the other strips, as Fox doesn't stop to provide context to the information she discusses, nor does she seek to conceal anything. Her self-caricature is amusing, with a loop of hair on her head, and one gets a sense of contentment with considerable labors and struggles by the end of the story.

McGlynn keeps up the diary theme, only she goes back in time with "My Future Boyfriend", written by a fictional character named Vivian Howard. The rhythm of the narration is meant to mimic both a diary as well as a director's notes for a movie. The writing is beautiful and painful, as Vivian is spun around in a million directions by her own brain, her own hormones and the wonderful and terrible confusion of adolescent being. Drawing the strip on lined paper gave it a certain authenticity, and the use of imagery not directly related to the narration was clever and hinted at the way Vivian fought off feelings of jealousy and distrust and embraced those around her.

Reilly Hadden's "Land Grove" uses his thin, cartoony line to create another story about a dangerous, unstable environment and attempts to find safety in it. When a man goes out in a bicycle away from his partner and their tent, how he negotiates danger and the reward he receives is not unlike an Aesop's fable. Stephanie Kwok's textual diary provides yet another take on the concept, as she uses a variety of fonts to create a visual framing device for her rambling thoughts and observations. Throughout, the theme of wanting to connect but feeling isolated is repeated, her own shouts into the void an act of defiance against loneliness. Sophie Yanow's "Gaslight", featuring a figure off-panel talking to a prone figure on-panel, offers a different take on intimacy. The figure off-panel conflates honesty with intimacy, as though being honest about doing horrible things excused the horrible things we do. It's an appropriate capper to an anthology where every artist explored their emotions, their limits and their struggles in each story in an attempt at authenticity. Yanow reminds us that authenticity without humanity is no virtue. As always, her command over her line is so precise that she uses a handful of tremulous slashes and geometric figures to get at that sense of being devastated. All told, this is one of the strongest CCS-related anthologies I've read.

Thirty Days of CCS #8: Iona Fox and Anna McGlynn

Iona Fox is a recent CCS grad (class of 2015), and her autobiographical Almanac Comics Annual picks up on the first day of class in September of 2014 and goes from there. She's the perfect example of a cartoonist with limited draftsmanship who nonetheless manages to come up with a working style and method to tell stories. This comic was initiated as part of a class assignment to record and draw one's dreams, but Fox's inability to remember her dreams at the beginning saw her spin out in other directions. There's a delightful, weird energy that suffuses her comics, from the tight spiral of her hair to the odd angles and sketchiness of her daily life. Above all else, these diary comics are quirky in a manner that's entirely natural, which may well be an outgrowth of the oddness of her daily life. She split time between Burlington and White River Junction (home of CCS), and co-owns and works on a farm in the former location with her boyfriend. It's delightful to see Fox experiment with different kinds of drawing styles throughout the book, alternating between a thicker line and her more quickly-scrawled out daily strips. She alternates between cartooning in a grid and using an open layout. There are quotidian descriptions of her day as well as meditations on particular incidents, like wading/floating further and further out into a lake, making some on the shore wonder if she was trying to commit suicide. There's a funny strip about getting dressed up in a bear outfit in order to trick a bear into thinking it was spring already. It's interesting that she chose to draw a couple of special guest-speakers in her class: Dame Darcy on one day and John Porcellino on another. That's because there are echoes of both cartoonists in her work: the scratchy weirdness of Darcy combined with the poetic focus on one's own mind and the natural world.

Anna McGlynn is another class of 2015 grad whose sensitive, perceptive work is reminiscent of another CCS grad, Melissa Mendes. Both took a number of cues from the Lynda Barry school of personal but fictionalized storytelling, especially in how they tell stories from the point of view of kids. The Puddle And The Sea follows the episodic observations of a girl named Allie in a Catholic school. McGlynn is typical of many CCS grads in that her draftsmanship is functional but unexceptional, but her storytelling chops are well-developed. Like Barry, each episode is organized under a single thematic title, narrated by Allie in caption boxes. The results are frequently poignant, poetic and achingly real. Strips like "The Abandoned Sock", which talks about the ways in which children build worlds with each other, some of which are taken more seriously by some kids than others, fall into that realm of familiar because of the specificity of its details. "Ladybird" juxtaposes a child's rhyme with the pain of seeing one's parents in emotional agony as they split. "The Van" is about going to some kind of group therapy session for children of divorce, where she's asked to choose a painful image that represents her family dynamic--a concept she was not yet ready for. There is also camaraderie and magic moments with friends who seem to know things she doesn't and boys willing to share their time, time that she wants to slow down to a crawl. Despite the many bleak themes in the comic, there's an essence of hope and resolve in the character of Allie, one that allows her to keep her sense of wonder. McGlynn's poetic chops are already well-developed, and her career will be one where she simply needs to further streamline her drawing style.