Thirty Days of CCS #31: Awesome Possum #3

Awesome Possum Volume 3 is the continuing, kickstarted brainchild of editor Angela Boyle. It’s a big (400+ pages), varied and loving tribute to the flora and fauna of the world. How one feels about it as a reading experience will depend greatly on one’s interest in the subject, especially since there are a number of stories that aren’t even really comics at all, but simply illustrated text. Several of the entries are simply rundowns on the varieties of particular kinds of species and attendant drawings of them. Considering that there’s a separate, sixty-page section at the end of the book that’s nothing but illustrations, there’s a lot that felt redundant in this anthology. Awesome Possum succeeded when its contributors made the extra leap to truly doing an actual narrative surrounding a plant or animal, and failed when it was simply science class supplementary material.

Not every narrative was equally interesting or equally well-told. While William Scavone’s story about the Varroa mite killing off bees had a solid platform (a beekeeper and his daughter trying to detect mites), it turned out to be scaffolding for a lot of detailed jargon. Spratty’s strip about rattlesnakes was more visually interesting, in part because of the subject, but mostly because Spratty is a better storyteller who used panel-to-panel transitions to create genuine reader interest. Perhaps the best story in the whole book was Moss Bastille’s story about ergot and its long and colorful history. In a style mimicking stained-glass window effects, Bastille nonetheless went from strange folk story to hard science in the investigation of the poisonous fungus ergot. It caused death, strange behavior, hallucinations and was eventually used to derive LSD. Bastille kept the visuals simple and bold, using a lot of negative space to let information-packed pages breathe a little. This is a great example of telling a story without sparing detail, but not dumbing it down for a reader, either.

Some of the artists in the book explained the science as though it were for kids, and others for someone who was genuinely interested in the smallest details of various observations. Bastille was one of the few who found that sweet spot in-between. Megan Archer’s story about ants farming aphids was aimed at kids in terms of the flourishes an overall simplicity of the line, but it’s still detailed enough to be accurate. In a black & white book that demanded clarity, she was one of the ones who did it best, especially since there were so many stories using lettering that was too small or stylized or gray-scaling that was too muddy.

There was another consideration to think of: was their story interesting or boring, especially to a general reader and not someone who doesn’t already find nature’s tiniest aspects to be fascinating? Well, Ross Wood Studlar, who has been drawing nature for quite a long time, took no chances with his story. First, it was framed as a conversation between himself and a group of friends and relatives, which made it easy to feed the reader information naturally. Second, it seemed based on a true story, which made the mechanics of how to explain things even easier. Third, it was about how amphibians have the ability to return from the dead. That’s an eye-catcher that demanded an explanation, and Studlar then went over the science of how certain mosses and amphibians can be frozen solid for incredibly long periods of time and then revive themselves when the conditions are right again. That even includes the tiny tardigrades that live on moss—little creatures that can shut off their metabolic functions and survive virtually any conditions. Studlar has never been great at drawing people, but he can draw natural life like a champ and knows how to tell a story, even getting a laugh at the end.

Kevin Kite and Michelle McCauley did their own take on the Tardigrade, which has survived all five of earth’s great extinctions. The line was much simpler and cuter, but Boyle made a good call as an editor to follow up Studlar’s story with this one, because they are endlessly interesting. That story made use of a simple, thick line that was perfect for the story’s sense of humor. Tom O’Brien story about bats is interesting because he made the best use of the opposite: a fragile line and an extensive use of gray-scaling that nonetheless looked beautiful. That’s likely because he made sure the images stayed in constant movement while the accompanying text oozed along. Kelly Fernandez followed that up with a more cartoony pen-and-ink story that used gray-scaling to a lesser extent. Again, a smart palate cleansing choice by Boyle, especially since Fernandez’s actual subject (about the difference between crows and ravens) isn’t exactly gripping, which she makes up for by making it funny.

My antipathy toward chart and illustration heavy entries is clearly noted in this review. There were some exceptions, and Alyssa Lee Suzumura is one of them. The delicacy and precision of her line is so fine that I could look at it for hours. Her page formatting in this story about animals rafting as a way of making their way across the world was also clear and clever, with striking images telling the story in such a way that they didn’t depend on the text. There are also interjections of humor and absolutely stellar lettering. Patricia Maldonado’s take on cryptozoology is very text heavy and there’s little here that resembles comics, except that she chose an inherently interesting topic and her drawings are beautiful and clear.

As I read the anthology, I couldn’t help thinking what I usually do when I read one: this would have been so much better if you cut out a third of it. That rule applied here, but it’s so long that there were still have been so many great stories in it that balanced its overall approach, like an autobio encounter with a mountain beaver by Natalie Dupille, a cute but accurate account of the alarming phenomenon of aphid birth from Caitlin Hofmeister & Lauren Norby, and a super-cute series of illustrations and pages with big text by Bridget Comeau. Boyle’s own story about the dodo and extinction perfectly balanced her interest in detail with solid panel-to-panel transitions and a star character that is truly fun to look at in the flightless dodo. When you ask someone to be in your anthology and they have a specialty, let them run with it. In the case of G.P. Bonesteel, he specializes in horror, so his story about the invasive plant species houndstongue and all the damage has precisely the right tone.

Sometimes, sheer storytelling and drawing skill turned something dull (cottonwood trees of Canada) into something fascinating, as in the case of Laura Marie Madden. In the case of Jerel Dye and the Grasshopper Mouse, the physical characteristics of the creature became a part of this life-and-death story’s plot as it fought a scorpion. Aurora Melchior and Iris Yan both do their own take on the occasionally alarming mating rituals and habits of various creatures, both with a comedic outcome. Finally, Kriota Willberg’s amusing and highly detailed drawings of the “denizens of Manhattan” is a great showcase for this anatomical artist.

There were times that I wished for a heavier editorial hand in how some of the information was arranged. As noted earlier, this was a result of too many inessential pieces being published, but what can you do when it’s a kickstarted effort? There’s no question that she upped her game greatly as an editor and artist with this edition, as her interstitial possum drawings were an additional form of palate cleanser for the reader of this often entertaining and occasionally exhausting book.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #7: G.P. Bonesteel

GP Bonesteel is best known for his tongue-in-cheek takes on horror and satire in general, and his mini series sixty/forty allows him to do this in a shorter form than his ongoing satire Jason. sixty/forty: Movies I Watched In 2016 isn't so much a comic as it is a zine with mixed content: lists of movies, illustrations and a short comic at the end. His parody drawings of films he didn't like as well as drawings of actors he thinks should be in the next Expendables film are funny. The strip where he's arguing with a friend about the film It Follows was especially amusing, as Bonesteel adds details like the friend stealing Bonesteel's sandwich, a diagram of the perfect sandwich, etc. All throughout, Bonesteel adds compelling arguments for a number of his points with regard to films he liked and didn't like. Someone who has strong opinions about film will find this well-assembled zine quite interesting.

sixty/forty Vol 5 is a more traditional comic as Bonesteel serves up several short stories. "The Day The Sharktopus Ate The Moon" was fun, as it's really about an apathetic lifeguard who refuses to do anything to stop the titular creature from completing its stated mission, reasoning that it doesn't have anything to do with him. It's a typical Bonesteel tactic of subverting a familiar story through logic, unsound as it might be in its premise, that is otherwise ironclad. "The Day The Frogs Fell" is one of Bonesteel's more visually intricate story, as it once again presents a debate regarding a potentially horrific or supernatural occurrence. In this case, it's the meaning of frogs raining down from the sky, with one unseen person talking about portents and other vague warnings and the other person doubting him. Bonesteel throws in a twist at the end where the seemingly deranged person turns out to be right. "This Is Howard" is an absurd space epic about a duck that steals a spaceship told in a deadpan narrative style, with occasional flashes over to the fuzzy duck in question. It's Bonesteel at his funniest, as his dry sense of humor is a perfect match for his minimalist, simple style. The absurdity in his work always comes from the concept, not the illustrations, even though their simplicity helps establish the deadpan quality of his stories.

Thirty Days of CCS #6: G.P. Bonesteel

Garry Paul Bonesteel's third volume of his side-scrolling, landscape comic Jason continues to delve deeper into the emotional life and quotidian details of the Friday the 13th boogeyman. Bonesteel's visual flourishes are crisper and clearer in this volume, even as the character design remains iconically simple. Indeed, the designs display people as having entirely blank faces, with points standing in for hands and feet. Only the iconic horror characters that inhabit this world get their own set of features, and even those are greatly stripped down. In this world (as in ours, actually), the best way to determine why something happens is to follow the money. Horror movie villains are expected to make a certain amount of money or else face being forced to retire, and worse, irrelevancy. There's a hilarious sequence in which Jason is a guest speaker at a school for up-and-coming slasher pic stars, displaying a personality that's at once sensitive, withdrawn and undeniably obsessive.

Jason goes to a hardware store to get new items to inspire him and is treated with respect. He returns the favor by not killing the hardware store manager's son. He hangs out with the boorish Ghost Face (from Scream) and the more sensitive Freddy Krueger. He goes to his office and desperately tries to come up with new ideas. His prudishness makes him recoil at offers of sex that come through the mail. He also becomes obsessed with the little girl from whom he stole his pet dog. Bonesteel uses the psychopathic nature of each of his characters as a base, allowing different nuances to emerge from each as a result of simply assuming that every one of them is a crazed killer. It's a story about trying to rekindle one's creativity, how to work among one's peers, the drudgery of a work routine and the lack of attendant dignity often found as one ages.

There are several white-on-black dream sequences which give the book a visual power that's not as pronounced on the other pages. Despite several scenes of grisly violence, the book's real power to disturb lies in its power to make Jason a sympathetic character that we can't help but get behind. Bonesteel portrays him as a haunted character who's enormously lonely and unfulfilled but feels entirely trapped by his circumstances. This is a scenario that many feel in their jobs, and the way Bonesteel meshes this drifting ennui with gags and gore makes for a jarring but amusing combination. The one thing that drives me crazy about his work is his terrible spelling, as there are numerous misspellings that should have been caught. Hopefully, some of the more rushed elements of the work can be cleaned up once Bonesteel reaches the collection phase.

Thirty Days of CCS #15: Steve Seck, Pat Barrett, GP Bonesteel

Steve Seck continues to hone his comedic chops in the pages of his one-man anthology, Monday Saddies. This issue features two separate stories: "Ghost Roommate" and "Locker Up!", both of which earn their humor with awful, over-the-top characters behaving badly. Seck adds weight to his pages with a lot of spotted blacks balancing the simple nature of his character design and unvaried line weights. His characters look funny, but most of the humor comes through in the dialogue. Mostly, his characters look weird, with vertical slits for eyes and angular features amid a pleasingly cluttered background. Seck's characters just seem to live in filthy settings, and "Locker Up!" makes particular use of that conceit. It's about a group of anthropomorphic objects that live in a kid's locker at school trying to make sense of their worlds. Most of the objects have devolved into highly juvenile and even senile behavior, like the "elders" that had been sitting in there for far too long. Seeing a rubber band become ecstatic upon being "raptured" by getting stuck to the kid's backpack was hilarious, as was the belligerent and foul-mouthed soda can wanting to watch dirty videos on the kid's phone. "Ghost Roommate" is a funny take-off on the ultimate form of do-nothing, slacker roommate that also mines humor from ghost mythology. Seck has really refined his line, making what could be a sloppy page easy to follow and giving his figures a pleasing, eye-catching quality. That approach in terms freshens up his slacker humor, in part because he's satirizing that kind of culture as much as he is taking advantage of it as the de facto stars of his comics.

Pat Barrett has a lush, dense illustrative style that he uses for stories that are comedic but possess a certain edge.The latest issue of his one-man anthology Oak & Linden (#6) is a micro-mini, measuring 2.25" by 4.25". The stars of the issue are his gross, goblinoid naked characters who are both representative of id-centered, scatological storytelling as well as sources of existential discussion. Of course, that existential discussion (centering around the idea of being remembered for something) winds up in a slapstick, springy fistfight, short-circuited by the object of discussion: their queen ("her flatulence"), who also happens to be the aging mother of everyone. The crudeness of these characters still gets at the heart of Barrett's point: that we are bags of phlegm, blood and shit with a biological imperative to have sex, eat and excrete. How we balance our biological imperatives against our higher selves (or rather, how we fail to do so) is at the heart of Barrett's sense of humor.

Barrett's comic How To Make Comics The Whiner's Way is a funny shot across the bow against cartoonists who constantly bitch about being cartoonists, who bemoan the lack of shortcuts, who substitute buying new gadgets for actual hard work, who use autobio comics as a crutch when they don't really have anything to say, who steal their styles wholesale from popular images, who hop on cultural memes and other easy reference points as a way of gaining readers, and who generally try to make their lives out to be worse than those undergoing actual hardship. It's all done in the style of How To Make Comics The Marvel Way, with hilariously arch "how-to" steps that flog those whom he perceives as whining their way through something that should be giving them pleasure, even if it is hard. Barrett makes a compelling case, especially as someone who went to "cartoon boot camp" at CCS, a place where artists were expected to work hard on actually drawing their comics because they loved it. This is a cleverly designed comic that should be a gut-check for every cartoonist, including Barrett himself, I would imagine.

GP Bonesteel's series Jason continues its crystallization in its second issue. Bonesteel's comics have always had a high pop-culture saturation combined with an amusingly cynical and even postmodern take on same. Jason's high-concept is irresistible: the quotidian activities of movie slasher villains. Jason from the Friday the 13th films is the series' protagonist, one that posits him as a sympathetic, lonely character in search of meaning in his life while still being a homicidal killer. Bonesteel creates a weird, heightened sense of reality where these killers all have high-profile advertising profiles that exist in real life, even as they all form a curious sort of insular and exclusive group of friends. Bonesteel plays that emotional chord in an entirely straight-ahead fashion, all while jarring the reader with hilariously over-the-top violence and murderous references. For example, the Big Brother-type program that Jason tries to sign up for is called "Tor-Mentors", designed to have slasher killers teach their trade to young kids in need. In one extended sequence, Ghost Face from the Scream movies and Freddie Krueger from the Nightmare On Elm Street films wind up arguing and have a "smoke-off", wherein each tries to kill three victims as quickly as possible. The entire comic is printed landscape, with each page featuring three panels. The figures are reduced to blank figures, with the only recognizable features being those of the killers. That simple approach works well in allowing the comic to move from comic to violent to poignant--sometimes on the same page. Bonesteel has found his groove as a creator here, though a few pages here and there appear rushed. When this project is complete, Bonesteel will have his best career work to date.

Gag Men of CCS: Lok, Bonesteel, Yoder, Seck

Let's take a look at four CCS grads who are primarily humorists.

Gag Rag #2. by Jeff Lok. Lok is quietly becoming one of my favorite humorists, thanks to his pitch-black comic sensibility. As his figures continue to look more like stacks of shapes and less like actual people, his strips have come into much sharper focus. Earlier in his career, Lok's attempts at a realistic style resulted in some over-rendered images. In this second issue of Gag Rag, he's reached the perfect antithesis of that style, creating figures and forms that are both unsettling and funny to look at. His gags continue to grow darker, meaner and funnier. The main story, about an Antarctic explorer whose heroic mission goes horribly awry, is peppered with absurdities (a man renting only one sled dog because "owning a dog is a lot of responsibility!") and grim, visceral conseqences. Indeed, Lok's can-I-top-this list of abuse heaped on his character goes beyond the cruel and into the ridiculous. Lok intersperses the main narrative with a bizarre visual pun about losing one's appetite and an enigmatic strip about a rooster and his young companion. There's no question that Lok has really found something that works, and I hope he continues to pursue this direction.

A Fan Comic About Community, Mr. Ryland & Mr. Yoder, and Giant Naked Baby, by David Yoder. Yoder is a very funny writer who's trying to figure out the best way of presenting his material visually. It seems pretty clear that drawing is a slog for him, especially since he tries to do much of his work in a naturalistic fashion. My favorite of these three comics was Mr. Ryland and Mr. Yoder, a hastily-drawn story for NaGroNoWriMo (National Graphic Novel Writing Month) that mixes humor and anti-humor in equal doses. It features my favorite drawings of his, most especially his own self-caricature. Along with Colleen Frakes', it's my favorite from the CCS crowd because it's both pleasant and funny to look at. The big glasses, the dot eyes and vaguely vapid smile all add up to funny drawing after funny drawing, which is a nice equation when paired with the punch of his gag work. This mini is one long deconstruction of humor as expressed through two "vaudevillian" characters who wear matching straw hats, bowties and plaid jackets. The way Yoder jumps back and forth through time, ignores conventional narrative and throws in a barrage of jokes both stupid and sophisticated shows how much potential he has as a humorist. The same is true for his Fan Comic About Community,  a TV show that features the same sort of meta-humor at which he excels. The comic is both an expression of his fears of what the show might turn into after its creator was fired and a smart parody of TV tropes, all told within a framework that allows ts "meta" character Abed to function both as a human being and as a comic book character. The crudeness of his line blunts some of the impact of his commentary, but it's still effective. Giant Naked Baby has its funny and absurd moments (after all, it's about the titular baby parking itself outside of someone's house and staying entirely still), but it's really about accepting one's own mortality as well as learning how to let go of loved ones in their dying moments. What the baby turns out to really be is a clever twist that adds an absurd element to the most grave of concepts. Yoder is an artist who just needs to draw a lot more in order to figure out what style will serve him best as an artist, though I could easily see him become a screenwriter as well. I'm hoping he'll continue to stick with comics and even return to previous works and re-draw them.

60/40, Jason and Birds, by G.P. Bonesteel. Bonesteel's comics are very much informed by his pop-culture obsessions, and the quality of the resulting gag generally depends on how cleverly he can spin those obsessions into actual jokes. 60/40 is a silly collection of random gags that are mostly forgettable, with the exception of "Monster Fight". Here, a fight between King Kong and Godzilla is actually a fight about their frayed friendship, bringing the language of slice-of-life comics to bear in a way that both sends them up and plays it completely straight. Bonesteel's skills as a draftsman are not especially highly developed, but he pushes through this thanks to his design and composition choices. For example, Birds is a collection of strips featuring 6-panel variations of the same pose, as two birds on power lines exchange witticisms, dirty observations, insults and deeply personal information. Bonesteel spares the reader's eyes from total visual monotony with some pleasing color schemes, but the real attraction here is the nature of the friendship between the two leads. Jason is by far the best of the comics, as Bonesteel's knack for creating high-concept concepts lands on a doozy: a slice-of-life story featuring Jason, from the Friday The Thirteenth movies. This "side-scroller" of a comic has three panels per page and goes day-by-day with the killer, who does this as a job, even punching a time clock in the morning and hanging out with fellow movie killers like Freddy Krueger and Leatherface. This is a comic about working and the ways it can be a deadening experience, as well as making connections. The ultra-simple, outline style works perfectly in depicting the very 2D world that Jason inhabits and allows Bonesteel to get gory without drawing the reader too far out of the page. This was the first chapter of a longer story, and Bonesteel has something very interesting cooking here.

Life Is Good and Monday Saddies, by Steve Seck. Seck loves depicting the lives of losers, freaks, perverts and all-around degenerate anthropomorphic animals. I've already written about the Pogo meets Hate antics of Life Is Good. However, Seck's art really comes alive when he's not beholden to anything resembling a real narrative, and such is the case in Monday Saddies. The continuing adventures of a homicidal (yet famous) snake, a depraved ranger and a bear looking for inspiration, this comic is agreeably frenetic. It plays into Seck's scratchy, exaggerated style while meshing the increasingly transgressive humor with the cute, anthropomorphic drawings. At the same time, it's a stinging metacommentary on certain kinds of "message" genre stories where Friendship Is The Most Important Thing, ending with the vicious snake going out of his way to stay friends with the ranger, despite the latter's deep desire to be bitten and squeezed by the former. The character of the bear is my favorite, especially when he protests being trapped by the snake's thought balloon and then later winds up haunting a couple that had him stuffed despite just being in a blackout drunk state. The mock-wholesomeness of this comic is what makes it work so well, as the bright orange cover seems to be one beckoning to kids until one comes across the "Not for kids!" warning at the bottom. I'd love to see the whole story done in a four-color process that would mimic Dell-style comics of the 50s and 60s.

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.

Gags From CCS: Bonesteel & Life Is Good

Let's take a look at a couple of minis from two grads of the Center for Cartoon Studies that have specialized in humor.


Bonesteel, by GP Bonesteel. This is a collection of fanciful diary comics from Bonesteel, a cartoonist with a limited range in terms of his line but an expansive imagination. He's a fine storyteller who isn't afraid to push the envelope in many of his comics, but the humor here is surprisingly tame and typically geek-friendly. Bonesteel seems to be going for a highly simplified, cute character design style not unlike a typical syndicated cartoonist. While his own self-caricature is perfectly rendered, he seems to have a lot more trouble drawing women (including his fiance'). The best jokes in the comic are those that aren't so heavily dependent on pop culture references and that push the bounds of good taste (like a hilarious strip about showing his love for mini-wheats cereral by depicting himself masturbating to them). There's the kernel of a good strip here, but Bonesteel needs to work on figuring out a direction that works best, making it different enough from standard webcomics to stand out, and honing the designs of his other characters to make them more interesting to look at. (Fixing the strip's many spelling errors certainly wouldn't hurt.) Like many webcartoonists, this feels like Bonesteel trying to get better in public by working steadily, emphasizing production and discipline above all else.


Life Is Good #7, by Steve Seck. Seven issues into this anthropomorphic social satire, Seck has really tightened up his art, focused his narrative and resolved the storyline in a funny and satisfying manner. Seck made the wise decision of giving his funniest characters the most screen time without overusing them, as slimy vegan poser Dr Peace Rock conspires against Charles the Gator and awful crusty-wannabe Sewer Gator annoys lead character Brownie on virtually every page. This comic is all about losing one's job, living on the margins of society, dealing with the weird characters one finds on those aforementioned margins, and the hypocrisy that can result by conflating principles with ego. Seck's lettering is still a little hard to read at times (especially when he mixes upper and lower case letters), but there's a much greater clarity to his work now, even on pages when he jams in as many as a dozen panels. I'll be curious to see if there's another storyline featuring these characters or if Seck goes in a completely different direction.

TCJ Post #12: Various CCS Comics

Here's my review of assorted comics from CCS students Jose-Luis Olivares, Melissa Mendes and GP Bonesteel.

Another Side of CCS

Here's another look at work from Center For Cartoon Studies (CCS) students new and old. Included are works by Sam Gaskin, Kubby, Jeff Lok, G.P. Bonesteel, Morgan Pielli, and Joshua Rosen.


OPHESTIOS, 1890 by Joshua Rosen. Rosen is currently entering his second year at CCS, and this pleasing little mini faked me out at first. Given the sort of alternate-world explication of the city of Orphestios as capital of the "Northern Empire", I expected some sort of political world-building story. The story started off as what seemed to be a comedy of manners, and then we got another fake-out: this was a rehearsal of a play that was going badly. It's not until we're introduced to the character of Iosif, an itinerant playwright, that the story really begins. It took me a while to warm up to Rosen's scribbly character design and extensive use of grey and black for backgrounds. I think the dreariness it created was intentional, given that this was supposed to be a Russia-like country in the winter. The consistency of Rosen's visual language eventually won me over, especially with the expressiveness of his characters.

This is a story about the intersection between art and love, and the quest to link the two. Iosif is a celebrity of sorts back in Orphestios, but he hates the attention, hates talking about his work and especially hates people talking to him about what they think art really is. He's fascinated by a singer at a club and starts to obsess over her, only to learn that they were childhood friends--and feelings still ran deep. What I liked most about this story is that ultimately Iosif is not a sympathetic character, even if he is the protagonist. Given the opportunity to grab onto something truly meaningful in his life, he instead gives into temptation and tries to slough off his regret by saying "Fuck it". That interesting turn came during a clever, silent two-page sequence where Iosif and an actress hook up. We see close-ups of the couple with grey backgrounds, alternating with white-on-black squiggles depicting sex and then dissolving into unconsciousness. This is a solid if modest early effort, and I'll be curious to see if Rosen continues to build more stories in this environment.



KILLER INK COMICS #1, ICE CREAM and THE SURVIVING LIFE OF HANZE ENEFFER, by G.P. Bonesteel. Bonesteel is a humorist somewhat in the vein of a Johnny Ryan, with a particularly deadpan and dry sense of humor combined with a tendency to go over the top (and beyond). ICE CREAM is a tiny minicomic wherein Bonesteel uses a minimalist line to depict what happens when an ice cream truck doesn't stop for a group of kids: rocks, guns and flaming arrows are deployed. This is essentially a bit of extended slapstick, with all sorts of clever background eye-pops. HANZE ENEFFER is another minimal-line comic featuring an anthropomorphic rabbit's pathetic dating life. This one feels more than a little familiar, with the lonely loser finally scoring but eventually feeling even worse about his life. It's nowhere near as provocative as his other work.

The real draw here is KILLER INK COMICS #1, especially the first story. This is the tale of "Abortion Andy", a for-hire aborted baby who lectures teenagers about the perils of teen sex. In this story, he interrupts a young couple with his bizarre lecture, complete with two pages of working in track listings from Grease into his warnings. It's an audacious idea, hilariously executed with as straight a face as possible. The backup story features a man on the run from Cupid on Valentine's Day and the collateral damage their conflict causes (including a man falling in lust with a newspaper vending machine). This story is a bit more predictable (and I've seen a similar idea in the pages of PROJECT: ROMANTIC) but still funny. Bonesteel's line is a bit crude at this point but still effective in getting across his gags. I'll be curious to see just where he takes the Abortion Andy series in future episodes.



INDESTRUCTIBLE UNIVERSE QUARTERLY #1 & #2, by Morgan Pielli. These are grab bag collections of CCS grad Pielli's stories for assorted anthologies and other odds & ends. These are really nicely assembled, with beautiful silkscreened covers, striking design and nice paper. The art in the first issue is all angles and interesting formal tricks. Pielli often dips into sci-fi type stories, like "For Want Of An Oomplip", wherein a punctuation error on an alien sign nearly sets off a war. A longer story in the first issue features a chase between two characters across, through and between the gutters of panels.

The second issue also features a story with some unusual panel configurations. "The Watchmaker's Dance" reimagines earth's creation story as carried out by three alien robots. The use of tiny panels and sketchy line makes this story work well; in fact, it's the most attractive and successful of all the stories featured in these two issues. Pielli abandoned that more angular style of character design for the rest of the issue in favor of a softer, fuzzier line that was a bit less interesting. His stories continued to have a certain tortured quality to them, like "The Terror In Choices", featuring a man who loses everything after he loses his ability to choose. "The Trial of Narcissus" features an irresistible hook: everyone realizes that god is coming in three days, but the revelation of its true form drives everyone insane. At the moment, it seems like Pielli is experimenting with different drawing approaches, looking for the most comfortable style. I thought the more angular approach was more interesting, but it's clear that Pielli really thinks through his pages carefully. I especially like the way he straddles genres without owing allegiance to any one in particular.



SAM 'N DAN, by Jeff Lok. A quick look at Lok's work reveals that while he doesn't have the drawing facility of some of his fellow CCS grads, he overcomes that with the use of various techniques and a total commitment to the dark absurdity of his concepts. This is the story of a bank-robbing dog and cat duo named Sam and Dan. The cat speaks with a faux-elegant dialect, as though he were an early 20th century con man. The dog, a truly disturbing characters, says little but does much. After they rob a bank, the dog shoots the sun with his gun, bringing on darkness and an encounter with a wood witch, ancient prophesies, fireflies that shoot lasers out of their eyes and a commandment to duel each other to the death. To set the mood, Lok makes extensive use of hatching and cross-hatching. That creates an oppressive atmosphere with his otherwise funnily-drawn anthropomorphic characters. Sam the dog in particular has a Droopy-like expression no matter his mood or situation, which cracks me up in spite of his psychopathic personality. Dan the cat is an oily smooth talker who talks loud but says nothing, and it's fun to watch him sweat, slant his mouth and otherwise squirm while otherwise looking quite cheerful. The wood witch, an amorphous-looking creature, later tries to disguise itself as a farmer in the least-convincing costume of all time.

Lok brings all sorts of weird, comedic touches to a piece that has apocalyptic overtones, making its overall tone hard to pin down but compelling. His matter-of-fact absurdism reminds a little of what Chuck Forsman is doing, but Lok brings a different sensibility to his work. It's more clearly calculated and less improvisatory than Forsman's comics (especially in SNAKE OIL). Both artists are world-builders where the reader is deliberately kept in the dark, but there is certainly a logic of sorts behind the weirdness. Forsman's work is more about the telling of tales through the mundane execution of a journey, while with Lok it's about a series of bigger moments. I look forward to fat collections of comics by both artists in the future.



THE MUD BOG, POCKET PORN #1, r, THE UGLY PLACE and BEAUTY PATROL, by Kubby. Kubby's comics are beautiful, intensely personal little art objects. All stops are pulled out as we see full color, silkscreened covers, interesting paper, etc. THE UGLY PLACE is a 24-hour comic that's one of the best-looking of it's kind that I've seen. It's a silent story about a farmer who puts in a hard day's work threshing a field, only to be overcome by a memory of a lost love. The stoic farmer tucks the memory away when he gets home, only to wistfully see the image of his lover in the door. This looks like it was done only in pencil with no inks, but Kubby goes to town on creating gradations of texture, especially in the close-up shots of the farmer's face. The viscerality and sweat of the farmer's toil on page after page is a nice contrast to the real pain he feels.

r is a very personal little mini that details the death of someone very close to the artist, printed on purple paper with what looks like colored pencil. There are some striking images, like the cartoonist-as-bear hunched over a sheet of paper with slitted eyes. THE MUD BOG is an experiment in color, detailing a funny memory of hiding out and watching guys driving their pick-up trucks into a mud pit, gunning the gas and getting it covered with mud. Why they do this and why people secretly watched it is besides the point; it was clearly something that both groups loved for different reasons. POCKET PORN was something Kubby drew collaborating with another writer and drawn with a brush, giving it a scratchy quality not seen in the artist's other work. It's a story of fetishes gone slightly awry, as a dominant woman and a more submissive woman who likes feet meet behind a dumpster. As the dominant woman is using her foot to pleasure the sub, the sub makes the mistake of suggesting that she be "rocked like a baby". That angers the dominant, who then uses her feet to slap her legs and ass raw. It's a visceral, ugly series of moments that clearly bring mixed feelings to the sub. The brush works both for and against the artist here: the scratchy quality of the line and the way it blurs reinforces the nature of the experience, but there are points at which there's a lack of overall clarity. It's still one of the more interesting examples of comics erotica I've read.



The artist's most-distributed comic is BEAUTY PATROL, a delightful series of fake-outs, science lectures, psychedelia, long-distance longings and time dilations. The book starts with a comic called "Beauty Patrol", about a bear making his way around the world. It's promptly crumpled mid-page by the artist of the strip, Cody Roder. The rest of the comic finds Cody going about her day off, meeting a strange person with whom she shares a connection they don't understand. It's there that Cody starts to wonder if deja vu is simply our understanding that time isn't a straight line. Meanwhile, we also follow the day of Cody's long-distance love Roxie Dagger, who who is on a more deliberate quest (to see her favorite band) but winds up in circumstances as unexpected as Cody. There's a spontaneity to Kubby's line here that I enjoy that carries it through some of its rougher pages; indeed, the more scribbly the line, the more the images burst off the page.



PIZZA WIZARD #2, CALL ALL MY DAWGS #3, and SUGARCUBE by Sam Gaskin. Gaskin's PIZZA WIZARD and other humor comics are sort of like Mat Brinkman on Pop Rocks. They carry fantasy elements, ludicrous quests and earthy & dense foregrounds and backgrounds. Gaskin's imagery is a bit simpler and easier to process than Brinkman's, and much sillier. There's definitely a story going on in these one-page episodes, revolving around the title character's quest for a magic pizza, but they're really an excuse for propulsive world-exploration in the Fort Thunder tradition. Gaskin is also working in the tradition of classic Sunday comic strips, supporting the main strip with shorter strips at the bottom of the page (usually tangential to the main story), wacky puzzles, and even hand-made advertisements (the weirdest of which was a straightforward ad for a fast food restaurant that winds up playing a significant role later in the story.



That's an apt metaphor, because Gaskin's work has a delightful junk food quality to it. In CALL ALL MY DAWGS #3, Gaskin gives us his ode to the schlock comedian Sinbad. Of course, it's filtered through Gaskin's demented imagination, so we see Sinbad bemused by the Cheshire Cat, posing in various outfits, having his TV son defecate on a toybox to spite him and dream about Kenan 'n Kel and barbecue sauce, wondering if he's become a "ghost dad". It's simultaneous a perfect tribute and deconstruction of a familiar but awful pop culture figure. It's comics like these that make Gaskin a singular figure as a humorist, even when he wears his visual inspirations on his metaphorical sleeve.



SUGARCUBE stands as a very surprising and personal work for Gaskin, and a wholly unexpected one. The story's protagonist, Andy, learns at age 20 that he has type-1 diabetes; and his whole life changes. This comic is less about the disease than the way it made Andy feel like his youth was over. By the end of the story, his earnest recklessness felt out of place, but he was no happier being forced to grow up so quickly. Gaskin eschews the more textured approach of his other work and instead uses a minimalist approach: clear lines, sparse backgrounds and iconic character work. Gaskin is trying to get across a lot of pain here, and I'm guessing he went this route so as not to overdo it. He also intersperses some of the heavier moments of depression with quotidian anecdotes about the mechanics of testing for blood sugar and injecting insulin as well as funny anecdotes about how and why he started smoking marijuana. That actually winds up as a significant plot point when he and his best friend are caught smoking by a policeman, the single event that effectively ended Andy's whimsical childhood. This is a comic without a neat and tidy ending; Andy feels trapped and the comic ends with an absurd fantasy sequence about becoming a subsidy farmer, living a quiet life. This isn't so much an ending as an escape, a denial; Andy has a long way to go to becoming a fully-realized person.