31 Days Of CCS, #9: Robyn Smith and The Mesozine #2

Ding Dong, by Robyn Smith. Noted as a "sketchbook zine," this mini shows off some of the things that Smith does best. Her character design, her understanding of how to draw clothing, her incredible detail with regard to hair are all on display, to be sure. Smith could ditch comics tomorrow and have a successful career as an illustrator, because her style is so lush and attractive. However, Smith never abandons what also makes her a great cartoonist, which is her understanding of gesture, expression, and the relationship between bodies in space. That's true in even the roughest pencils for some of her strips; Smith is especially adept at using a head tilt to convey meaning and affection. There are other drawings that give hints at untapped aspects of her talents, like movement and physical struggle, but Smith is best at drawing highly stylized figures in various states of repose talking to each other. While I've enjoyed Smith's collaborations with other writers, I'm eager to see her write her own material down the line. 

The Mesozine, Issue 2, edited by Denis St. John. St. John loves drawing monsters and dinosaurs, and this zine is a gathering place for his friends to also draw dinosaurs. St. John was in the second graduating class of CCS, and there are a lot of older grads in this mini. It also includes fellow co-workers in the Schulz Studio. the highlights of the mini include a serial from Morgan Pielli (whose bizarre sci-fi comics are greatly missed), drawing a dinosaur combat from three different species, and a thoughtful strip from Ross Wood Studlar (a forest ranger and cartoonist) discussing how the Oviraptor got a bad reputation as an egg thief. There's a wonderful image from Donna Almendrala-Joel and a slightly cartoony story from St. John that adds a touch of Carl Barks cuteness while still maintaining Carl Barks action and movement. This is the story of more dinosaur fights, this time with a mother trying to protect her children from predators. Bryan Stone, another early CCS grad, contributes some pin-ups, as does the legendary Steve Bissette, who was a faculty member at CCS for many years. Non-CCS alum Alena Carnes has a memorable but brief story about being on a dig open to the public, and what it meant for her. Overall, there's something loving and fun about doing this kind of drawing that's at once highly technical in its illustration style but also freeing in terms of the sheer nature of the visceral quality of these animals. Those who love dinosaurs will get a kick out of this zine. 

31 Days Of CCS #13: Nhi Luu, Jess Johnson, Donna Almendrala, Kori Michele Handwerker

Nhi Luu is a first-year CCS student, and her mini Latchkey Kids serves as a preview of a larger work. She uses a thick, expressive line that's also quite scribbly in this story of two sisters who find themselves lost in a haunted hotel. Not much more than the premise is established in the mini, but Luu lets us know that the older sister is dissatisfied to be on a working vacation with her parents, and the younger sister is a kid who wants to have fun. The undercurrent of anxiety and dread that emanates from K.C. (the older sister) when her parents don't answer their phones and haven't returned by midnight is a palpable one. It's that kind of existential fear felt when a loved one is away and you're terrified they might die. It's also unclear what's going on in the hotel, but there's a late scene that's both funny and creepy: when Mai (the younger sister) leaves her crayons to mark their path, hands reach up from under the floorboards to take them away. The thickness of Luu's line would seem to indicate maybe using a color wash later in the process because the figures really cried out for it. The mix of YA familial tension and mystery leaves the reader wanting to know more.

Similarly, Jess Johnson's Student Council Yearbook features bits and pieces of a longer work about a slightly fantastical scenario involving the student council of a school. Of course, Johnson's work is highly informed by manga tropes, so there's a lot of drama, flashy uniforms, and odd relationships. Johnson spots a lot of black into her comics, which adds to that sense of dramatic confrontation. Johnson's line is really thick in this comic, and there are times when it doesn't seem she has total command over that line. Some figures look wobbly and half-formed. There are clearly plenty of ideas here, so hopefully, Johnson can clear things up on the page and also perhaps consider color.

Donna Almendrala graduated from CCS in 2012 and she's worked on all sorts of clever, genre-oriented projects. She's doing these nicely-produced series that have a lot of color touches, focusing on some of her favorite subjects. Food Fanzine #1 isn't just recipes (though that's part of it); it's also stories and memories about food. For example, "Pizza Spaghetti" is a recipe for a rich, meat-based pasta dish. But the story is really about growing up and trying to connect with your far-away family by making beloved dishes. A strip about favorite ice cream flavors is about how eating it can momentarily distract from workplace stressors. The guest spots from Maia Kobabe and Alena Carnes were perfect fits in this kind of emotional narrative surrounding food.

Desert Dreamin' #2 sees Almendrala doing what she does best: draw cute animals. This is the story of a new mother owl who realizes that feeding her kids is going to be way more difficult than she had expected. Almendrala's combination of clear, naturalistic detail and cartoony grasp on motion and exaggeration make this comic a breezy delight. Indeed, the comic's comedic touches take it beyond the realm of simply being cutesy, especially when the owl is struggling.

Kori Michele Handwerker's career has been split between genre stuff, queer (and specifically trans) romance, and comics about the importance of pronouns and other signifiers of identity. Their Books About Gender Make Me Feel A Way is interesting because it's all about Handwerker's struggle with reading other people's experience being trans, in part because are worried about being triggered. More to the point, it's really a comic about what they really want to write about and what they're afraid to write about. Dancing around the issue of just how much ink to spill is difficult for any cartoonist who chooses to work in memoir, but even moreso when navigating these emotional pitfalls. They don't come to any particular conclusions but do wind up reading a book they were avoiding on the subject (Maia Kobabe's Genderqueer). That mere act sparked this particular comic, and it seems clear that it might just be the beginning.

Thirty Days of CCS #19: Nomi Kane & Donna Almendrala

Donna Almendrala & Nomi Kane submitted their most recent work together, which makes sense since they are both staff artists at Schulz Studios. Yep, they get to work with the Peanuts properties as they are currently still being published.

Kane came into CCS with an incredibly beautiful, fine line and a hard-won skill as both illustrator and cartoonist. What I think CCS did for her was enhance her narrative skills, as it’s clear that her ability as a draftsman is even more refined now than when she was in school. If Kane has a weakness as a storyteller, it’s a lack of subtlety. Things are spelled out very clearly, all of the time. That’s even true in some of her minicomics that range from the very silly to the political. The Alt-Left, for instance, takes the absurdity of that very concept and spells out its joke (essentially, oh no! The Alt-Left will destroy the country with health care for all!) on page after beautifully drawn page.  Shut Up, Donnie! uses quotes from the president with silly pictures to go along with them, which R.Sikoryak did to a more absurd extent and Warren Craghead continues to do in a far more grotesque manner. The result here is more silly than satirical.

On the other hand, Artsy Fartsies and I Don’t Want To Know How This Happened make great use of her playful style. The former is exactly what it sounds like: hilariously cartoony drawings of people farting with pithy descriptions, and the latter is Kane imagining new crossbreeds of dogs. The former comic works because it is designed to be funny, not disgusting. The latter works because of Kane’s incredible skill in drawing dogs, especially mashing up breeds in funny ways with amusing new names. The “Dachsador” (Labrador + Dachsund) was especially cute in a simple way, while Kane really went to town in drawing the Chihuapei (Chijuahua + Sha Pei), with all of the folds adding to the cuteness of the tiny dog. Anyone who loves dogs will enjoy this mini.

Almandrala, unlike Kane’s vivid use of color, sticks to pen and ink. Pick Your Poison is an Inktober challenge, where an artist receives a prompt to work from every day and tries to link each up in a way that makes some degree of narrative sense. Almandrala seems to enjoy drawing monkeys (based on her past work), and so it’s no surprise that a monkey should be the star of this densely inky of a monkey tossing pies and tomatoes at his friend, a one-horned demon. It’s really just an excuse for her to draw fun things, like giant spiders and space suits. Birbwatching takes the internet meme and squeezes it til the point of asphyxiation in search of laughs. Essentially a slang name for any kind of cute or odd bird on the internet, Almandrala mixes her skill as a draftsman with the tendencies of a stand-up comedian. Captions like “Heading to Birbcon”, with a bird carrying a pile of sticks and in flight, are an example of the amusing but not explicitly funny. On the other hand, a bird scratching its beak in the ground with the caption “Calling Ubirb” made me laugh out loud. Almendrala picked on a number of hipster or young people’s activities and used “birb” somewhere in there to poke fun at them, but it was also clear that she was poking fun at herself as well.

The Wanderer’s Guide To The Wilds is another illustration zine, this time taking creatures encountered as part of Jason Lutes’ own fantasy role playing game. Without the pressure that a drawing challenge presented, Almendrala clearly took her time with these drawings, and the result was beautiful. By using RPG style descriptions (example: “Hostile, Large, Group”), the reader gets a sense of what the encounter with each creature must have been like. Creatures like the Heavily-Armored Ravens are perfectly conceived and illustrated, with just the right amount of minimalist background. My favorite were the Miklos (“Clamfolk, At War, Lawful, Medium”), fantastic drawing of a creature that’s both vaguely cute and definitely strange, which I think sums up much of Almendrala’s work.

Lone Rock Falls is an anthology featuring both cartoonists as well as Kat Efird, with each doing their own chapter that takes place in the same town at around the same time. Kane’s piece is one of her best to date. The usual strongly-developed character design is there, but she uses odd angles at times to vary the way the characters interact with each other in space. In this cowboy story from an indeterminate era, the protagonist is a pigtailed young woman who has a few tricks up her sleeve. With a for page grid maximizing the sheer size of her characters, we soon learn that she’s in town to be an apprentice to the greatest magical mastermind around. Along the way, she fixes her horse’s hoof, pacifies a group of bounty hunters who are after her, guns in hand, and charms the local barmaid. It’s the queer western magic show story I didn’t know I needed, as Kane twists any number of clichés into a satisfying, funny narrative.

Almendrala’s story once again involves a monkey and sorcery, this time as a monkey revenant digs its way out of a grave and crosses a desert for some unseen act of vengeance. Its story is being narrated by an owl, who first sees the monkey bury her child, and then set off on her quest. The owl can’t stop asking questions both occasionally profound but mostly banal, finally stopping when she reaches what she believes may be her own clutch of eggs. She leaves the fearsome warrior to her quest, concluding, “Vengeance is tiring”. Almendrala’s line is scratchy and relies blacks being heavily spotted as well as huge swaths of negative space in the form of the desert. She also turns any number of clichés on their heads in this surprisingly cute story, when one considers the subject matter.

Efird is not a CCS grad, but she certainly fit right in with this take on vampires and gothic romances set in that same old west town. Half of the story is a shaggy dog story as we await what possibly could be the source of the scratching in a widowed woman’s old house, and the other half goes down that roller coaster into a hilarious rush of a monster-hunting story. Her style has some of Almendrala’s scratchy tendencies combined with the detail that Kane uses in her faces. Overall, this is a nicely cohesive anthology that flatters the talents of each of its creators. 

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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