31 Days Of CCS, #30: Dakota McFadzean

Dakota McFadzean's short stories reflect desolation. His stories are set in rural Canada, and the isolation of the area is almost palpable and contributes to the sense of existential dread and horror that is in every one of his stories. I've reviewed most of the stories in his newest collection, To Know You're Alive (Conundrum), in High-Low and other places, but the design of the book and the sequencing of the stories gives them a different context, so I decided to review them with fresh eyes. 

One running theme in McFadzean's work is the liminal space between reality and frightening fantasy and how children often make no distinction between the two. In "Gnoshlox," for example, an adult recalls playing in a sandbox and creating these sort of clay golem creatures he called "Gnoshlox." It was all matter-of-fact, and one day it ended, with the implication being that he changed somehow and was no longer able to make it happen. It was, metaphorically, the difference between magical thinking and the age of reason. This story was part of a suite about childhood experiences. "The Truck" is about the way children push each other to cross and push ethical lines and social mores, and what happens when lines are crossed. 

"Buzzy" expands on this idea and explores the ways in which socialization can warp kids. The title character is a misanthropic kid who starts going to a new school and finds that while he has to deal with the same kind of assholes as ever, his weird tics and explosive temper doesn't make life any easier for him. That's especially true when he doesn't know how to react to someone being nice to him and inevitably drives her away. McFadzean leans heavily on a John Stanley/Little Lulu style of scaled-down, cute-kid drawings as a way of contrasting the idealized quality of kids with a frequently more brutal reality. "Good Find" is a sort of companion piece to "Truck" in that an older kid eggs on a younger kid...but it's slowly revealed that this is a world where their monstrous features are just a casual fact of everyday life. "Hollow In The Hollows" moves the ages up a bit, where there's a greater understanding of one's own actions and how we hurt each other. It ends on a hopeful note, where the magic that one of the characters so desperately wishes is real manifests in the presence of a friend who has forgiven her behavior.

The "Intermission" section contains short pieces that reveal that even when McFadzean does gag work, it's tinged with dread. The most disturbing is "Ghostie," which is about a Casper-type boy ghost who gets rousted by bumbling ghost hunters and their monkey, and then remembers for a moment that he is dead and lets out a howl. It's funny and terrible all at once. "The Pasqua Penny Savor" draws a little on Chris Ware and others who've done fake comic strip pages with tiny panels, and it mixes in fantasy stuff with unnerving slice-of-life comics about families and parenting. 

The second half of the book is about the transition and tension between childhood and adulthood. The longest story is a gibberish title where the bear from a cereal box comes to life and menaces a kid in a non-stop parade of horror that's jammed into 24 panels per page. It's frantic and disturbing, as the kid does whatever he can to stop the leering, cheery menace that only seems to mutate and multiply. After seemingly vanquishing it, the bear returns in his adulthood to menace him further...only for the kid to pop back into childhood. The key to the story is its use of a bloodline spot red. It's sparing at first, but the kid eventually accepts the monster as his entire world is red. This silent story is an effective metaphor for understanding that our fears never really go away, but we can accept them. 

"Debug Mode" is about a programmer trying to find bugs in a game for a company with a weird hierarchical structure, only to learn that the game is much broader than she suspected. "First" is about first contact with an alien lifeform whose lack of demonstrable intelligence, but the story is really about the way in which social media and our cultural attention span quickly moves on to new, frequently stupid topics when the old one fails to entertain. "To Know You're Alive" is an autobiographical story about McFadzean taking care of his difficult toddler son. Being alone and taking care of a kid who is absolutely melting down is unbelievably difficult, and McFadzean captures the horror of that moment of losing one's temper and yelling back. That forbidden, guilt-inducing feeling of wanting to be freed from the burden. It centered around Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood on an old website, including weird, creepy episodes that were silent or filmed in the dark. 

The story reflected that key understanding that time is a different construct for kids, who will pass through that inconsolable rage and return to the steady-state of seeing his parents as his whole world and needing his father because he's scared. It is a fitting capper to a collection that reflects a parent's anxieties: fear of a child dying, fear of a child being bullied, fear of a child bullying, fear of a child not fitting in, and fear of failing your own children above all else. It's not an accident that the entire collection uses red as a spot color, because these stories are about McFadzean facing and ultimately accepting his own fears, understanding that they will always be there. We are always in the red.

Thirty One Days Of CCS #6: April Malig, Josh Kramer, Dakota McFadzean

Last Mountain #5: To Know You're Alive, by Dakota McFadzean. This is an interesting departure for McFadzean, who rarely does autobio work. It's a fascinating addition to the burgeoning comics genre I'm calling True Parenting. Anyone who's a parent knows it's both terrible and wonderful, often at the same time. That's especially true of the toddler years, when kids develop agency but they've not yet reached the age of reason. This comic follows McFadzean, a stay-at-home dad, on a day with his toddler son. McFadzean describes his son as "intense" as a counter to his wife's more cute description of him as a "firecracker". ("Mama will come home RIGHT NOW!") The latter description is applicable when his son did things like get excited by green garbage trucks and the trolley on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. The former description applied when his son hit McFadzean in the back of the head as hard as he could with a block. It's an amazingly rendered scene, as visceral as anything McFadzean has ever drawn.

What's most interesting about this comic is McFadzean's understanding of what his son is going through on an intellectual level and actually going through it with him. His son was going through a particularly painful teething process, the result being "he just screams and screams". As a parent, you feel awful. As a human being, it is hard to deal with. How one copes with that fight-or-flight confrontation through tantrums is crucial, and McFadzean feels bad about screaming back at him. There's another scene where he is literally surrounded by his son's screaming word balloons, his own attempts at reason drowned out as he covers his ears, puts his son in front of a screen and crumples into a heap. At the same time, McFadzean reveals his near-instantaneous anxiety over bringing his son into horrible world and compensates by psychologically picking at that wound, seeking out upsetting images. It feels like a way of fighting the everyday anxiety of child-rearing (amplified by a lack of sleep) by distracting oneself from it with actually horrible thoughts and images. The comic coalesces into a bizarre episode (?) of Mr. Rogers on a dark set, with shadowy figures that frightened his son enough to call for his father's help. It was the unknown calling, anxieties swirling for both father and son, as they passed through it. Though Mama came home at last, his son wanted to see the monsters again.

My Dumb Feelings, by April Malig. Malig's comics are a mix of swirling, colorful images (brought to life thanks to a Risograph) and her own pointed, funny and self-deprecatory comments. Lines like "I have a lot of energy, uh, it's just all potential" get at Malig's general discomfort with life. That page has bright orange and pink backgrounds with images of flowers coalescing on the page. It's the ultimate in potential energy. As she talks about on the final page of the comic, there's just a general sense of weariness pervading the comic. She's tired of everything, including herself and her own feelings. She's unsure if she's sad or angry enough about the right things, in the right ways. She has no idea if making something beautiful means anything, and notes that "believing in dumb magic feels as good and valid as believing in anything" else on a gorgeous page filled with colorful talismans. Malig advances no viewpoint other than her own personal uncertainty, which is a statement in itself. Nowhere is there a statement of surrender or inaction; she'll keep right on feeling those dumb feelings and doing meaningless stuff, but she knows she'll never get the Answer to any of her questions. That might make her tired, but at least she's trying, in a comic that can only be described as day-glo existentialism.

The Cartoon Picayune #8, edited by Josh Kramer. Kramer chugged along and published eight issues worth of solid comics journalism, with each reporter out in the field reporting on a story. This is unfortunately the final issue (published in 2016), but it's typically quite good and focuses on a variety of stories. Some are low-key, some are whimsical, and some are a matter of life and death. It's like a comics version of Radiolab or some other unpredictable, informative podcast. This issue features an interview with a man named Tony Burns, who went from homeless (thanks in part to having AIDS) to being the recipient of a government housing program that restored his dignity and autonomy. It's allowed him to become and advocate and assist others in similar situations. Kramer mostly just lets Burns tell his story (the story got a little cramped with tiny lettering at times, and everything about it demanded a bigger page), and it's a testament to putting the lie to the notion that public assistance saps an individual's interest in doing things for themselves. To the contrary, the knowledge that one's basics are at least partly cared for allows an individual to be a contributing member of society. This story fed perfectly into the issue's theme of "Unnoticed". Homeless people are unnoticed and ignored, and it wouldn't take much to help so many people reclaim their sense of dignity.

Laura Brooke Kovac's "Forgotten" is about a scrap-metal dealer who stumbled upon a metal egg that turned out to be one of the lost Fabrege eggs of Russia. What followed was a fascinating history of the eggs, including a note on how much they cost to make for the Tsars and their families relative to the average person's yearly salary. Ellis Rosen's "The Number Stations" is about the cold-war tactic of transmitting codes via short-wave radio to a one-time pad with the corresponding code to relay information. The original messages are available for anyone to tune into, and they continue to be transmitted to this day. The story follows how the public picked up on them, wrote books about and generally pondered their usage. It's an interesting artifact of the Cold War that persists precisely because it's so hard to crack. Finally, Kramer's "Why Grown-Ups Are Playing D&D" is still timely today, as the game continues to explode in popularity. Drawing each person he interviewed as their character as a fun touch, but Kramer gets at the heart of why it's drawing people in. In a world where technology is isolating, the camaraderie and imagination of the game is appealing.

Thirty Days of CCS #11: Dakota McFadzean, Dean Sudarsky, Mitra Farmand

That Was Awkward 1-2, by Mitra Farmand. Farmand draws funny, four-panel strips featuring little thumb-shaped characters. That said, it's amazing to see what she can accomplish with such simple shapes, especially in terms of both humor and expressiveness. Seeing one with a pony tail is an inherently funny sight, for example. That said, the strips are funny because of Farmand's wit and sense of timing. Farmand turns her attention toward awkward social interactions on herself (with a fourth panel that says "I DID THIS") as much as she does others ("THIS HAPPENED"). Farmand is especially sharp when doing strips about relationships and dating, racism, workplace drama and aging. She'll occasionally dip into full color experiments that work quite nicely with the ultra-simple figures. Despite the sense of formula from strip to strip, Farmand keeps the audience off balance because the punchline panel can vary from anywhere from the second to the last panel, with either the text noted above to fill out space and emphasize the joke, or else a silent beat panel. I could have read a dozen more issues of this.

Untitled (Last Mountain #4), by Dakota McFadzean. This nerve-wracking, silent story about capitalism and advertising gone horribly awry gets its message across with a number of suspenseful 24-panel pages. It's the story of a young girl who's eating her typical morning sugary cereal with a nauseatingly cute mascot on its box. When it comes to life with its incessant smile on its face, it's unnerving but still interesting to the girl, until the bear wants to play hide-and-seek and its eyes appear on its hands. Not only are its eyes now blank, but dozens of tiny bears can be seen spilling out like maggots. What's real and what's an illusion are questions she's constantly asking herself, as the bears disappear and later come back to haunt her at night, as they've invaded the world and (worse) her mother. There's a nasty image of the girl stabbing her mom in the yes with scissors, only to be met with that unrelenting leer. The girl eventually triumphs, and years pass.

A guy comes into the cafe where she's a barista, and he's wearing a t-shirt with that image. Horrified, she asks about it, and he shows her a video of the bear being back in full-force...and there's a creepy set of panels where we see a close-up of his face, and the image of a bear forming as a kind of boil. In the way that time passes differently as an adult, so are these panels 2x3. It turns out she had kept the evil cereal box in a safe for a number of years, and when she opens it up again, she wishes her present away, and winds up being trapped in the past with the monster, forever eating bowls of cereal. She's sacrificed herself to a past of boredom, cavities and the annoying, invasive and omnipresent nature of advertising. McFadzean's control of his line is superb as he crams so many drawings onto single pages and loses no readability in doing so.

Hyperlydian, by Dean Sudarsky. This is a series of strange aphorisms in the form of letters between the unseen Darla and Ronald. Ronald begins the dialogue with a bunch of statements about ends, means, babies and respect, and the line is deceptively plain, especially with the off-putting font that he uses. Everything about this comic is off-putting, strange and yet familiar by way of deja vu. Darla tells him things like "You are as hostile to grace as rhythm to the future" and urges him not to dance again, with drawings of anthropmorphic notes rushing toward a puddle soaking in musical notes. These letters are interspersed with strange images, jokes, violent scenes that have nothing to do with the epistolary narrative, and these climax in a nail desperately trying to not get hammered, to no avail. There's something beautifully liquid about both text and images that swept me along quickly; I often had to stop myself to retrace my steps and really take in each page. This is a comic in the immersive tradition, filled with poetic passages and images, and it's worth many readings.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #22: Dakota McFadzean, Ian Richardson

Last Mountain #3, by Dakota McFadzean. This is the first collection of McFadzean's comic strip Murray Geister: Paranormal Investigator. This looks like it's going to wind up being the talented McFadzean's first long-form work after a career spent publishing affecting, dark and sometimes supernaturally-tinged comics. The titular character is near retirement age and is desperate to find a way to make money, as he can't get enough hours as a grocery store clerk. His other job, as a paranormal investigator, is one that he's taken seriously but has never found any real evidence with regard to paranormal activity. In the course of the story, he's asked to investigate a home that a frantic woman claims may have a crack that leads to "the other side". A quick investigation yields some mice and little else, other than an angry and disappointed customer.

Geister wants out of the paranormal business and regrets the ad he placed in the phone book. In his first person narrative, Geister reveals himself to be intelligent, self-effacing and skeptical. In the actions in the story itself, he's awkward, unsure of himself and generally doesn't know his place in the world anymore. Much of his narrative is about the human brain: how it arranges random data into patterns, the ways in which a disconnect between mind and body during sleep can cause sleep paralysis, This line of inquiry leads him to wonder the ways in which has own brain has fooled him, either because of memory or because of the actual events he wants to see. A chance encounter with a fortune teller on the street set off his usual charlatan alarms until she called out his name, and even that wasn't convincing since he was a quasi-public figure. (Her flyer purported that she would be helpful in court cases as well as with immigration.) What was true, as revealed in his dreams and in the final scene of this issue, was that he was very much haunted by a figure from his childhood named Ollie, and it became clear that this probably initially spurred his interest in the paranormal.

Geister is a complex character. His cool skepticism is what got him kicked out of the Haunting Society. He can't help but watch and chuckle at the Specter Catchers TV show. However, without his paranormal investigating, he has no identity or purpose. His future is grim. As the fortune teller pointed out, he has a lot of unresolved pain. McFadzean's character design is subtle but telling. Geister has male pattern baldness, a mustache and glasses. He's the sort of character where it's clear that he's been robbed of some of his youth, that he's lost a lot of vitality. He has clarity about everything except his own life, and McFadzean emphasizes that every time he encounters someone younger than he is who's in a hurry. The slightly grotesque character design of others in the story also subtly plays off what was probably once a more heroic appearance for Geister. A fellow Haunting Society member looks like a Dan Clowes character in his broad face, thick glasses, balding pate but long hair and no sense whatsoever of his own strangeness. Even the customers have the raw, ugly mien of people in a hurry who don't care to whom they're rude. McFadzean has set up a lot of interesting possibilities in this first chapter, and I look forward to the final work.

At Dusk, by Ian Richardson. This quartet of horror stories features short, punchy entries, a lurid use of color, and a merciless edge. Richardson goes for the throat in every story, doesn't bother with useless narrative background and basically elevates the tension of every story from the first panel and doesn't relent. In "Demon", for example, we meet a smiling female creature who causes death and destruction everywhere she goes, simply by dint of her presence. She makes men fight over her and kill for her as she blithely goes on her way, leaving a visceral trail of blood and gore. Richardson does not skimp on those details, and his strategy is to keep piling on until the climax of the story. It's a method he uses in his other stories as well to varying degrees. "Malaise" is a first-person account of a warrior navigating a monster apocalypse, wherein he has to kill dozens of monsters just to get supplies. Those "supplies" just turns out to be a cup of coffee, as his ironic social anxiety prevents him from doing anything else. The frenetic pacing of this story makes it a thriller, as we follow the protagonist in battle after battle.

"Turn Up The Heat" imagines god as a space alien who was just keeping Earth around as something to eat later, and an astronaut encounters it to do its bidding--warm up the Earth even more (presumably with nuclear war). Richardson goes space Lovecraft for god's design, a horrible series of swirls and tentacles that's madness-inducing. The last page, when the now-possessed astronaut kills the rest of his crew on his space station, has some nice visual flourishes as the blood from his former crewmate's neck floats upward and fills the panel from the top down. Richardson is a detail-oriented artist and that's a great example of how he considers his visual impact. "The Munchies" is the weakest of the stories, as a seemingly benevolent soup kitchen cook guides a homeless man who's had a little too much to drink to the basement, where he's made a sacrifice to the creatures living there. The cook is then devoured and reborn after the creatures feed. The contrast of charity with depravity doesn't work that well because this is the one case in the book where some understanding of what's going on beyond what we see on the surface might have been useful. Unlike the other stories, which build nicely to their conclusions, this one is anticlimactic. Still, Richardson's ability to zero in on key narrative points while providing plenty of other entertainment in the meantime makes this a solidly constructed anthology.

Thirty Days of CCS #34: Dakota McFadzean

Dakota McFadzean's comics are among the best created by CCS alumni. He's got every technical tool to be a great cartoonist already. He can draw, convincingly and fluidly, in virtually any style. I'm not sure how much of that came from prior experience and how much of that came from CCS demanding that students learn to emulate different visual approaches in their assignments, but he's equally comfortable drawing in a naturalistic style, in a cartoony John Stanley/Irving Tripp pastiche, or in a sweaty, cluttered Evan Dorkin approximation. Beyond being technically accomplished as a draftsman, he has rock-solid storytelling chops. His panel-to-panel and page-to-page transitions are smooth and clever, though he rarely steps outside of standard grids and fairly conventional formal choices. He's not so much there to dazzle the reader as he is to tell a story and create an atmosphere.

There is a natural confluence of style, aesthetic influences and narrative choices in McFadzean's comics. His focus on loneliness, wide-open spaces and working class families most likely got its start from being raised in a small town in Saskatchewan. However, McFadzean often channels the supernatural, the grotesque and the inexplicable into his work as well. That pervasive sense of magical realism and dread sets his comics apart from most cartoonists. His frequently warm and inviting visual approach makes the eventual story twists all the more horrific.

His collection of daily strips, Don't Get Eaten By Anything, is a fascinating account of a young artist trying to get better in public by forcing himself to draw every day. Inspired by the patron saint of daily webcomics, James Kochalka, McFadzean began this strip as a typical 4-panel autobio strip but eventually abandoned that in favor of a more free-for exploration of his own dreams and nightmares. What McFadzean wound up creating was a one-man daily comics page where a number of recurring characters act as McFadzean's interchangeable avatars of dread. Moreover, his daily strip acted as an incubator for ideas that he would expand upon in his later short story.

One example is the Ghost Rabbit, a goofy character who was later used to darker effect in a mini of the same name. A strip about the existential quality of video games had its origins in a series of strips where one could practically feel the grime of a den and its greasy inhabitants. The sad, alienated and often angry characters found in McFadzean's regular work often started as inhabitants of a four-panel strip with a punchline. While the strips here stand on their own, the book offers the same sort of insight into McFadzean's creative process as a sketchbook might. In essence, the daily strip was his sketchbook.

McFadzean riffs a lot on pop culture, but not in the way one might think. When he refers to The Simpsons or Bugs Bunny, his drawings are monstrous and grotesque: childhood memories gone horribly astray. McFadzean has an uncanny sense of how to push the boundaries of good taste without going for the obvious gross-out gag, like in his "Invincible Baby" strips. These are exactly what the title suggests: an indestructible baby getting launched into space, shot, stabbed, absorbed by a black hole, etc and coming back no worse for the wear each time.

There are the tediously quotidian God Comics (whose tedium was entirely intentional), scribbled birds worrying about being snubbed, and monsters moping over their daily lives and their search for meaning. There's the old man with the thick, white moustache pondering his future. There's a man talking to an elephant, rarely getting the answers he wants. There are animals trying to escape their circumstances in strips that remind me a little of the sort of thing that Anders Nilsen does. There is also the occasionally happy interlude or image that results here, even though that obsessiveness factor eventually catches up with it. McFadzean even had a few multi-part stories in here that later got reworked.

Through it all, one can see certain arguments and approaches start to coalesce, as though problems he was working through on the page here got solved and translated into minis. For example, his comic Last Mountain 2 (Birdcage Bottom Books) contains elements that originally appeared in the daily strips, like the cartoony John Stanley/Irving Tripp art juxtaposed against disturbing events. In McFadzean's world, loners and outcasts aren't necessarily very nice people. They strike out at the world, alienating even those that approach them in a friendly manner. In that mini, in the story titled "Buzzy", a young kid starts at a new school, only to find that his off-putting and weird manner instantly draws all sorts of bullying and taunts. His response to such behavior is to go nuclear, moving to acts of extreme violence. Not everyone wants to be saved or is even capable of it. Some people are just doomed, in part by the way they react to the world. It's no accident that the figures are so cute and cartoony, because McFadzean set out to make the reader uncomfortable as old tropes and settings were explored from a different angle.

That sense of inevitable doom and dread is pervasive throughout the book, even as it's played for laughs in the gag strips. There are moments of bliss, but even beyond strips about sadness, fear, dread and devastation, the pervasive emotion felt throughout the book is simple disappointment. Whether it's a boy realizing that hitting someone doesn't feel as good as he thought it would to existential ennui even in the face of beauty, one can almost hear the sighs coming from this book. Still, the rabbit concentrates on not getting eaten, and another day goes by for the birds to achieve happiness or for the man with a walrus moustache to make human connections. McFadzean's worldview may be grim, but there's a survivalist streak there as well that puts aside nihilism in favor of braving the cold, bleak world.

Thirty Days of CCS #30: Irene

In the sixth volume of the premier CCS anthology Irene, editors DW, Dakota McFadzean and Andy Warner continue to bring together established but overlooked talents, up-and-coming cartoonists, and artists from all over the world into one challenging volume. The fact that each of the three editors has a totally different aesthetic (both in terms of the contributors they bring in as well as their own work), yet they somehow work together to create something coherent and disquieting.

Part of that coherency is the use of two different sets of interstitial material. One is a silent narrative from Jai Granofsky, wherein a rabid man running from a rabid tiger is eviscerated, creates a smaller version of himself, is eaten by a penguin, gets the penguin sick and comes out as an ice cube and finally gets put in a drink. It's a funny palate cleanser of a story, as each panel gets one page and plenty of negative space around it so as to create clear divisions between stories. The other recurring feature is a series of one-page strips from Kramer's Ergot veteran Leif Goldberg in crisp, cartoony and silly pencils. Each of the strips is about consumption in some way, be it squirrels collecting nuts, police eating sentient hot dogs after a crash, a robot collecting bananas for a rave or a man pondering a love potion.

Marta Chudolinska's "Genesis" splits neatly into bored aliens working a shitty job and the life they accidentally create on the backwater planet they visit, combining greyscaling with cartoony figures. Carolyn Nowak's "Girl Town" starts off with the premise that three young women started living together after being "kicked out of astronaut school for being too good-looking to be sent into space". Mixing slice-of-life narratives, ritualistic oddness, and painful romantic feelings in an amusing and heartfelt stew, Nowak's confident and sharp line fits both the strange and mundane aspects of the story.

Tillie Walden's "Dreaming" is a completely different aesthetic approach: a naturalistic line that employs an extensive use of negative space surrounding the protagonist's face. It's a series of interlocking nightmares that bleed into each other and daily life, as Walden makes the clever move of not differentiating the visuals from nightmare to nightmare. Lebanese cartoonist Lena Merhej's story mixes a dream-like reverie with abstracted women's bodies that focus on genitalia.

While Irene is certainly anchored by narrative, there are certainly more abstract and non-narrative pieces as well. Natsuko Yoshino's drawings feature swirling human bodies interacting with each other, while Marc Bell's typically loopy drawings are pointedly titled "Not Comics Department". Bell's sly sense of humor is certainly on display here, both in terms of how he titled it and the hilariously daffy internal logic in each drawing. Ben Juers' "Flowerpot Heads" features beautiful, strange figures juxtaposed against each other in a fluid manner. Of course, there's DW himself, whose piece combines his intense pattern work, simple figures and repurposed text.

There are several works that touch on personal reportage and political issues. Nick Cartwright's "Station Life", for example, is a funny and sometimes unsettling account of life in an Antarctic station during both summer and winter. His thin and scratchy pencil drawings in an open-page layout add to the sense of vast whiteness, stillness and isolation, with funny visual interpretations of text leavening the sheer anxiety of life at the South Pole. Warner's own "An Unravelling" encapsulates the idea of "the personal is political" as he relates a story of travel during his stay in Lebanon. With his typical naturalistic style, he drew parallels between old civil wars in Lebanon, the current civil war in Syria (including a town he visited with friends) and the real collateral damage that's been done to his friends who are still there, all while connecting it to his own career and ideas. It's one of his best stories to date. Egyptian artist Shennawy's scribbly and distorted silent story concerns the real human cost of political demagoguery. Ben Passmore's funny "It's Not About You" is about a guy being introduced to a female-appearing person who goes by a they/them pronoun, provoking a paroxysm of anxiety, doubt and resentment that is only resolved in his head when his inner mentor tries to eat him. I love Passmore's sweaty and cartoony line that nonetheless has rock-solid fundamentals.

It's hard to describe McFadzean's own aesthetic sometimes, but "personal and unsettling stories set in isolated locales" comes close. His "Good Find" is a slice-of-life story about two kids looking for stuff in an abandoned (and possibly haunted) house. What goes unexplained is that every character is grotesquely disfigured, with various boils and growths on their bodies. It's meant to throw the reader off-balance, to given them something to think about in addition to the pleasant little escapade they just read. Along the same lines is No Tan Parecidos' "Indian Rope", which is a story about waiting with each character rendered in a distorted and elongated fashion. It's more a fragment than a story, but it adds to the book's atmosphere.

Luke Howard's "You Come To A Strange Town" is the book's best story, and it certainly fits in the McFadzean wing of aesthetics. Drawn using a minimalist and angular style that recalls John Porcellino and Warren Craghead, Howard spins vignette after vignette about a small town and the weird things that happen in it. From the woman who can't get off a swingset to a taxi with no driver to a hotel that traps certain of its guests to the hilarious story of the Ghost Bike (it shouts "Human Blood" while threatening no one at all), Howard nurtures a bunch of disparate gags, images and characters into a single, coherent environmental narrative.

There are also a number of more personal stories. Norwegian cartoonist Froydis Sollid Simonsen's "Siberian Stillness" cleverly transposes an anecdote about life in ancient Siberia with a turbulent relationship. Katie Parrish's "Drink More Water" smartly uses word balloons to describe thoughts gone awry in a relationship with a scrawled, intense line. Lucy Bellwood's "Salt Soap" and Jackie Roche's "Hopes Up" are more conventional slice-of life stories, with the former being about slowly recovering from a bad break-up and the latter about the continual disappointments of being in school. Both employ a smooth, naturalistic line. Sean Knickerbocker's "Killbuck" excerpt shows him at his best: depicting the hopes and fears of young people in small towns who are desperately hoping for something better.

Finally, there's an in-your-face, underground inspired piece by Kevin Uehlein called "Dozens of Cousins", which features anthropomorophic characters doing disgusting things. Uehlein's own sense of self-awareness has him doing meta-jokes about hillbillies that turn into a series of hilarious running gags. It's a scatological romp with brains. It also points out that the editors may have their own tastes, but they've gone out of their way to include as many different approaches to comics (in terms of style and aesthetic as well as making sure it was balanced in terms of gender and had an international bent as well) as possible.

Thirty Days of CCS, Day 29: Irene 4, 5

Irene continues to be a consistently well-edited, designed and produced anthology. Each issue is a self-contained and coherent entity, even as certain themes and artists tend to pop up from issue to issue. Editors DW, Dakota McFadzean and Andy Warner are the essence of the anthology, as each brings elements of their own aesthetics and methods to the book, both in terms of the actual stories and the contributors who are selected for each issue. Warner's naturalism, McFadzean's emphasis on open spaces and how they can be haunted (both figuratively and literally) and DW's mark-making weirdness make for a surprisingly even blend, in part because all three show a remarkable amount of flexibility and respect with regard to the points of view of their fellow editors.

Irene 4 features a number of stories that can be called personal, even if they aren't directly autobiographical. For example, Jan Burger's fanciful tale of his child being called forth from his wife's womb by the family cat is a warm and wonderful story about waking up to the demons that keep us distracted from what's important: being creative. Burger's supple line makes it perfect for fantasy stories such as this. Then there are directly autobiographical stories like Georgia Webber's "Access", which is about the injury she suffered that made it hard for her to speak. In this short, she talks about social media and how easy it is for her to get lost in it, because she doesn't have to be conscious of her injury. At the same time, in this story full of cascading windows, she understands that a life filled with nothing but social media is an empty one. Jai Granofsky's "Cauliflower" walks the line between the two, as a series of dream sketches and gags about pizza, what "comics" are and the logic of cauliflower.

Warner's interest in reportage drew in a couple of entries. Emi Gennis is well-known for her interest in unusual deaths, and in "Nyos" she reports, in her typical naturalistic style, of how an eruption of carbon dioxide from a nearby lake killed nearly everyone in an African village. The point she hits on that's interesting is that the mysteriousness of the event made the very few survivors think that the world had ended, and wondered when they left if anyone would be there to see them. Jackie Roche's "Black Boots" takes a micro view of a big event: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. You might know that he was taken to a room across the street; what you might not know is that the room was a boarding room rented to a soldier named William T. Clarke, who later charged admission to his room for morbidly curious onlookers. "A Dream", by Warner & McFadzean, has the feel of reportage, as it's about a woman recalling a dream she had about imprisoning her brother, only to have her situation reversed. It's very much a "tell not show" story, as the artists are more interested in evoking the sense of a story being told then telling that specific story.

DW's presence can certainly be felt as well. He crafted a story surrounding the interstitial characters from a prior issue, "Veronica And The Good Guys" that Warner drew in his mixed cartoony/ naturalistic style, about a rock band being chased by a planet full of "bad guys" hungry for their skins. Amy Lockhart's "Drawings" fit in with DW's aesthetic; this weird mix of stippled, naturalistic anatomy with big foot/big nose qualities warps reader expectations. Carlista Martin's gender-bending, highly detailed drawings tread similar ground but with an entirely different approach. "Generals and Gods" features McFadzean writing and DW drawing a story of possibly misplaced mercy. The Mat Brinkman-inspired line is the only visual approach I could have imagined for this story. "Walk Like You Mean It" combines DW's cut-up text technique with the drawings of Power Paola, and the resulting cute/weird imagery looks like something out of Paper Rodeo.

Finally, the stories that defy categorization. Mazen Kerbaj (almost certainly brought in by Warner) has a story called "Boats", which is a hilarious treatment of boats as anthropomorphic beings that actually hate water. Luke Howard's "Zapruder 313" is about two guys sitting around watching the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy getting killed. It's less a morbid exercise than it is a simple exploration of the idea of how things can be one way one second and then radically different the next. James Hindle's "Yellow Plastic" is Hindle's best-ever story. It's a story about a teen meeting a mysterious girl who appears and disappears suddenly from his life, the sort of person who leaves a mark on a guy even if their interactions were brief. Laura Terry's "The Dark" is a visceral, disturbing story about addiction and self-destruction couched as a fantasy about a shadow creature encouraging such behavior in a woman desperate to get away from it. It's one of her most powerful stories, one that still uses her witty and clear line but subverts it for emotionally devastating effect.

Irene #5 follows a similar path in terms of genre, mark-making, illustration personal stories and reportage. The cast of characters, other than the three editors, is entirely different. "Fire Truck Duck" is by Warner, and it's a touching bit of quite sincere nostalgia regarding how their father used to tell them stories, and how the occasional recording, preserved today, recreates the experience to a degree. Dave Ortega's "como un tren" is a different kind of memoir, one about his family's journey from Mexico to El Paso and religious freedom. The sketchiness of the art reflects the artist's own struggle in telling the story of someone else, of knowing when to invoke creative license and when to stick precisely to the facts.

After that is an incredibly clever cartoon by R.Sikoryak mashing together the long-running Simpsons with the Tyrones of Eugene O'Neill's semiautobiographical play, A Long Day's Journey Into Night. The idea of Homer as James Tyrone (a successful actor pigeonholed into a single role) parallels the notion of the Simpsons becoming cultural icons at the expense of the overall quality of the series. That, and some Bosch-inspired drawings by Emanuel Schongut, provide a palate-cleanser for the longest piece in the book: a story written by the FDZ and drawn by Fouad Mezher called "The Fifth Column". It's a story set in Lebanon, by Lebanese cartoonists (once again, Warner's connections come into play here). It's a story that starts as something personal, then political, and then slowly descends into total horror. That horror is born of reality, of roaming packs of dogs and checkpoints, which makes it all the more chilling.

Following that bit of naturalistically-drawn genre is a bit of mark-making lunacy with DW and Mark Connery. Luke Healy's "Mountain Take Me" is another cornerstone of this issue, one that I've covered elsewhere. After a bit of comedic weirdness from James Stanton and Bailey Sharp (the former in the tradition of underground artists, the latter more like Anders Nilsen), Pat Barrett's "You Are We" is a tremendous bit of sci-fi combined with the possibilities and difficulties surrounding identity. Jon Chad's "Compleet Pwner" is a hilarious, nasty and deliciously drawn fine-line extravaganza featuring monsters, spaceships and the moon. In other words, all the things he does well. DW follows these two genre stories with something that's purely him: mark-making and pattern-creation in the service of exploring consciousness through the use of repurposed text.

Finally, Dan Rinylo and McFadzean contribute two stories that dwell on ontological concerns. For Rinylo, it's being given an absurd and meaningless tour of the world by a higher being, who shows him his total insignificance in the face of things when he complains about the stupid stuff he's being show. For McFadzean, it's a memory of using clay to create creatures called Gnoshlox; it's a child's magical realist memory that supersedes anything that came earlier. In both cases, pondering meaning is fruitless, even though it's something we either can't resist trying or can't stop from entering our minds. McFadzean's stories always linger in one's mind when he talks about the lives of children, not unlike an Eleanor Davis. That's why it's so exciting to see him collaborate with like minds as well as creators he respects who work in an entirely different style; it's clear that editing Irene has stretched all three of the editors.

Thirty Days of CCS, Day 17: Max Mose and Dakota McFadzean

Max Mose is one of the few CCS grads to specialize in horror comics. He is unique in that his take on horror and genre in general is brutally and pointedly satirical, creating comics that are frequently as funny as they are disturbing. His adaptation of Bram Stoker's short story The Judge's House is actually more straightforward than usual from Mose in terms of subject matter, though his own attitude towards elites is still plain as day. The story follows an arrogant young student who takes up residence in a decrepit, creepy house in order to have the proper amount of time and space to study philosophy. With a gloomy, slightly vibrating line and droopily-drawn characters, the story resembles something Edward Gorey might have drawn. The young man soon learns that a particularly vicious judge lived in the house and that he is not entirely departed from the premises, initially emerging as a huge, vicious rat. From there, there are all sorts of spills and chills that lead to our protagonist's untimely and mildly ironic end. Mose milks that drama for all it's worth while playing up the general arrogance and cluelessness of the young man; it's not so much that he deserves to die, but he's not an especially likable character. He's oblivious, arrogant and out of touch, and those qualities are what ensures his doom. Mose's figure drawing has never been better than in this comic, but his lettering was shaky. No doubt that was a function of adapting someone else's prose, but there were spots where the lettering being crammed into a too-small panel was a genuine distraction.

Dakota McFadzean, on the other hand, doesn't write explicitly about horror, yet his comics frequently have a quietly horrific quality to them. As opposed to Mose's critiques of modern, urban society, McFadzean's comics are meditations on the desolate loneliness of the country. In particular, he's interested in telling the stories of outsiders and the ways in which they seek to transcend their surroundings. He doesn't lionize them, however; the lead character here, Mary, is selfish, insensitive and immature. This pre-teen takes her best friend, Arnold (a fellow outsider), for granted. Mary struggles to come to terms with the excitement that her imagination brings her, especially with regard to play. This story nails that weird time when children start to become self-conscious about play and make-believe lest they be considered weird, and it's Mary's dedication to the idea of their being a guardian spirit in the woods that's been silenced by evil ("the Dark Empty") that shines through despite her own disbelief. That spirit is represented by an animal skull she finds in the forest; there's an especially arresting image where she tries the skull on as a mask and then goes to school late to find all of her classmates and teacher wearing animal masks as part of an art project. It's an image both jarring and amusing, which is precisely the tone McFadzean aims for in many of his stories. If the ending is a bit on the pat side, it's at least an emotional connection that feels entirely earned through Mary's attempt to redeem herself for her callousness with regard to her friend.

Thirty Days of CCS #30: Dakota McFadzean

Dakota McFadzean came into CCS as an already fully-formed talent, but it's clear that his experience there only served to bolster his confidence and encourage him to take even more chances as a creator. In his first collection of short stories, Other Stories and the Horse You Rode In On, McFadzean manages to create a surprisingly coherent meta-narrative. McFadzean is not unlike Joseph Lambert in that many of his stories have to do with the ways in which children engage the world in magical realist terms, but there's a certain melancholy that pervades his work in ways that it doesn't for Lambert. A big part of that is McFadzean's work is marked by its sense of restraint and subtlety, even in the craziest of situations.

For example, the opening story "Standing Water" is about a kid navigating a world that's frozen in time, as though he were the only one who could travel through a world that's entirely underwater. Friends, family and pets float limply in the water, and his attempts at interacting with the world reveal a hidden well of meanings that have lost all their significance in the wake of what is essentially the end of the world. What seem to be acts of revenge or cruelty lose their meaning, leading him to a sense of sad resignation in a totally absurd situation. There's no background or explanation given here, because the emotional resonance of this world is what's important.

The same is true in "Unkindness", which is one of McFadzean's very best stories. It's typical of his work in that it depicts small town life in Canada in an entirely unromanticized fashion and also contains unexplained elements of magical realism. While there's a strong streak of naturalism running through his work (the world he creates feels quite solid and real), his character design here is looser and more expressive. He allows for a certain rubbery quality of reality that gives him the opportunity to mold and bend it. An "unkindness" is what is referred to as a gathering of ravens, and there is indeed a mysterious and surprising visitation by the birds in the dead of winter. The birds observe, feed and even communicate (one says "goodbye" to a little boy), often by creating a series of mysterious lines and circles in the snow. The title also refers to small acts of unkindness in the story, leading up to a mother essentially telling her teenage daughter that she was a mistake. There's a sureness to the way in which McFadzean flips from character to character in this story, each of whom are just trying their best to get by in life without a whole lot of happiness or fulfillment. When one character tells another "I'm going home to run out the damn clock like I do every damn day", it's a brutal statement of how life is that comes after a joke that covers up that fact. There's also a sort of hidden momentum and tension in this story generated by the wild card factor of the birds and the repressed emotions that well up as the story unfolds, exploding in a manner that is unexpected. It's also a story about different entities being at cross-purposes and being unable or unwilling to fully communicate their desires. That's made literal in the mystery of the ravens--there's no real sense of what their purpose is or if they mean harm to the humans in the town, but it's also expressed in the way that characters talk past each other. McFadzean never spells out the secrets and mysteries in his stories, preferring that they hold a charge for the reader to interpret as they see fit.

One running theme in the book is that of loss or the sense that something is about to end. That's true in "Boxes" (about a young woman leaving a town and the people she sees on the bus behind) and "Skeletons" (about a boy telling his best friend he's going to move). The former story concerns the boxes we put other people in as we classify them, the ways in which others see us that we don't understand, and the ways in which categories in general limit us. The latter involves a supernatural element, as the titular skeletons refer to what happens when we look back. If that seems like a heavy-handed metaphor, it's mitigated by the way in which McFadzean uncannily is able to get at the ways in which kids actually behave toward each other as well as the genuinely spooky nature of his imagery. "Seelie Court" is a different take on this kind of relationship, where two friends share their difficulties as young adults in a context of wishing magic was true. While McFadzean offers a visual hint regarding this magic, the real power here is in the way the two boys are able to talk to and relate to each other in an honest manner, while still retaining the profane, slightly distancing tactics that boys have with regard to their feelings.

Another story about loss and memory is "Ghost Rabbit". This story features the parallel narrative of a young girl growing up in a house where her mother struggles with her own mentally decaying mother along with an anthropomorphic rabbit haunted by the titular ghost rabbit. The lingering images of memory loom large in this story and they're elegantly portrayed by McFadzean. McFadzean implies that the anthropomorphic rabbit's narrative is a product of the girl's imagination as she processes the repeated phone conversations her mother has with her grandmother, until she actually sees a rabbit in the wild. Initially, that real-life meeting leads to a joyous fantasy sequence (featuring two pages of the characters dancing with each other excitedly in a manner not unlike that of Charles Schulz or Bill Watterson characters) but the ghost lingers further when she understands that the rabbit is sick and soon dies. We see that small ghost hop after her when she comes inside after covering the dead rabbit with leaves, as the girl has acquired the same sort of ghost that she imagines her mother is burdened with. This is a simple, elegant and poetic story.

McFadzean also seems to be fascinated by the human capacity for cruelty. "Everything You Can Think Of Is True" is about a child who can literally think a weird, child's version of anything he wants into existence--only he's being held by scientists for experiments. McFadzean's primitive line used for the things the child imagines is almost heartbreaking in its execution, especially when the child literally disappears into his fantasies. "Brokenface" is another more fanciful tale involving a man without a face and the assorted cartoonish indignities he suffers as a result; the story has the rhythm of a Milt Gross strip, even as it grows weirder and more contemplative by its conclusion. "Snotgurgle" transfers McFadzean's interest in the real lives of fantastic creatures like gnomes into a nightmarish torture scenario, one whose seemingly happy ending is a cruel fake-out of its own. "And The Horse You Rode In On" is an Archie pastiche that features extended segments about a lone horseman riding out on the prairies by himself, relishing his solitude. This is the daydream of a nebbish who is manipulated, abused and/or ignorde by school administrators, fellow students and his parents. He has a laughable lack of agency even as he's drawn to fit in a kind of Archie-verse, content to flit from embarrassment to embarrassment even as he refuses to truly knuckle under to anyone else's desires. There's a delicious, unresolved tension at the end of the story where the protagonist is given a chance to renounce his "purity" once and for all with a bag of weed that was given to him, but it's unclear what path he will choose.

The oddest story in the book is "Leave Luck To Heaven". It's about a young man visiting a slightly older person to have a "session" playing a video game. The structure of the session is more like Lacanian psychotherapy, wherein the analyst is often cold and demanding, threatening to throw out the analysand if they detect inauthentic action or speech. This has the rhythm of therapy, with the interesting detail that the reader can't see the eyes of either character. The corpulent, slovenly and highly erudite analyst has long hair that obscures his eyes, while the analysand is wearing glasses that deflect the reader's gaze. This device prevents the reader from getting a clear idea of either character's motives, forcing one to rely entirely on body language and what is actually said. The story also features the only color portion of the book, which plays out in a Chris Ware-style diagram that's also a sort of circuitry sketch. The story sums up McFadzean's work in a nutshell: subtle, bizarre, restrained, probing, melancholy, hopeful and mysterious. Like the analyst, McFadzean has no interest in giving readers pat answers to the scenarios he introduces. Instead, he wants readers to experience the isolation, loneliness, tenderness, familiarity and strangeness of the environments he creates and the people he introduces. Thanks to his skill as a draftsman, storyteller and writer of dialogue, each and every story is a success, and each story builds on the momentum of the next.

Thirty Days of CCS #29: Irene 3

Irene is currently the best of all the CCS-related anthologies. The editorial crew of Andy Warner, DW and Dakota McFadzean is not only a talented group in their own right as artists, they also seem to have a great sense of how to bring each of their aesthetic approaches to bear in the anthology in a manner that produces a cohesive final product instead of a bunch of stories that clash. For example, DW's scribble aesthetic and repurposing of text for decorative reasons is in line with the old Fort Thunder group, so it only makes sense that Leif Goldberg should contribute a story here. In "Newton's Mist", we see a figure battling against the forces of physics in a magical forest; though just two pages, the images are primitive and powerful. DW himself takes on what I like to call the Mat Brinkman spot in the anthology: creating a series of related interstitial images. In this case, it's scrawled, funny images of a band called "Veronica and the Good Guys". Some of the drawings are tiny and fine, while others are blown way up in order to give the reader a sense of the thickness of the line. Indeed, the essence of DW's drawings is to constantly remind readers that they are drawings, that they're made out of ink.

Andy Warner's influence can be felt with the presence of Barack Rima, a Libyan cartoonist and filmmaker whose dream comic "Nap Before Noon" is a fascinating trip not only through his own subconscious, but through the cultural and political landscape of Libya. The shadowy, hand-constructed look of each page certainly bears the mark of his cinematic influence, yet he's interested in the single, striking image above all else on page after page. This story held down the middle portion of the book, and it served as a fascinating change of pace, resembling nothing else in the book. Warner's "Boatlife", by contrast, is a slice-of-life story told in his typical naturalistic style. Relating two teenage girls hanging out in a cemetery, it's the sort of "nothing happens" story that's nonetheless full of crucial emotional beats and events that create lasting memories.

McFadzean's closest aesthetic compatriot in this comic is Sophie Goldstein, whose "Edna II" I reviewed here. Like McFadzean, Goldstein's storytelling is crisp, clean and assured, which allows her to go off on flights of fancy or use cartoony figures in a story that is otherwise naturalistically told. McFadzean drew DW's story "Ten Minutes' Break", a fascinating and funny workplace strip about three creatures essentially dealing with creation myths and alien civilizations. However, it's entirely from the point of view of working stiffs taking a break from their otherwise endless labors. McFadzean's every bit as good drawing fantastic characters and weird scenery as he is drawing average people and the plains of Saskatchewan.

Certainly, there are creators present here who cross lines. Alabaster's "Gin" combines the fanciful, beautiful and cartoony art with a story that's emotionally painful and raw, all wrapped in a quirky, decoratively interesting package. Jess Worby's "The Sasquatch In Brooklyn" has a heavily-shaded, ramshackle aesthetic that fits right in with DW, but it's easy to see how its humor and characterizations fit in with the other editors. The same is true for Mark Connery's "Whots It Mean", bringing more of that ragged art that brings a bawdy sense of humor to the proceedings. I would guess that the origin of this fused editorial aesthetic is that the CCS experience is one that encourages artists to understand and appreciate the work of artists whose approaches are radically different from their own. I would also guess that the editors deliberately sought out work that combined different aspects of their own aesthetic interests.

The stories by Luke Howard and Ben Horak are other good examples of this. Howard's "Dance Yourself To Death" is perhaps his most original, best-realized story to date. Using a slightly flat line and character design style, this story of the dark ways in which artists gain inspiration has a powerful payoff at the story's climax and then another shock in its denouement. In an anthology filled with downbeat and often disturbing stories, it was the perfect capper for the book. Horak's "What're Fiends For?" is a more broadly comic story, but no less dark than Howard's work. It's the ultimate example of a well-meaning but utterly destructive friend. Horak impressively manages to up the ante of menace in a rhythm not unlike that of a Looney Tunes cartoon, only with a viscerally disturbing ending.

It's likely that Kramer's Ergot and perhaps Non are significant influences on Irene. Both of those anthologies were fueled in part by Fort Thunder's influence and contributors; Goldberg himself is a KE alumnus, of course. It's certainly not a straight copy, but rather an influence in the sense that the editors wanted certain kinds of aesthetic approaches to comics to be present in the anthology, and once selected, they wanted those artists to have total freedom. For example, Dan Rinylo's "Find 'Sleepy'" is less a story than a reader activity, as they must find the one "sleepy" ghost on page after page of other ghosts. Cleverly, the pages are designed to make the reader's eye explore a space in much the same way a Brian Ralph or Brian Chippendale story might, only it could easily appear in Highlights or the old Nickelodeon magazines as well. Irene continues to be an anthology that's greater than the sum of its parts, a statement that's all the more impressive when one considers how individually excellent many of the stories are.