31 Days Of CCS #16: Angela Boyle, Denis St. John, Cole Closser

Bearskin, by Cole Closser. This comic is from 2013, from Ryan Standfest's "Rotland Dreadfuls" minicomics series, but I've only seen it relatively recently. Closser adapts the Brothers Grimm to forceful effect, as the story of a soldier who makes a deal with the devil has multiple twists and turns. Closser, who usually adopts the veneer of classic cartoonists in his comics, here instead uses a more traditional illustration style, albeit one fitting for a fairy tale. In particular, he really nails the early part of the book before we are officially introduced to the titular character, as small creatures in what seems to be a forest taunt an unseen presence. It's Bearskin himself, as the bet he made was that he wouldn't cut his hair or nails for seven years, nor would he bathe. It turned him into a monstrous pariah but also gave him riches that he used to help out a sad, bereft old man. In return, one of his daughters volunteered to marry him. In the end, the devil may have missed out on getting Bearskin, but Bearskin's action inadvertently led to him getting two other souls. It's such a brutal story because there is no moral, only the inevitability of death. The timing and grittiness of Closser's art is a perfect fit for this kind of story.

Artema The Beast #2, by Rachel Cholst and Angela Boyle. The second issue of this series about an exile from a peaceful society is more ambitious than the first, but it does have certain structural problems. Artema joins a small party of thieves and killers and proves to be far more bloodthirsty and deadly then the rest of them combined. Cholst gets at Artema's inner struggle here, as she doesn't know if she likes what she's become. Artema's loyalty to her country supersedes everything, but she is also aware that she's being manipulated. Boyle's bigfoot cartooning is an interesting match for a gritty fantasy story, and that is part of what makes the story visually interesting. There's a lack of fluidity in some of the fight scenes and some general clunkiness when it comes to characters interacting in space, but Boyle usually finds a way to work around it. Indeed, the stiffness of character interaction is more pronounced in non-combat scenes. There are also some panels suffering from a paucity of background detail that further accentuates some of the character design issues. Boyle's art was more interesting in close-ups and with just two characters together. When the series is hopefully collected one day, I could see Boyle re-doing certain pages here and there.

Continuing the monster/fantasy theme, let's check in with Denis St. John. His Monster Club Comix is a collection of short Patreon comics originally created for subscribers. St. John's level of detail and expressive scribbliness are a highlight of his comics, along with a ghoulish sense of humor. In the first couple of strips, we meet a teen who encounters a horrifying yet intelligent slug-like creature on a bus. In a later strip, it suddenly grows after being on her body while she's taking a bath. It's a hilarious take-off on that particular trope and even gives it a romantic bent. There are also several monster vs monster one-offs, and these suffer in a comic the size of a minicomic. The level of detail in the drawings sometimes makes it hard to tell precisely what's happening on a panel-to-panel basis. Some of the best strips are stories like "Passage," about an alien coming to this dimension and struggling with every aspect of it and finding a way out through a human. It isn't a gruesome ending--it simply jumps into his shadow. It's an interesting point-of-view comic with a twist worthy of an EC horror comic, which is a clear influence for St. John.

The Kiss Of Death is an individual issue of Monster Club, done in the style of a Jack Chick tract. With the Vampirella-style hostess "Hella'Rella" narrating, St. John goes to his other main well as an artist: sex. Just as monsters in his comics almost always have a humorous edge, so too is sex a subject of humor. In this story, the classic trope of the monster seducing and destroying the innocent human woman is hilariously subverted as the monster disintegrates upon a kiss. Hella'Rella then warns all innocent monsters about the depraved humans. St. John plays it up for all its worth, and the formal qualities of the comic all help sell the joke.

Thirty Days of CCS #31: Cole Closser

(Yes, I know that 31 is greater than 30. I had too many artists to keep it to a mere thirty days!)

Cole Closser is an oddity in the world of alt-comics. Plenty of cartoonists have drawn inspiration from the golden age of comic strips, from R.Crumb to Chester Brown to Kim Deitch and beyond. Closser is a different case, as it's not so much that he's modeled his work after any one cartoonist in particular as he's almost become a man out of time in terms of his aesthetic, down to the most minute of details. His first book, Little Tommy Lost, was an example of Closser channelling Harold Gray by way of Milt Canniff, creating an action-adventure story featuring an orphan in a sinister orphanage. From the flat color scheme to the crude energy on every page, Closser's intent on creating a strip that would have not looked out of place on a comics page in 1930 was certainly successful. But to what end?

While I thought his first book was interesting, it felt gimmicky. On the other hand, his latest book with Koyama Press, Black Rat, sees Closser raise his game to another level. I can't even begin to suss out every influence at work here, and I'm not sure it really matters. Closser isn't interested in a spot the influence game; instead, he's crafted a truly strange, beautiful and compelling series of vignettes all centering around the titular character.

While the Black Rat sounds like it would be a monstrous or frightening character, he's actually an anthropomorphic rodent not unlike Mickey Mouse. The fluidity of the character allows him to be the star of several crude and hypnagogic action-adventure stories, a series of rhyming couplets, a text-heavy series of spiralling lines, a dreamy set of images with text, a fairy tale, and a silent horror story.

The endpapers have crude drawings that look as though they were made by Closser as a child, and there's a brief introduction where the Black Rat finds a magic object that will help him "live forever".
That's certainly true in the sense that he becomes a pervasive, omnipresent fictive force who is almost always a sidekick or something for a protagonist to react to. In the first story, a man working at a desk repeatedly uses the same magical cube the Rat finds in the introduction to unlock doorways into adventure, becoming more crudely-drawn and kinetic as a figure once he arrives in each adventure scenario. He's a forward-pushing, quipping, unstoppable force and the Black Rat is simply there to assist him and act as a sort of Greek chorus. This story shows the thin line between different levels of reality, as the hyper-real drawings between each adventure and the souvenirs the man brings back demonstrate different kinds of awareness.

"Ill Omens" features the Black Rat desperately trying to help a man calm down before forces beyond his control sense the man's fear and bring about his doom. The blotchy quality of this story gives it the feeling of being an abandoned artifact discovered and reprinted. The rich colors of "Air Ships", the cursive writing and the structure of each page evokes the wonder of a Winsor McKay or Lyonel Feininger. "Cat Teeth"'s crude line makes one feel as though one is reading a child's energetic and enigmatic story.

"Boy Blanc" and "Bow White" feel like flip sides of each other. The action and drawings in each are a bit less crude than in the first story, even as both are entirely fictive and don't have the same levels of reality-bending as the first story. In "Boy Blanc", the Black Rat is especially bright and cheerily-rendered, his strange pentagonal ears on prominent display as he and his Tough Boy Prototype partner fight off aliens with their fists and quips. "Bow White" uses lettering that's almost identical to what Edie Fake uses in his comics. The story, involving stopping earthquakes by travelling to the center of the earth, has its share of psychedelic moments and often uses language to create dissonance on the page.

"Our Watch" and "The Chase" use the Black Rat in an entirely different manner. In the former story, the Rat is found underneath a tree by children, as a rhythm is created in how they perceive and write about this huge, mysterious figure that's come into their lives. It has all the hallmarks of originating in an obscure child's storybook. 'The Chase" is about the good old metaphor of love being both nurturing and destructive, told in rhyme and once again employing the sort of splotchy print quality that makes the reader want to connect it to something from the 1800s.

More than anything. what Closser demonstrates here (other than an astounding facility in any number of visual and printing techniques) is an ability to harness the energy of older works in a manner that rewards an attentive reader with an open mind. It recalls the wildness of early comics, when cartoonists would try anything to see if it would stick. That's part of Closser's goal here, to be sure, and it's certainly what made this so remarkably readable despite its density and variety of approaches. However, Closser is also clearly interested in the power of an iconic figure like Mickey Mouse and how the reader's instant familiarity and identification with a fairly blank slate of a character make him mutable in all sorts of interesting ways. It's as though the Floyd Gottfredson approach to Mickey (also a clear influence) here become the dominant approach in popular culture, as opposed to the sanitized, bland promotional icon that Mickey became. Closser imagines a world where Mickey was a subversive, if familiar character, one where anything could happen in the world he inhabited. Indeed, the simply invocation and appearance of the character was a harbinger of high weirdness, drama and anything else the author or reader could imagine.

Thirty Days of CCS #13: Cole Closser

Cole Closser designs strips such that they're not just pastiches or homages to classic comic strips, but rather as a strip that could be transplanted back into the past with the authenticity, skill and authority of one of the masters. Little Tommy Lost is not a parody; while it has jokes, it's very much a straightforward adventure strip. It's designed to look like Annie Koyama had somehow found a drawer full of original tear sheets from a 1930s comic strip and shot a book directly from those old, slightly yellowed and even stained originals. While Harold Gray and his Little Orphan Annie is an obvious inspiration for the book, there are also nods to Winsor McCay and Frank King in terms of the way Closser designed the color Sunday comics to act as an explosively clever, dream-oriented strip separate from the daily continuity. Gray's white-pupils are in effect here as far as character design goes, but there are also bits of Chester Gould to be found in terms of the grotesques who pop up. I'm no scholar of comic strip art, so I'm sure there any number of other allusions to be found here, down to the way Closser signs his name on each strip, emulating Ernie Bushmiller's handwriting.

That said, the strip owes as much to the serialized writing of Charles Dickens as it does Gray. Tommy is separated from his parents in the big city and soon winds up homeless and on the streets. A corrupt cop takes him to work at a children's slave labor factory, where he makes friends with some of the boys but winds up making enemies out of several huge and scary older boys. Tommy is no victim, though; he's a tough kid who's good in a fight, eventually winning over the brutish Clarence Pigg to his side. He also schemes to find a way to escape and gets involved in the mysterious plans of the factory's owner. The poor lost boy who's at the mercy of unscrupulous adults is a Dickens staple, and Closser brings that story to life.

Closser has the rhythms of a daily strip down cold, keeping things moving while re-emphasizing certain key plot points. Indeed, Little Tommy Lost unfortunately reproduces one of the more annoying aspects of daily adventure strips: a day-to-day repetitiveness originally designed to help keep casual readers up to speed. The result is that it sometimes takes three or four strips to propel the story when it could have been done in one or two strips. Information is repeated every few strips as Closser goes to great lengths to spell out what's going on, just as strip cartoonists had to make everything plain to keep the attention of their readers. Reading all of the strips at once, it makes processing some of the strips a grind to get through. Still, Closser's art is a genuine pleasure to stare at, with his confident cross-hatching and memorable character design. Characters like Pigg and Oliver "Skullface" Duggery are frightening to behold, and factory owner Mr Greaves' hunchbacked posture and balding head make him a figure of genuine menace. Closser's dialogue is street-tough rough but is always crystal-clear in meaning; it adds a great deal of texture to the book.

Ultimately, the first volume of Little Tommy Lost is somewhere between an astounding achievement in terms of the skill and care devoted to creating this kind of object and a storytelling curiosity. While the first volume had its moments, the storytelling padding reduced its overall impact. I liked that Closser had his strip adhere to the seasons he depicted with his daily, arbitrary dating that he created, but I wish we had gotten to the high seas adventure promised in volume two much earlier. The daily grind of the strip sometimes allowed Closser to delve into the pathos of his characters, but again that repetitiveness made even that attempt at storytelling depth feel like going to the same well a few too many times. To make this more than a simple triumph of conceptual design, Closser needs to up the narrative ante while still staying true to the comic strip roots that are so important to him. Breaking the rules wouldn't be such a bad thing, as so many classic strips became classics precisely because they broke the established rules of the day.

New and Old : Hive #5

The fifth volume of Jordan Shiveley's anthology of new and old material, Hive, is unsurprisingly hit and miss. However, Shiveley is to be commended for the sheer breadth and depth of the material in the book, as many of the cartoonists here are relatively new to me and show exciting potential. Let me start with Cole Closser, a student at the Center for Cartoon Studies whose "Finnegan Frog" stories channel both the style and spirit of golden age comic strip cartoonists like EC Segar or (especially) Billy DeBeck. The ways in which the poor title character gets beaten down by life in strip after strip is hilarious and evocative of later work (Chris Ware crossed with Tony Millionaire, perhaps). What makes Closser's work great is the organic nature of his line. He's not simply doing a pastiche but rather looks to have achieved his own style after much trial and error after looking at a lot of different kinds of comics. I could read a book full of these gags.

Shiveley did a nice job in getting a number of non-US cartoonists for this anthology, and these artists in particular piqued my attention. German artist Lilli Loge's darkly humorous "Make The Most Of It" plasters that platitude atop a number of funny and grim situations in which a wheelchair-bound woman goes out of her way to overachieve in the most ridiculous of situations. I enjoyed her bleak but absurd sensibility in this strip and found myself wanting to see more, which is certainly the mission of a good anthology. Liliana Velez wrote and Paola Gavira drew Velez's  story "Naked In The City", a straightforward account of a provocative act done with no thoughts toward eroticism, but rather a way of truly inhabiting (and forcing others to confront) the sense in which we are embodied. It's a fact that we literally cover up as people, a fact that is eroticized or shamed but that is always present. Her plaintive cry of "Don't they have a body?" as she is mocked, scolded and/or leered at rings true. Gavira's nervous line reminds me a bit of Julie Doucet in the way it wavers and is slightly on the grotesque side, a factor that helps ground the nudity in the story.

There's a lot in here that I've already seen, but I'm guessing many American readers haven't. Comics by Joe Decie, David Zggy Greene, Craig Collins &Iain Laurie come to mind in that department, representing diary comics, gags, and skewed horror, respectively. There was also an excerpt from Noah Van Sciver's excellent comic The Hypo published long before that book debuted. The tone and subjects of this anthology are really all over the place and have no particular flow; really, it's less an anthology than a sampler of work that Shiveley happens to like, published in a highly attractive package. (The hand-printed vellum dustcover is a beautiful little art object.) That said, Shiveley publishes work by artists not usually seen by wider audiences, like Hawk Krall's excellent comics about being a chef or Danny Hellman's lovingly-rendered exercises in hilarious filth that he drew a number of years ago.There's a couple of amusing Jonathan Baylis stories from his minis and lightweight but well done pieces from Lauren Barnett and Annie Mok (the former Ed Choy Moorman). Generally speaking, there's simply less dross in this volume than in the prior one. The comics in general look better and are visually distinctive. There's less genre tedium (not to say that all genre work is tedious, but there's nothing more tedious than bad genre work) and more risk-taking in the sort of storytelling approaches that are attempted. Even the most conventional of stories, like Paul O'Connell's by-the-numbers stories about jazz musicians and other cultural figures from the 1950s, are at least readable and competently done. I can't help but think that Shiveley is on the verge of being able to make Hive uniformly excellent, but that may require a rethinking of the way he gathers some of his material. There's no question that he has a knack for identifying talent and anticipating its rise.

Anthologies: Lies Grown-Ups Told Me, Cartoon Crier

One of the priorities at the Center for Cartoon Studies that's pounded into its students' heads is the need to publish. Publish minicomics and work on your short-story chops before you can get to that ambitious graphic novel. Better yet, band together and publish anthologies. From the very beginning, CCS students and then alums have been publishing anthologies, many of them themed. Sundays is the best and probably the best known, but there have been a couple of dozen other CCS-related anthologies that have seen print. For the most part, the quality and professionalism of each anthology has improved with each passing year, as alumni continue to improve and the best young students contribute as well. The reader gets a sense that these aren't just filler stories, but rather examples of cartoonists truly putting their best foot forward.

Lies Grown Ups Told Me, edited by Nomi Kane, Caitlin M, and Jen Vaughn, is yet another quality anthology assembled by two CCS alums and the former Schulz Library librarian (Caitlin McGurk, now at Ohio State). Not everyone in the anthology is or was associated with CCS, but it's a good 90% of the book's contents. The anthology's theme is simple, yet proves to be fertile ground for its artists. There's not a single clunker in the whole book, even those strips whose draftsmanship isn't in the same class as the best artists in the books. Some of the very best CCS draftsmen are featured here, including Nomi Kane, Dakota McFadzean and faculty member Jon Chad. All three members of that trio do not disappoint. Kane's story is hilarious, as she repeats as a matter of fact that pregnant women shouldn't swim with dolphins because their sonar can detect the gestating baby, leading them to corner the women and kidnap the babies to raise them as their own. Until she says this out loud to her friend, she believes it to be true. Kane's figure work is pure eye-candy: expressive, amusing and packed with clever details. Speaking of detail, McFadzean's story about his grandfather's claims of being able to draw the best Donald Duck is both warm and wry, bringing past and present together in a simple satisfying manner. There's a clean elegance to his line that nonetheless always conveys warmth and emotions just below the surface. Chad's story about his parents inadvertently realizing that a television show that signaled bedtime meant putting him to bed whenever they wanted is a pretty simple one by his visually lush standards, though he still manages to throw in some clever flourishes.

Most of the contributors play the theme for laughs, and the sheer variety of lies they later discovered makes for a lively book. Some are a bit more sobering than others, like Tom Casteel discovering that hard work and dedication doesn't always pay off in "Patrol Boy of the Year", or Cody Pickrodt wondering why on earth he thought his dad thought it would be funny to pretend that he died after a rough-housing session with his two young children and no other adults around. Saying things to scare kids is another running theme, as Beth Hetland's sister freaks her out with tales of the "The Undertoad" living in the ocean, Bryan Stone's grandmother keeps him from exploring the forest by telling him that "Red Eyes" lives there and will eat his dog, and (worst of all), Andrew Greenstone's parents keep him in line by telling him of his "other brother" Igor whom they killed and buried in the backyard because he was a naughty boy. Ben Horak's "Sweet Trap" was along those lines but even better because the threat was silent. He and his brother kept raiding the cookie jar, and his frustrated mother put up a bunch of wires and other junk on it, saying "Now I have to do something drastic!"  There's a hilarious two page spread of Horak and his brother imagining what kind of trap their mother might have set, when the reality is that it was just a hoax.

Overall, the tone of the book is breezy and affectionate. That's best encapsulated by Lena Chandhok's "Earth Girls Are Easy", an account of watching that movie as a preteen with her grandfather and younger sister. It's a lovely story because it captures the moment when Chandhok realized that she was suddenly on the other side of the divide of adult and child, knowing something that her younger sister didn't. I liked that the editors reached out to plenty of non-CCS artists as well, like letterer/caricaturist Rick Parker's illustrated story about being accused of cutting up a garden hose, Jesse Lonergan's hilarious account of being duped as to the origin of broccoli, and the superb Scottish artist Lorna Miller chiming on in on the reasons why she was told not to pick dandelions as a child. The editors do a nice job of alternating the truly silly stories with the slightly more contemplative or serious ones, though the tone throughout is fairly lighthearted. 

Another CCS anthology with precisely the opposite tact is The Cartoon Crier, edited by Cole Closser, James Sturm and R.Sikoryak. This is a free, 36-page comics broadsheet that's a collaboration between the National Cartoonist's Society and CCS, with the theme being sadness and crying. This is a fascinating snapshot of contemporary newspaper cartooning and the next young wave of cartoonists, as the editors plumb the depths of veterans like Mort Walker to find those strips that defy conventional punchlines in the service of expressing misery. I imagine this project owes much to the Comics Editor of King Features Syndicate, Brendan Burford, who is also a small-press cartoonist. He contributes a strip theorizing how cartoonists transformed from garrulous men-about-town in the early part of the 20th century to the more introverted and downbeat characters of recent years, and guesses that the influence of Charles Schulz had the biggest impact. It's obvious that the hand of Schulz can be felt in many of the modern strips when they do turn away from gags.

Consider Lynn Johnston, whose series of strips regarding the death of a family dog is absolutely shattering. Like Schulz, the strips have the rhythm of a comedic strip, but she eschews punchlines in some for portents, while the punchlines in other strips later take a dark turn. Sturm provides an example of a brutal strip by the Family Circus' Bil Keane that technically contains a gag but only in the bleakest of terms. In general, the strips by the CCS cartoonists are more interesting and daring than the NCS strips, which is understandable given the total freedom they have. While there a few CCS veterans and some other outside artists, most of the contributors to this comic are either current students or 2012 graduates, and they give a fine accounting for themselves given this format. April Malig's simply-drawn strip about her difficulty controlling her tendency to cry is clever, especially given her solution. Sophie Goldstein's full-page "Potato Baby" is hilariously depressing as it doucments the ridiculous travails of the tile character. Rachel Dukes' slickly-drawn "Lucky Dog" is even more over the top, as it addresses the side issue of the lonely life of the cartoonist. Closser's own "Little Tommy Lost" and his activity page are evocative of classic newspaper cartooning. The former is an homage to Milt Caniff-style adventure strips, while the latter goofs on being maudlin. Donna Almendrala's Nancy pastiche is hilarious, expertly evoking the cadence of that strip while staying on theme. (She also had a strong strip in Lies Grown Ups Told Me.) Max Riffner and Dakota McFadzean are two cartoonists whose slick draftsmanship is clearly strong enough for syndicate work, even as their strips here both take enormously dark turns.

The lineup of veteran cartoonists, CCS alumni and CCS fellows here is killer. Sturm's autobiographical strip about getting older, drawn in the form of a superhero comic, is thoughtful and smart. Sikoryak, the comics/literary mashup master, this time around puts together Dilbert and Herman Melvile's Bartleby The Scrivener, an inspired pairing given that both address workplace ennui and forms of rebellion. Scribbly autobio specialist David Libens contributes a marvelous strip about a kid visiting the grave of his dead pet and telling her a secret: that he no longer uses a potty seat. It's a strong use of detail, as Libens has a knack for translating how little kids talk into comics form. Melissa Mendes has a typically strong but understated story about a girl who sees her dog die in an accident, with the last panel showing her back to the reader as she processes the grief by drawing pictures of her beloved pet. Jon Chad goes literal with an ingenious, thin-lined strip about a "scientist" who takes us through a series of background sight gags about how and why humans cry. Joe Lambert's "Retainer" is yet another example of the artist's increasing complexity and maturity, even as he continues to explore the dynamics of children and teens. Ariel Bourdeaux, the 90s comics veteran who recently graduated from CCS, contributes a funny strip about crying listening to children sing, and the embarrassing feeling of being spotted in public in a bright room, crying uncontrollably. Laura Park's story about someone recalling their mother being sent away before their fifth birthday because of mental illness is all the more heartbreaking when the final panel reveals that she was glad because she knew that she'd get the biggest slice of cake. Robyn Chapman's story about a woman who is unable to cry after a childhood as a crybaby is restrained yet powerful.

The broadsheet also contains commentary by Shaenon Garrity on the saddest comics she's ever read, while Andrew Farago compiles the results of a survey of cartoonists about the same question. Overall, The Cartoon Crier isn't necessarily a compelling read from page to page and strip to strip, as many of the syndicated strips are still rather banal. This comic is better read like a regular newspaper section--with some brilliant strips, some reliable favorites, some interesting discoveries, and a good deal of dross. Its goal of comparing and contrasting two entirely different worlds of cartooning and finding common ground was an interesting one, especially since Schulz is an influence on nearly every cartoonist. What's most impressive about it is that the youngest cartoonists really took this assignment seriously and did their best work. It's not unusual to be impressed with CCS cartoonists after reading an anthology, but it's rare that every contributor does their best work. It's this group that's the true backbone of this anthology.