45 Days Of CCS, #13: E.B. Sciales and Gabrielle Tinnirello

There is something delightfully old-fashioned about E.B. Sciales' comic Sal #1, featuring "Sal, the Tiny Artist." This pen-and-ink collection of gag strips feels like something I might have seen in a "Best Cartoons of 1957" book that Lawrence Lariar put together back in the day, but they also feel delightfully fresh. Wearing a jaunty beret and sporting a thin handlebar mustache, Sal is always feverishly at work on a new painting. Whether he's spilling a lot of sweat over a single dot or fretting endlessly over someone possibly making money with a painting he through away, Sciales' expressive cartooning makes Sal an instantly compelling character. Every gesture is meaningful and intentional, and Sciales is especially adept at using space in interesting ways. Frequently eschewing a standard grid, Sciales flips between open page layouts, squiggly panel borders, panels that are puffy-bordered dream sequences, and a host of other techniques. Sciales has the chops to do any kind of gag or humor comics she wants.

Gabrielle Tinnirello's zines are consistently beautiful, colorful, and emotionally vulnerable. I'm not exactly sure that they are comics in any traditional sense. Her extensive use of mixed media does convey a sort of emotional narrative even if there's not any kind of grid or familiar use of an open-page layout. J'Obsessed features a cavalcade of photos of Tinnirello in a bikini, surrounded by a whirl of collage images that include name stickers, photos, decorative hand-drawn patterns, her own hand-lettered commentary, and other colorful images that express Tinnirello's unabashed and unfiltered sense of joy. Local Whorish is a much more dense diary comic following Tinnirello's self-described "boy crazy" summer and her various crushes. The feeling she captures here is one of tantalizing possibilities, the thrill of desire and being desired. She rides that wave throughout the comic as she employs her exaggerated, looping line that centers her intense use of decorative elements. Those elements dominate every page, as though Tinnirello is inviting the reader to frolic inside her journal or vision board with her. That said, her figures (a mix of cute and distorted) still stand out and fit snugly with the other elements on her page. Her comics are more about a feeling than narrative, and one can't help but feel the sweet pangs of her almost innocently portrayed crushes along with her.

 

45 Days Of CCS, #4: Gabrielle Tinnirello and Al Varela

Al Varela's style features big-eyed characters, bright colors, and hearts worn on sleeves. It has a deeply humanistic quality to it, as it's clear that Varela loves all of their characters, whatever their flaws. Skate With Me, Baby! is a mini featuring teens Sandra and Mandy. Sandra is a new employee at a roller rink, and purple-haired Mandy is a frequent customer. What unfolds are the opening moments of a sweet romance that clearly presages a deeper summer relationship. Varela has a way of getting at those opening butterflies and sparks of attraction, especially when someone like Sandra is so shy and awkward. The more aggressive Mandy is nonetheless sweet and patient, and the scene where Mandy teaches Sandra how to skate is both tender and filled with sexual tension. This is less a story than it is a quick character study. The background details of the rink (cheap toys from game tickets, crying kids, an indifferent boss) all add to the magic of the central relationship. Varela's understanding of the relationship between bodies in space and gesture provide the reader with all they really need to know about the story. 

Gabrielle Tinnirello's career thus far has been interesting in terms of the minis I've seen from her. She seems more interested in a sort of narrative collage style of storytelling than traditional comics. That's certainly true with 27, a birthday zine celebrating her 27th birthday. The way she arranges her collage elements and then fills in with decorative drawings around them exudes warmth, and in many ways these comics feel like she's trying to put a certain kind of energy into her work. In drawing different playing cards for different people, she's aware of tarot and other divination techniques in terms of setting intentions for them. This whole mini seems to be about setting intentions after her birthday, and they include finding love and working collaboratively with others. I'm hoping to see something resembling even a further veering into comics-as-poetry given her decorative style or a more conventional narrative with lots of visual bells-and-whistles.

31 Days Of CCS, #7: Gabrielle Tinnirello, Carl Antonowicz & Reilly Hadden

This post will cover a few shorter comics by interesting young CCS cartoonists. 

Gabrielle's Pocket Book, by Gabrielle Tinnirello, is a small (4" x 2.5"), landscape-formatted mini that's an excellent example of her highly decorative style that surrounds all of her drawings. This is a clever meta-assignment for CCS that includes elements of things she was supposed to talk about as well as taking the original instructions and turning them into something different. There is an essential cuteness to this that seems simple on the surface because of the approachable and cheery line, but Tinnirello's integration of word and image is actually quite sophisticated and balanced. This mini feels like a proof of concept for a longer work, and the other comics I've seen from her employ this same mix of dense imagery layered from clear line art and elegant, decorative touches. Eventually, I hope that she works bigger and continues to work in color; it will help her work breathe a bit more without losing its impact. 

Kricket The Cat (Spring-Summer 2022), by Reilly Hadden. Hadden's latest Kricket comics are some of their best. Going the black-and-white route paid off, as the strip got re-energized for this extended story. The right balance for Kricket is providing a satisfying 4-panel punchline on every page while also connecting them for a longer narrative. That's exactly what Hadden achieves here, as the perpetually put-upon Kricket takes a photo of a rare Steahorsus, only to lose his camera to a bird flying to Forbidden Island. Hadden is able to bring a number of recurring characters (apart from Kricket, there's also the hat-wearing Louise and the ingeniously-designed Old Man Catfish) who need no special introductions to understand. There's a clarity of narrative here that allows Hadden to occasionally go off on a tangent, but Kricket's central motivation is a through-line that provides a solid structure for all of the foolishness. If John Porcellino drew a funny-animal series, it would look something like this. 

The Ardent SPX Preview, by Carl Antonowicz. This is the first twenty pages of Antonowicz's next book, and he's added a beautiful blue wash and added much more clarity to his line. Antonowicz likes telling fantasy stories steeped in grubby medieval imagery, meaning that there's a lot of rubble, debris, and decay. Not to mention usually disease and violence to boot. Visually, this has meant a gritty quality that teeters into messiness, but The Ardent features his usual line-up of themes with backgrounds that aren't quite as fussed over. Antonowicz lets his use of color do a lot of the job of adding weight and substance to each page, as well as giving his characters something to work off of. The story is about a devoted monk charged with taking the remains of one of his religion's beloved saints to her final resting place. The contrast between this monk's absolute faith with the rest of the order falling to pieces because the monastery is being sold off is hilarious and fits in nicely with Antonowicz's project of studying true believers in the face of all other evidence. I'm fascinated to see how the rest of the quest goes, especially since it seems the monk is either mute or has taken a vow of silence. 

Antonowicz also submitted Open Casket Soundstyem: Tomb Riddim, an anthology about different kinds of forbidden and foreboding tombs. "Riddim" is a reference to the instrumental portion of reggae and dancehall; or the vernacular version of "rhythm." This is exactly what Antonowicz is doing here: creating a storytelling rhythm with the neat trick of using a hidden protagonist: the tombs, or rather the forces that built each tomb, themselves. One is in a desert, drawing in pilgrims. Another is forgotten, in the center of a city. Another contains the remains of a dying god and is lethal to the living. Another reveals a horrible truth about the inhabitants of its city. And so on. It's akin to Bob Dylan once saying that each of the lines of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" is in itself the first line of its own song. Antonowicz's thinking of comics as performance and music adds a richness to how he tells a story. 

31 Days Of CCS, #5: The Ladybroad Ledger #5

The Ladybroad Ledger is a broadsheet anthology by women, femmes, and nonbinary cartoonists in Vermont. So says its back page. The original version of this folded a few years ago after four issues, but three CCS students revived it with a bunch of their fellow students and alumni, along with other local cartoonists. The editors are Violet Kitchen, Annabel Driussi, and Sofia Lesage, and it looks like Kitchen handled the editing and Driussi the design. Kitchen took the cover chores and she came up with a powerful, vivid strip filled with violent reds and oranges that exemplified her anger regarding the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and endangering a woman's right to her own body. It's an eye-catching, righteous bit of fury that demonstrates her considerable skill as a cartoonist. She's got every tool needed to become great. 

One of the fun things about a broadsheet is that cartoonists get to work big. Coco Fox's strip about her struggles with gardening is a 16-panel grid that still has plenty of room to breathe because there's so much room on the page. Her loose, scribbly style and extensive use of decorative flourishes along her panel borders aid in depicting the slightly out-of-control nature of gardening and how difficult it is to control. Kristen Shull's autobio comic addresses the problem of worrying about her readers and audience reactions in general. It also has a lot of interesting visual flourishes that reflect her other cartooning interest of fantasy, and the panel design is chaotic in ways that aid its overall aims. 

A lot of Daryl Seitchik's work involves wide-open spaces, and so working big in her story "How To Become A Mermaid" does a great job of using negative space and black/white contrasts. Masha Zhdanova's comic about summer and falling in love has a nice visual gestalt effect that encapsulates a brief, fleeting feeling. Sofia Lesage's comic about summer goes in a radically different direction: it's a depression journal that's an absolute howl. It's a comic about being trapped in one's own worthless, horrifying mind and body, where the possibility of communication that doesn't poison everyone around you seems impossible. Where one's creative impulses are self-muted and whatever distractions that can be generated are fleeting and foolish. She captures all of these feelings and more in a loose grid that emphasizes body language above all else. 

Leda Zawacki's "29 Miles" suffers from murky grayscale reproduction, marring an otherwise spare, emotionally resonant story about a desperate young woman making a hail Mary play to get a ride. Sarah Woodard's "Open Heart" is a slightly heavy-handed but certainly pointed story about the ways in which the absurdity of racism is highlighted in a medical care facility, with people of all backgrounds providing care and treatment. Driussi's own piece spreads across two pages, depicting the raw, visceral, and erotic experience of experiencing live music. The clashing and clanging images and density of the lettering all play into creating this experience for the reader. 

Sarah Oak's strip about her "Daisy Duke" character grossing out a guy who's hitting on her at work is funny, although her cartooning style is cloyingly stylized. Jen Jolls' piece about someone whining regarding a class has a funny punchline, although the cartooning is all over the place. Keilani Lime and Amy Burns' graphic medicine comic about giving blood (I think; it might be just getting a shot) is funny, reflecting how chronic illness can disrupt any experience. Franky Frances Cannon's full page strip about favorite Vermont bars is cluttered and disorganized, but the drawings are so charming and the actual reviews are so funny that it won me over. Finally, Gabrielle Tinnirello's piece on dresses beautifully uses up the space provided with a host of delicate, decorative elements in a fluid, open page layout. 

There are also essays on why making bad comics is a good thing, how to become a cartoonist, an interview with Kitchen, and a long interview with musician and comics fan Neko Case. Overall, the level of cartooning is superior to the original publication, and more of the cartoonists take advantage of the format to produce work that's outside of their normal comfort zones.