31 Days Of CCS, #16: Denis St. John

Denis St. John is one of a small number of CCS grads who has specialized in monsters and horror, and he touched on both things in his recent work. Quarantine Dreaming Comix is a cut above standard dream comix in that St. John took intense, lucid dreams and turned them into brief but compelling horror narratives. As always, there's a touch of the absurd in his work, like in the story where he heard howling coming from the walls; the pose of his character, wearing goggles and determinedly using a drill, made me laugh out loud. The next image, of dozens of babies in the walls, screaming their hatred for him, was both unsettling and absurd. 

There's a running theme in his dreams of good things turning horrible, like a sexual encounter leading to rot and decay, or taking care of a kid leading to the child being covered in disgusting, diseased skin. Sometimes he's the victim of a horrifying event and sometimes he's perpetrating it, like when he tricks a beautiful park ranger into going to hell with him. Another strip has him fending off a murderer in Toon Town, which allowed St. John to really show off his range as a draftsman. His use of spotting blacks, silhouettes, dense hatching and cross-hatching, and other techniques gave his work a high level of sophistication without losing that raw dream energy. 

The Mesozine Era is a zine dedicated to one of St. John's favorite things: dinosaurs. A number of other CCS alum are in it as well, including Donna Almendrala, Russ Wood Studlar, and Bryan Stone. Most of St. John's own contributions were detailed dinosaur drawings, though he did include a dream strip wherein his drawing new interpretations of dinosaurs got him yelled at by people trying to play baseball. Joey Weiser's strip comparing dinosaur hunting to getting recognition as a comics artist was amusing. Another St. John strip had an amargosaurus battling an alligator; St. John is especially imaginative in depicting the kind of movements and damage each might do. Studlar's strip about the dangers of a watering hole highlighted his skill in drawing nature. For those who like dinosaurs, this is a fun fanzine to check out. 

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 One Days Of CCS #27: Denis St. John

Denis St. John balances both genuinely unsettling horror comics with a quirky sense of humor. The result are stories that unnerve or shock the reader while making them laugh. In his collection of short stories, The Land Of Many Monsters And Many More Monster Tails, St. John bounces between takes on familiar creatures with wildly original characters and also draws a lot of dinosaurs fighting. If it sounds like pure fun on each page, that's because it is. This is a case where an artist expresses themselves through genre work in unusual ways, taking delight in the ways in which he can provide warped versions of classic ideas.

For example, "Drought" is a story imagining what happens when a Creature from the Black Lagoon encounters a drought. St. John's stories thrive on their sense of logical consistency, especially with regard to how one thing leads to another. In this case, the Creature happens upon a group of wholesome teenagers in an big, raised pool. (That the teens bear a suspicious resemblance to a certain gang of pals 'n gals from Riverdale is nothing more than coincidence, I'm sure.) The poor creature just wants some water when one of the gang slaps him, resulting in the Creature retaliating by slashing his face open. It's a shocking but funny image, especially after the creature is baffled and pained by the chlorine in the pool's water. Things go downhill from there, as St. John subverts the Creature/beautiful woman trope in gleefully horrifying ways.

"Horns" and "King Of The Hill" are silent stories featuring dinosaurs, and they are written with wit and verve. The fact that St. John clearly delights in drawing these creatures goes a long way to making the stories lively and fluid. The action is clear, the motivations make sense, and the sense of resigned patience on the part of the apex predators is all part of the comedy. The lush backgrounds provide the needed atmosphere to give the story some context without impeding the action.

St. John's former anthology series was called Monsters and Girls, and that speaks to his love of featuring femmes fatale in a number of different roles. In this collection, "Magic In The Moonshine" is about a witch who doubles as a burlesque dancer during prohibition times, and the aesthetic is a tribute to the Max Fleischer cartoons of the time. She winds up dodging demons and bible-thumpers by dropping in on a bootlegger who had a crush on her, and the resulting story is sweet and trippy. St. John is at his absolute best here in dipping between drawing her as a sexy woman and as a pile of bones, and the "magic drink" hallucination sequences are a particular pleasure.

"Dance Of The She Beast/Redneck And The Wolves" speaks to a different kind of femme fatale and a far less discerning audience. It takes the trope of the woman/witch turning into a wolf in the woods and subverts the hunter as Good Guy in this role, with a shockingly visceral death scene that ironically underscores his claims of being a hero. The subsequent story continues his shaky narrative, but there are dire consequences for him as a result. His story starring "Furiosa Frankenstein" combines the Bride of that particular monster with the ass-kicking heroine of the recent Mad Max update. This story mixes horror with action, as she has to fight the creatures in front of her as well as an imagined, twisted version of herself back at the lab where she was born. The visceral quality of his drawings is at his most detailed here, as the monsters drip with menace and gore.

Finally, "Whispers In The Woods" and "The Devil's Magic" reflect St. John's interest in having the mundane confront the extraordinary. The former story is about a couple of friends who go back and forth between thinking they're in horrible danger and trying to disbelieve in it, with increasingly rising stakes. Their reactions to what they see are hilarious, especially as the images become more and more bizarre, disturbing and monstrous--but not all is as it seems. The latter story is a funny, silent story, as a demonic figure shows up at a little creature's birthday party to perform the most mundane of tricks, yet those tricks are more impressive than him appearing and disappearing in puffs of smoke. St. John's line here is thin and expressive, emphasizing the almost dainty quality of the goat-creature magician's hands. This is a strong collection that fans of classic horror and more recent comedy-horror will appreciate.

Thirty Days of CCS #23: Bingo Baby

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

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

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

Funny Aminals Volume 3: Hush

Of the few CCS-related anthologies that have published more than one volume, Jeff Lok and Bryan Stone's Funny Aminals has been the most uneven in terms of production values and content. The third volume, subtitled Hush, is easily the tightest and best-looking edition to date. In part, I think that's because the editors chose from a wider pool of CCS-related artists, including a number of current and recent students. It's a substantial book at 64 pages yet doesn't outstay its welcome, with only a few pieces that might have been omitted. There was a sense that the contributors for the most part tried to bring their "A" material to the table, rather than hurriedly submit something, which is not an unusual occurrence for unpaid, self-published anthologies.

The book takes as inspiration funny animal comic books, a source that gives the artists a lot of latitude as to what kind of stories they chose to tell. Some tell stories in the original spirit of the comics that were once as commonplace as super-hero comics are today, while others take their cue from the underground comics that subverted these tropes. A good example of the latter is Matt Aucoin, whose "Floplins and Fuzzwumps", while silly and scatological, is superbly drawn and paced. This is probably the single best piece I've ever seen from him in terms of both storytelling and draftsmanship. G.P. Bonesteel similarly ups his game with his one-page strip "Chalk", which brings a silly premise to life with lively figure drawing of two lizard creatures. The anthology wisely leads off with Denis St. John's "The Devil's Magic", a hilarious and elegant story about a sinister-seeming anthropomorphic goat magician whose actual magic may be mundane, but still enormously impressive to his audience. It's a great-looking story with a strong undercurrent of humor throughout.

Other strong pieces included Andy Burkholder's "ZZZZZZZZ", a surreal piece filled with sharp and angular imagery; the joyfully loose "Bedtime for Boozy" by Colleen Frakes; Stone's delightful forest farce "One Year"; Jeremiah Piersol's ant vs anteater battle "Ant defEaters" (featuring his thick line deployed in a cartoony manner); Lok's bulbous figures and absurd horror in "Sal's" (the image of a sentient, bouncing pig's head is a hard one to shake); Donna Almendrala's silly Eastwood-as-chimp story "The Good, The Bad and the Chimpanzee" and the inimitable Dane Martin with "The Wise Old Bird's Paranoid Ballet". In his ratty, frantic, claustrophobic style, Martin once again tells a story of someone yearning desperately with the prospect of something wonderful at the end of his journey, only to find a bullet for his troubles. I'm excited that he's doing a series with Chuck Forsman's Oily Comics, because this is an artist whose work needs to be more widely seen. His presence is precisely the sort of change of pace that makes for a good anthology, and while many of the comics in Hush can be described as lightweight, there's a strong level of craft and care at work here that makes it worth a look.

CCS Comics: Denis St. John's Amelia

With the publication of the fifth and final issue of Monsters and Girls: Amelia, Denis St. John finished one of the quirkier horror stories I've ever read. The plot of the story is quite simple: a college-aged woman decides to find two artifacts that are connected to one that her deceased mother used to own. She has an ornately carved box, and she manages to track down another to a sleazy antiques dealer who used to know her mother. From there, the story is a cat-and-mouse game between the young woman (Amelia), her bizarre younger brother, the dealer and the wigged-out daughter of one of her mother's former lovers as to who can gather the objects and what their significance might be.

The plot of these comics is beside the point, however. What makes them so enjoyable is St. John's mixture of body horror, the humor of awkwardness, and sex. These comics are a love letter to many influences (including H.P. Lovecraft's fiction and David Cronenberg's films), but the biggest influence seems to be the horror comics of EC. In particular, Jack Davis seems to be a big influence here, and that can be seen in the way St. John draws his figures with slightly distorted facial features. There's also a total unpredictability in the way each of the characters acts (possibly due to the influence of the artifacts) that twists the reader around. For example, Amelia sleeps with the dealer in the first issue despite a huge age disparity and then steals his artifact (a tablet) when he's sleeping. She sees a weird pair of eyes in the dark when they're having sex (in itself a hilariously and awkwardly drawn sequence, especially when the dealer orgasms), only to discover that they belong to her younger brother, who has inexplicably transformed into looking like "a Nosferatu".

This scenario is repeated in a far more disturbing fashion in the second issue, when Sammy is revealed to be in league with the dealer and after Amelia has a dream where she's pierced by the third artifact (a dagger) and a bizarre rash grows on her stomach. When the dealer takes off his shirt and reveals a sickening protuberance growing out of him that resembles a spiky penis, he pins her down and the protuberance is met by a flowery gash growing on Amelia's stomach. In the middle of this disgusting, upsetting scene, in walks Sammy nonchalantly complaining that the eggs the dealer cooked are burned. St. John's timing here is flawless, as the humor that Sammy's presence provides doesn't lighten the situation but rather makes it much worse. The next two issues feature a rapprochement of sorts with Sammy and Amelia and the introduction of Eleanor, the aforementioned daughter of her mom's ex-lover. She's a demented sorority girl who insists on guzzling alcohol prior to meeting with Amelia and Sammy. St. John draws her as big-breasted and almost anorexic, almost resembling a Tom Neely character.

The final issue is a dizzying recapitulation of the rest of the series, as Eleanor is drawn to Amelia (at one point, they start to drunkenly dance as Eleanor starts feeling her up), the dealer comes back and Eleanor stabs Amelia after the knife is almost stolen from her. From there, things get even more unpleasant and bizarre, as Eleanor starts licking Amelia's protuberance as though she were performing cunnilingus (to the annoyance of the dealer) and the dealer explains the true nature of the objects. After escaping into the box, Amelia comes back out and is able to defeat both of her opponents, including a marvelous scene where she rips out the entire network of obscene Lovecraftian plant-like growths lurking inside of the dealer. The ending has a fitting, tragic twist, which makes sense given the nature of the power that she absorbs and her own erratic behavior throughout the comic. Amelia may be the protagonist of the story, but it's not clear that she's a hero. Indeed, she turns out to be a monster and a girl. St. John's art is claustrophobic, rubbery, funny, moody and outrageously designed. The extras in these oversized minicomics are a nice bonus, including the photos of Amelia stand-in Jess Abston (a real trouper, given the design that's drawn all over her) that turn into a full-blown fumetti at the end as well as nearly a dozen clever pin-ups by a variety of CCS artists and faculty member Steve Bissette. Hopefully, St. John is shopping this around somewhere for a deluxe treatment.

Another Wave From CCS

Rob reviews the latest batch of comic from students and alumni from the Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS). Reviewed are comics from Penina Gal, Chuck Forsman, Caitlin Plovnick, Colleen Frakes, JP Coovert, Alexis Frederick-Frost, Bill Volk, Denis St. John and Alex Kim.


Time for another peek at some recent comics from the Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS).

THE FIRE MESSENGER 1, by Penina Gal. This first issue of what promises to be an extended fantasy series is most notable for its gorgeous use of color and the way Gal plops us into a fantasy world with no information given to the reader. We meet two boys named Aiden and Nik. We quickly learn that Aiden has the power to control fire, but that the friends were trapped in a big fire that Aiden couldn't quite control and somehow wound up in an unfamiliar forest. As they wander through the forest and desperately try to survive, we are slowly given clues through their dialogue about their lives. They both go to a school in a world where everyone has some kind of special magical gift, but Aiden's abilities make him a teacher's pet. The unfamiliar world they wind up in turns out to be our Earth, and the realization that they're no longer on the right world chills our heroes.

The way the story begins reminds me a bit of Phillip Pullman's HIS DARK MATERIALS novels, where we're thrown into a magical world with no context and are expected to figure things out through context. It's an effective strategy, because it forces us to concentrate fully on the characters instead of on the way the world is built. Gal favors pastels for both the color of her paper and the actual panels themselves, giving the book a fairy-tale look. The main problem with this approach is that the color fairly overwhelms her line throughout much of the issue. Her line is deliberately simple and basic and the emotions of the story are mostly conveyed through color, but a slightly bolder line would make the story's figures stand out a bit more. The thinner line led to a blurred, bleeding effect, especially between foreground and background. Still, her use of color is expressionistic and ambitious, and I'm curious to see where the story goes from here.


DEAD AIR #1, by Caitlin Plovnick. This minicomic miniseries about a group of 20-something slacker guys with a band is modest in scope and ambition. The story is a familiar one: directionless young men sitting around getting stoned, listening to music, going to dead-end jobs (or laying on couches all day), etc. What makes this comic worthwhile is the pitch and tone of Plovnick's treatment of her characters. That tone is equal parts mockery and affection, made effective by the pitch-perfect dialogue. The lazy guy who doesn't even want to get off the couch because "it's all gloomy out", the convenience store clerk whose smartassery gets thrown in his face by activists, the record store clerk whose passion for music is chewed up by retail are all examples of characters that could have been cliches. Instead, there's a respect for the way they interact (especially with regard to music) but also an understanding of how pathetic their lives are. The strip on the back cover shows of Plovnick's wit, which she uses in a restrained manner in her comic. The themes and characters we see in this book are certainly nothing groundbreaking, but Plovnick's developing skill as a storyteller made me want to see more. If anything, I'd like to see Plovnick simplify her line. She overrenders a few scenes that would have benefited from a clearer line, which gets in the way of the expressiveness of her characters.


3AM and A SMALL STORY OF LOVE AND DEATH, by Alex Kim. Kim's comics always have an open-ended and ambiguous quality. His stories rarely provide much in the way of exposition. The reader is thrown into a situation and forced to figure out how the characters he's introduced are interacting and why. 3AM is a comics adaptation of a poem written by Jessica Abston, an ode to those magical late night hours spent in diners where reality seems a little more fluid somehow. Kim's use of silhouette to depict the blankness of the narrator in all this was a clever move. A SMALL STORY... opens with a typical Kim setting: a conversation in a bar. A person tells a story about watching two rats living near a subway line rail and understanding that they were mates. He is drawn to their lives in ways he can't articulate and is shattered when he sees that one of the rats is dead and the other essentially commits suicide by waiting for a train to hit it. Of course, the friend he tells the story to is baffled by his obsession, and even the sympathetic bartender thought he was crazy.

This comic is not about the story of the rats, but that the man needs to tell this story. It reflects a deeper crisis in the main character that is just hinted at but never hammered at, and that emotional restraint is a hallmark of Kim's work. As always, Kim uses a wavy-line approach in his characters' clothing, giving them a rumpled look. I wish he had taken a different approach with the character design in this comic, because the main character needed to stand out a bit more from the others. That said, his use of panel-to-panel transitions was quite clever and resonant, especially when the protagonist has just witnessed the rat killing itself.


DAFFY, by Chuck Forsman. The SNAKE OIL artist presents a collection of shorter works here, mostly humor strips and other odds and ends. The bulk of the mini is a reprint of the "Jimmy Draws Cats" series of strips originally published in SUNDAYS. This was Forsman's best early effort, drawn with the feel of a classic comic strip with Forsman's own brand of absurdity. The scenes where young Jimmy is sent to "Art Skool", depicted as the most desolate and vicious place imaginable, still make me laugh. The book's first strip, featuring two characters hanging on a gallows, creates an absurd situation by contrasting the dialogue and the grimness of the situation. Drawing the characters as stick figures heightens the tension and humor even more.

The last pages of the book are devoted to what seems to be an attempt at doing a series about the life of Jim Thorpe's latter years. I'm not sure if this is a work in progress or a work abandoned, but it seemed intriguing. You can see Forsman's line developing in some of these earlier strips, where he didn't have quite the same control over his line that he does now. At the same time, it's clear that he has always tried to maintain a spontaneity of approach, and that organic quality of his comics is perhaps their greatest appeal.


WOMAN KING preview, by Colleen Frakes. I've always found Frakes' bold but spare line and composition to be her greatest strengths as an artist. There's a bleakness to her work that I also find appealing as she tells her own version of myths and folktales. This brief preview is no exception, a story told in another format in the NO! anthology that I reviewed elsewhere. Frakes' composition is bold and exciting in this story of a girl chosen to lead a clan of bears against a human village, but some of the rendering seems a bit rushed here. That's especially true of the girl herself; it seemed as though Frakes was trying to get at an iconic depiction of her but couldn't quite pull it off without adding some more detail. On the other hand, the way she constructs her bears embodied that bold simplicity perfectly. Given the way she altered her final version of the story she told in her Tragic Relief book, redrawing much of it, I wouldn't be surprised to see this mini as simply another draft. In any event, the prospect of a long-form work by Frakes is an exciting one.


INSIDES, by JP Coovert. This short, striking comic plays to Coovert's strengths: an understanding of how to create and solve visual puzzles on each page. He doesn't do this with a lot of formal pyrotechnics, but rather a thoughtful and clever approach on how to use images to tell a story on several levels. This comic is a great case in point, as it's literally about a man (presumably Coovert himself) purging and vomiting up everything that's touched, moved or inspired him. Whether this purging is at some level voluntary (it would seem not), there's a sense that, like any purging, one feels better afterward. That feeling faded quickly as the character whimpers that he needs the final person her purged: an important significant other. The realization that getting rid of everything inside is only helpful up to a point--especially when we're trying to purge memories, influences and feelings. Because of the strong specificity of the images purged but a lack of detail given regarding their meaning, it's easy for a reader to project their own memories and feelings onto these images. That particular tact was risky on Coovert's part, but the way his images from specific to general was impressively conveyed.


3 STORIES and MARIA OF MONTMARTRE, by Alexis Frederick-Frost. 3 STORIES is a cleverly designed mini that shows off a few different approaches from Frederick-Frost. His comics combine a looseness of figure with an almost diagrammatic approach. Those figures have a sharpness to them, as Frederick-Frost composes them mostly out of triangles and rectangles. The simplicity of form combined with the expressive sweep of what appears to be a brush makes one pause to admire each page before even reading it. "Letter" is the most clever of the stories, a circular narrative where the lovelorn protagonist meets a horrible fate due to coincidence. His love going up in flames becomes both literal and figurative. The simplified character design makes the backgrounds every bit as important to look at as the characters themselves. That gestalt of background and foreground established throughout the story makes the final panels all the more effective. "Haunt" is more conventionally designed, with a visual conceit that lacks subtlety. The reader understands right away that the protagonist is haunted by the ills of the modern world and can't do anything about it, but the on-the-nose depiction of this on page after page dulls the point. On the other hand, "Hunt" almost dips into abstraction in this story of a hunter in a forest. The way Frederick-Frost worked the hunter into an almost abstract forest of angles and jutting lines was quite striking, and the literally explosive climax continued to make use of this interesting visual approach.

MARIA OF MONTMARTRE is Frederick-Frost's second long-form work. It's based on the life of a model-turned-painter in Impressionist-era France. This is only the first volume of what would seem to be a much longer work. Compared to his first long-form comic, LA PRIMAVERA, Frederick-Frost's figures were much more expressive here. While maintaining his simplicity of character design, he was able to add just a few more flourishes to bring the likes of Toulouse-Latrec and Aristide to life. While his use of greyscale shading was effective in adding texture and weight to his panels and figures, I'm guessing that the eventual collected work will be one or two toned. This chapter is simply and leisurely told with few surprises, but it's the loving details of how Frederick-Frost imagined the life of Paris in the late 19th century that give this comic life. The idea of a story talking about the tension between artist and model and the muse seeking her own form of expression is a clever one, and I'm guessing the the eventual finished piece will be Frederick-Frost's most impressive output to date and really announce his arrival.


THE DEWEY DECIMAL SYSTEM IS DECADENT AND DEPRAVED, by Bill Volk. This is a 24-hour comic, one with an impressive level of compositional and drafting skill for such an exercise. There are certainly a number of rough spots, of course, but the cleverness of the artist and spontaneity of his approach makes up for the raggedness of his line and occasional clutter. The story is about Volk working at a library and wondering why the Dewey Decimal system files some comics all together, but others (like MAUS) in completely different portions of the library. This leads him on an amusing fever dream quest where he confronts Melvil Dewey, Art Spiegelman and dame Fortune herself and concludes that there's nothing wrong with MAUS being filed under World War II/Holocaust books, and that in fact all comics should be scattered "unto the four winds". Visual flourishes like Volk's fever-dream self morphing into an anthropomorphic dog to talk to Spiegelman's famous anthropomorphic mouse caricature was clever. A comic not just about comics but about how comics are shelved is a bit meta, but that can be forgiven, I think, for a student entering the comics boot-camp that is CCS. I'll be curious to see more work from Volk drawn under more ideal conditions.

MONSTERS & GIRLS: AMELIA, by Denis St. John. There's so much going on in this comic that it's difficult to know where to begin. First and foremost, it's a high-concept horror comic. It's about a girl in her early 20s who has a magic object (a box with a creepy, ornate eye symbol) and is seeking out two other objects that are related to it somehow, knowing that she needs to complete the set. That particular bit of high concept unifies all of the other weirdness in this comic and gives it a sturdy structure to rest upon. Second, the tone of the comic slips between laugh-out loud absurdity back to horrific, sometimes in the same panel. Third, sex is a key and visceral component of this story, and St. John blends in eroticism with humor and horror--again, sometimes in the same panel.

There's a scene early in the comic where the protagonist, Amelia, is seducing a much older man so as to steal his magic object (a writing tablet). The way she moves her body around so as to avoid the disgusting prospect of seeing his facial expression, only to be scared witless at a pair of eyes staring at her out of the darkness, and watching her body twist around on top of his, was squirm-inducingly funny. Later, when she confronts her younger brother, acting remarkably casual for someone who was in the room at the same time and seemingly in cahoots with the older man, she blurts out "Why do you look like a Nosferatu?" The weirdness and laughs never take the reader out of the story, because this is in no way a parody. Everything that happens here makes sense in the context of this world, and the reader is asked to immerse oneself in it.
St. John is ambitious in the way he uses expression, gesture and mood. He doesn't quite have the chops to pull it off on every page and in every panel. Amelia's big eyes are one of the book's foci; there are some panels where her face, given a greater focus by St. John's line, looks slightly raggedly drawn. There's a density to his cross-hatching that's sometimes at odds with his figures. At times, there's also an awkwardness in the way his figures interact. Some of that is intentional, I'm guessing, but some of it is distracting on the page. On the other hand, St. John's use of black/white contrast is quite clever, as is the way he renders the repeated skull motif. His greatest skill is his ability to render humor, discomfort and desire in the same panel, and that blend is what makes this such an intriguing comic. I've never seen a comic that blended all three and still managed to tell an engaging narrative, and it seems that St. John is well on his way to creating a significant long-form work.