31 Days Of CCS, #3: Ana Two, Iris Gudeon

Ana Two is one of the most exciting artists to emerge from CCS this decade (and I believe this so fervently, that we will be publishing book by them soon). This little mini, Storm Drain, came from this year's Riff Raff anthology, which in turn is edited by CCS alum King Ray. This is only a 4-page, but so many of Two's interesting storytelling elements are at work here. This is a two-track narrative, with the first arc being about a nameless narrator leaving behind a journal on a napkin that yearned to be drained, washed away, and become a new person. This accompanies the distorted, psychedelic imagery of a body wasting away, becoming skeletal, and finally being reformed. The bottom third of each page is taken up by big text, acting as a sort of call-and-response with the rest of the narrative. Every gesture and statement Two makes in their comics is big. The emotions are over-the-top, bursting out--uncontainable. The desire to live, to die, to control, to be controlled, supercedes everything else, and the exaggerated art reflects. 

I find Iris Gudeon's strange little comics to be utterly baffling in a way I enjoy. The figures (usually animals) are simple and cute, the humor is often corny in a deliberately labored way, and it all amounts to what you see is what you get. There's no larger message, no intricate character work, no intense drawings. It is purely strange and cute gag work, but less in terms of having punchlines and more in terms of one artist's fancy flowing smoothly and freely on the page. All of this is true about Standing Cats, whose sensibilities are somewhere between Dr. Seuss and B.Kliban. Drawn in what looks like colored pencils, there's a vibrancy to these yellow cats going about various activities, including building chairs (with or without a sense of obligation), doing taxes, and staring at the sun. It's just a bit of nonsense, but I always look forward to this kind of nonsense from Gudeon. One thing I did notice is that their line is much more confident here than it was in their earlier minis. 

45 Days Of CCS, #21: Crank Case & Iris Gudeon

Iris Gudeon's comics are odd and funny. Using a four-panel grid and a deceptively simple line, Gudeon's storytelling leans into a cute, upbeat aesthetic in order to disguise the sheer weirdness of what she's actually doing. In The Warm (worm farm), for example, the reader meets a farmer who works on the titular worm farm. What Gudeon is doing here is a shaggy dog joke, as the initially cute concept (a worm farm!) gets weirder and weirder. The farmer, desperate for human (or really, non-worm) contact, gets increasingly awkward until it's revealed that EVERYTHING is worms. I laughed out loud at the surprise punchline when I turned the final page. 

One of my favorite CCS assignments is when students are put together in order to collaborate on a particular genre assignment. They divvy up responsibilities like traditional mainstream comics. In the example of Crank Case, the team was Adrienne Adkins, Amelia B.C. Dutton, Fern Pellerin, and Fernanda Nocedal. Adkins did the designs for two of the characters, layouts, and lettering. Dutton did character and style designs, pencils, and the book design. Nocedal designed another character and did character inks. Pellerin was production manager and did background inks. 

The team decided to do "90s style science-fiction shonen manga," and the result is pretty solid. The story is told in a Western style (left-to-right), and it merges futuristic dystopian sci-fi with very familiar fantasy tropes. The story follows Poco, an engineer/scrap-seeker, and their robot dog K-9, as they meet an elven sorceress named Phae who was banished to this realm. Most of the comic is a chase scene, as Poco's competitors chased them down before Phae unleashed a nasty spell. The character design for Poco and Phae was by two different artists, but it was a clever idea to make these characters from completely different genres. It highlighted how weird and alien Phae seemed in Poco's gritty, junk-strewn environment in a dump. The composition was all over the place on every page: dutch angles, two-page spreads, inset panels, and other dizzying, disorienting choices typical of shonen. This was one of the better examples of this kind of collaboration that I've seen.

45 Days Of CCS, #34: Iris Gudeon

Iris Gudeon's comics are delicate, deeply warm and sincere, and clever. One Horse Farm is the humor entry here, as it's a POV story where the reader is being offered a job at a farm that strangely seems to have one of many different kinds of animals. The eventual punchline is given to the reader in a manner that's deliberately awkward. Gudeon is so good at color that its absence here lessens the impact of the story, but it seems to be something of a lark anyway. 

Candy Is Changing is a beautiful, poetic comic about a piece of candy in a wrapper and the changes she must face. Here, we can see Gudeon's talent using color, adding both a sense of brightness and intensity. The comic can be seen as a metaphor for any number of things, but I especially like the wrapper initially being something that provides safety and solidity but eventually becomes constricting until it is shed. Gudeon really gets at the heart of an existential crisis of belief in that it's not only an individual change that is perceived, but one where the entire world ceases to make sense. Of course, the two are inextricably linked, but it's impossible to understand that in the moment. Gudeon uses cute character design to get at much deeper ideas. 

Cat 14 is a beautiful blend of different coloring strategies. It looks like there's crayon, colored pencil, and maybe even some watercolors in there. The different textures of the color add to the gentle richness of the storytelling. There's a Little Prince vibe to this story, as explorers Ellsworth and Danley walk around a very small planet. However, this isn't a story about loneliness but rather curiosity, intimacy, and affection. As the duo walks around a swamp looking for another example of a cat-plant species, they gently poke fun at each other, make schemes, get lost, and otherwise meander around pleasantly. Amusingly, the various cats featured in the comic are based on Gudeon's CCS classmates. There are times when Gudeon's line disappears a little in terms of keeping the characters a solid presence on the page, but this is mostly just a delight.