45 Days Of CCS, #8: Hannah Kaplan and Anna McGlynn

Hannah Kaplan is someone I hadn't seen in seven years, which was the last time I reviewed her work. I was happy to run into her at the Philadelphia Comics Expo and got a lot of work that was new to me. Kaplan's work is funny, frank, and restlessly smart. The work covered here is from 2017 to late 2022. 

We're All Gonna Die One Day is in the classic Kaplan style: philosophical diary strips done in colored pencil with an emphasis on sex, friendships, and creativity. Her strip from 5/22/17 talks briefly about the agitation of feeling horny, leading to her discussing why the show Twin Peaks was meaningful to her. its focus on the tangibility of evil, death, and aging allowed her a kind of comfort, in part because all of them are expressed as illusory to some degree. There's an extended sequence of going to the comics show CAKE in Chicago, including a particularly funny one where a tipsy Kaplan approaches cartoonists Kevin Huizenga and Gabrielle Bell to see if they remember her. Kaplan's use of color does a lot of heavy lifting for the emotional narrative of her comics, along with making them interesting to look at. 

Lately jumps ahead to 2018, done in the same style, with a lot of visual flourishes. This digs further into the essence of Kaplan's comics, which can be roughly summed up as "What is my purpose?" Finding a way to connect her desires with a need for meaningful interactions and a larger sense of what she can do in the world drives these comics. This is true whether she's hanging out with her close friends, feeling frustration over an interesting temp job ending after a week, going to therapy, and dating a new & odd guy. Kaplan's work reminds me a bit of Gabrielle Bell's, only she's much more open in revealing details to the reader. The main similarity is her sense of humor, both in terms of witty dialogue and funny drawings. 

Fantasy Land is an interesting comic that seeks to distance an author who usually (but not exclusively) works in memoir from the experience of a character (who bears a great resemblance to the author) who has decided to try "sugar dating" as a way to make money. Of course, this has been well-documented in M.K. Harkness' comics, though her circumstances were far different than the ones of the unnamed character here. It's an important distinction to make because Kaplan is revealing certain things here that are otherwise not discussed in her comics. This comic depicts the fledgling era of the character's career as a sex worker, and the ambiguity allows for Kaplan to show the awkward humor, the feeling of self-empowerment, and both the mundane qualities of sex work as a job like any other but also the ways in which it is dangerous. Using this bit of distance in the way that Phoebe Gloeckner does in her work allows the focus to be on the narrative itself instead of the voyeuristic qualities of the experience. 

Diary 2011/2021 is an interesting variation on the daily diary comic. Starting with January 1st, Kaplan does a page from 2011 that is immediately followed by a single panel on the same date, but ten years later. The entries are generally more mundane than her usual comics, but the point of this is to take a gestalt view of her life as a 25-year-old with a particular group of friends and as a 35-year-old dealing with the global pandemic in Philadelphia. Kaplan cleverly makes the images similar in each pairing, even if the life events they portrayed were dramatically different. 

August Diary was done a few years after her last comics as a way of working with her friend Anna McGlynn. The threads are interesting to pick up on here, as Kaplan is moving in with her boyfriend Kyler, someone first seen in comics from five years earlier during a time when her dating life was much more fluid and tenuous. Kaplan notes feeling a greater overall sense of solidity even as she remains unsure of precisely what qualities define her, and this feeling runs through this entire collection. While much of the comic is devoted to moving and creating a new normal in living with a partner, this is all contrasted by Kaplan contracting COVID and time taking on a weird, fluid quality. As always, her comics are less about specific events and more about someone living in her head who struggles to be in the moment. 

Finally, Alone Together/Together Alone #2 is a collaboration with McGlynn from 2018. Kaplan uses a six-panel grid in the style of Gabrielle Bell with a purple wash here, and the tone of the comics is similar to Bell's traditional July diary comics. There are more shenanigans than usual for Kaplan and her line is a lot more refined and careful than in some of her other work. Her droll sense of humor and ear for interesting dialogue are both working well here, but the slightly ramshackle and colorful quality of her other comics is what I tend to like most about them. That style is certainly a better fit for working with McGlynn, whose comics have a more structured sense of narrative than Kaplan's and are generally more polished. Her self-caricature is delightfully sloppy, giving it a cartoony contrast to everything else she draws. It's interesting to see where the two friends intersect as well as when they're completely apart, like when McGlynn goes to Amsterdam. Overall, Kaplan's comics are thought-provoking, experimental, and funny, which isn't what I tend to think of with regard to diary comics. Hopefully, she will continue to make more. 

Thirty Days of CCS #9: Girl Talk & My Pace 2

My Pace Volume 2 is an anthology edited by Iona Fox and Anna McGlynn under their Rod & Cone aegis.

Girl Talk is a classic CCS anthology: hand-made and aggressively bold in terms of its theme and structure. This time around, an artist adapted part of another artist's diary, fictionalizing it to create a narrative. The hand-cut cover with various punched-out skeletons is beautiful and a nice touch. Anna McGlynn took an entry from Fox and turned it into a visceral slice-of-life story centered summer in the city. Our protagonist, Vivian, is sick of being in her cramped, hot apartment while getting calls from friends smoking weed and hooking up with random guys. McGlynn drew Vivian in such a way that she was irritated with anyone having a good time with a potential romantic partner, eventually drawing in x's for eyes. When a loser guy she has a crush on won't even hit on her because her breasts were "consumed with sadness", that's her breaking point, one that only snack cakes will alleviate. The rawness of McGlynn's storytelling is a nice fit for depicting the kind of daywhere people feel like they're melting.

Fox illustrating Cooper Whittlesey's psychedelic insights was a particular pleasure, as her quirky character design, decorative touch and oft-sketchy line were perfect for a comic about walking around and listening to music. Whittlesey and first-time cartoonist Alyse Burnside were inspired by McGlynn's diary, an office story about a young woman named Jane who is frequently sexually harassed and humiliated by her boss. It's revealed that she's the result of her father having sex with his mother, a fact she tries to work through with fantasy (both in real life and with porn). The battle between her trying to assert her worth as a human being that deserves love and the abuse she receives culminates in her taking a bus to the end of the line and meeting a naked woman next to a run-off pipe and perceiving her as someone connected to her. Nothing is explicitly revealed regarding this identity or even reality in this situation, and that ambiguity charges the strip even more. With 16 panels per page, Whittlesey & Burnside pummel the reader with tiny print, grotesque drawing and oblique angles, yet the horror and absurdity of it all is strangely hypnotic in its own way. Kaplan drew a convoluted account of a story from Fox, as it's about a day she was supposed to get a stitch out from someone who turned out to be an ex-girlfriend of an ex-boyfriend. There are amusing rabbit-hole details that emerge from the story, but this story was fairly lightweight compared to the others. That's not surprising since it's just four pages, as it served as a digestive more than as a crucial part of the anthology.

My Pace, an anthology about marching to one's own drummer, had a tight seven-person lineup. It's not as conceptually interesting as Girl Talk and is more uneven, as the editors went wide and took some risks with their contributors, not all of which paid off. Sam Szabo's silly ant piece feels like something out of a 1980s Steve Willis minicomic, but the way in which she sticks to the premise of the ant janitor and its mystic implications won me over by the end, although this slight story was way too long. Collage artist Sara Hebert contributed clip art with statements about her anger about not asking for anything regarding her needs when having sex. It's short, stark and bold, and quite a shift from the first story. Sean Knickerbocker's crisp line art was another nice change of pace, as he wrote a story about a guy going back to the desolate area in which he grew up. Knickerbocker takes a wrecking ball to ideas like nostalgia and closure, as coming back to his old house was walking through a minefield of triggers. The kicker is that the friend who came told him that this was, in fact what he wanted--to relive the trauma instead of learning how to move past it.

Iris Yan's anthropomorphic autobio is always dryly witty, and even this story about the death of her mother is no exception. When she gets a wreathe "from the team", she imagines her mother was on a secret soccer team. Having her librarian mother's ashes on a shelf so she could read whenever she wanted was a sweet touch. Mississippi's text lettering was distracting, especially for a comic that was so roughly drawn. There were points where this meditation on loneliness was rough in a way that was lovely and expressive, and other points where it let down the story's flow. The more abstract nature of Megan Snowe's comic made that text feel more suitable, since it was a comic about texting, the hand and arm broken down in such a way so as to render them into almost abstract shapes. Finally Summer Pierre's piece about how she came to comics is one I've read elsewhere, but it was a perfect choice for ending this particular volume. It's a sweet, funny story about Pierre meeting "comics' (an anthropomorphic character accounting for all of the art form), having flirtations with music, art and poetry, and then one night coming back to comics ("It's you! It's always been you!"). Her use of the grid highlights her whimsical self-caricature design by featuring it in every panel, almost invariably in a different pose and position each time. It's a subtle way of making the reader work a little in every panel and keep their eye fresh when they absorb new text.

Thirty Days of CCS #8: Hannah Kaplan

Hannah Kaplan is one of a younger set of autobiographical cartoonists whom are especially frank about their mental health, their overall existential position on the world and their sex lives. Politics is also something else that's become a part of her comics, thanks to the changes the country's going through.

Wandering is a hand-cut, screenprinted comic that's nonetheless restrained in its color scheme (olive green and red). It serves as a brief introduction to her work and persona, ever restless as she balances a desire for solitude with the necessity of connection. It also alludes to the increasing number of marches and rallies that concerned people have started to throng to this year, especially in big cities. The personal is political, as the saying goes, and that saying has never been more true. Many of Kaplan's comics explicitly explore that idea.

Self Help is a work of fiction that highlights Kaplan's ability to zero in on excruciatingly painful moments of social awkwardness and then let the characters twist. This copy is grayscaled and I'm not sure it was meant to ideally be read this way, since all of her other comics are in color. It starts with a woman named Mel having lunch with her friend, who is about to get married and has those sorts of problems. Mel begins the story by relating a "tapping" technique that she uses to strike her pressure points so as to "transform my negative emotions". Mel continues with affirmations all the way to work, where she's approached by her work fling CJ, of whom she told her friend that they were keeping it casual, but she thought he was falling for her. Instead, this unctuous individual tells her that he's seeing someone else at work now ("She's fantastic! Have you talked to her?"), and even though he's "all about the polyamory thing", his new girlfriend didn't want him seeing anyone else at their company.

That kicked off her trying more affirmations that wound up betraying her real feelings ("Even though CJ isn't all that great a guy and actually his hair is really greasy and he smells like onions and he rejected me...") and then firing up the dating app Tinder on her phone--which led to a talking-to in front of her boss which grew increasingly (and hilariously) more awkward by the second. Things get worse and worse until she finally acts to look like she visualizes herself: as a bespectacled brunette with earrings and a mustache. Ridiculous times call for extreme measures, including becoming someone else altogether, and the end of the comic reflects the first time she stopped needing to go through constant affirmation. While Kaplan's drawing is rough in spots, her ability to create expressive characters and depict body language is all she really needed to make this comic work.

A Quick And Easy Guide To Finding A Husband had a disclaimer on the cover that it was based on a true story with a fictional ending. Done in a pink and blue wash, it's an odd story: Kaplan proposes marriage to a man from Australia living in Brooklyn with whom she'd had a single hook-up, because he was having Visa problems. It's an awkward, funny, and strange way of looking at an awkward and strange kind of marriage, because it involved sex and cohabitation--it wasn't just a paper marriage. One thing to note about Kaplan if it hasn't been clear: she's a hilarious writer. Going to Brooklyn and encountering hipsters exchanging cheeses on picnic baskets and declaring their creativity, she nailed that sense of alienation that pretension can create. He's blunt when they discuss why she's doing this: "I guess it's all material for you anyway". They wind up getting married, it winds up going disastrously, but they cleverly reconcile when they decide to date other people. However, they wind up communicating through their Tinder profiles (shades of "Escape (The Pina Colada Song"!), to the point where they stop talking face to face! It's a funny, clever idea. Kaplan draws people and places with a messy, schlubby, lived-in quality: people as they are on a day-to-day basis, not some idealized idea of the same.

Is This OK? #7 is the latest issue of her autobio series, and this is the real meat of her work. Her coded use of colored pencils gives the comic a vivid yet clear sense of flow. That's especially true when there are multiple characters; she'll often match the color of the line for the characters with the color of their lettering. It's a small but valuable detail that reduces confusion just a bit, keeping the reader totally involved with the page. The book starts on election day in 2016 and ends on February 1st, 2017--three months of all kinds of turbulence. Kaplan bases this book on her willingness to be emotionally raw, open and vulnerable. The palpable sense of trauma after the election extends even to her therapist, who suggests a kind of group trauma on top of everything else going on in our lives.

Some of the stories run a few pages, but most are a single page with a 2x3 grid. There are stories about work (including one where she had a nice male customer and she didn't that he wasn't even trying to hit on her), stories about the frequently contentious character of her relationship with her boyfriend, a strip where she follows the full moon and an odd one where she appears nude in six straight panels with forlorn expressions, with the lyrics of Meredith Brooks' song "Bitch" as the text. My favorite was one where an old boyfriend came into town, and her thoughts were in red cursive script, like "I don't know how to be nice to you". Trips across town to hang out at a bar are interspersed with road trips to DC to protest the inauguration (there's one strip where she tries to count the number of pussy hats that she sees but there are too many). The issue ends with a stunningly open and clear talk with her boyfriend about their relationship that results in matter of factly breaking up. The combination of her scribbly and expressive line, the use of color that never fails to add clarity to the proceedings, and her relentless pursuits of authentic experience and happiness are quite potent, adding punch to every page.

Thirty Days of CCS #20:My Pace

Rod and Cone is the publishing imprint of Anna McGlynn and Iona Fox, and My Pace is their latest anthology that's mostly from CCS students and grads. It's a very nicely curated anthology whose contents manage to fit together well despite veering from confessional autobio to visceral weirdness. There's a scrawled, intimate quality common to all of the work here, beginning with Hannah Kaplan's "Summer Diary". These are almost embarrassingly confessional in nature, as Kaplan lets her insecurities and her sexual encounters out into the open and on to the page. She's not afraid to plainly draw her own nude body as well as those of her lovers, but the effect is raw and immediate, as opposed to titillating. Kaplan deals with the loss of an important relationship, the confusion of sleeping with her boss and the emotional challenge of living around in a loose, freehand pencil style that's all about capturing emotion through image as quickly as possible.

Cooper Whittlesey's four-panel and one panel strips veer somewhere between intensely personal and intimate and absurd at a Sam Henderson level. His drawing style is a sort of frenzied scrawl, with lots of difficult-to-read lettering and smudged images. Like Kaplan, it's like he's trying to get these thoughts about sex and "photos of every man she's ever been with--with erections!" out of his head an onto paper as quickly as possible. After the harshness of the first two artists, Fox's own "November Diary" is a smooth counterpoint. It's a lovely account of a trip from Vermont to Quebec for a zine fest, though not before Fox (who is also a farmer) stops off to examine a farm in Quebec. These strips are every bit as intimate if not as revealing as the other strips, as Fox doesn't stop to provide context to the information she discusses, nor does she seek to conceal anything. Her self-caricature is amusing, with a loop of hair on her head, and one gets a sense of contentment with considerable labors and struggles by the end of the story.

McGlynn keeps up the diary theme, only she goes back in time with "My Future Boyfriend", written by a fictional character named Vivian Howard. The rhythm of the narration is meant to mimic both a diary as well as a director's notes for a movie. The writing is beautiful and painful, as Vivian is spun around in a million directions by her own brain, her own hormones and the wonderful and terrible confusion of adolescent being. Drawing the strip on lined paper gave it a certain authenticity, and the use of imagery not directly related to the narration was clever and hinted at the way Vivian fought off feelings of jealousy and distrust and embraced those around her.

Reilly Hadden's "Land Grove" uses his thin, cartoony line to create another story about a dangerous, unstable environment and attempts to find safety in it. When a man goes out in a bicycle away from his partner and their tent, how he negotiates danger and the reward he receives is not unlike an Aesop's fable. Stephanie Kwok's textual diary provides yet another take on the concept, as she uses a variety of fonts to create a visual framing device for her rambling thoughts and observations. Throughout, the theme of wanting to connect but feeling isolated is repeated, her own shouts into the void an act of defiance against loneliness. Sophie Yanow's "Gaslight", featuring a figure off-panel talking to a prone figure on-panel, offers a different take on intimacy. The figure off-panel conflates honesty with intimacy, as though being honest about doing horrible things excused the horrible things we do. It's an appropriate capper to an anthology where every artist explored their emotions, their limits and their struggles in each story in an attempt at authenticity. Yanow reminds us that authenticity without humanity is no virtue. As always, her command over her line is so precise that she uses a handful of tremulous slashes and geometric figures to get at that sense of being devastated. All told, this is one of the strongest CCS-related anthologies I've read.