31 Days Of CCS, #21: Ivy Lynn Allie

Ivy Lynn Allie's most recent minicomics show an artist who's come into her own stylistically and as a writer. Her short fiction is exceptionally clever, subtle, and unsettling, and her ability to effortlessly cross genres mark her as someone who can go in any direction as a cartoonist and do well.

Last Stop, for example, mixes two genres. There's a heaviness to this story as she quickly establishes her nameless protagonist as a man who's reached the end of his rope. He's broke, he doesn't have a job, and he's completely isolated himself from his family and his therapist. Allie gets this across with one succinct panel. This is a character psychodrama. The story begins when he falls asleep on the subway, only to awaken at a stop where a talking raccoon in a cop's uniform rousts him and throws him off the train, and he finds himself in a part of the city where anthropomorphic animals are dominant. That minor-key tone of his depression mixed with the weird absurdity of the world he finds himself trapped in are a potent high-concept, and him finding another human and glomming on to him provide the spark for the beginning of a potentially longer story. As it stands, the combination of despair and lunacy resonates. One can see Allie's drawing tighten up and sharpen as the issue unfolds, with the black gutter space emphasizing the comic's sense of gloom. The character design, especially for the animals, is expressive; it's silly but also gritty and realistic at the same time.

My Friend Meredith is a brutal take on how childhood friendships can be every bit as abusive as other relationships. A girl named Terri and her family visit their friends, and a loving, open Terri is happy to see her same-age friend, Meredith. Allie is not subtle in waving the red flags regarding Meredith from the beginning: she wants Terri to watch a scary movie at her, and then screams at Terri and hits her with a pine cone when Terri beats her in a foot race. The point of the story is not that it establishes Meredith as a sociopath (and Allie does pile it on), it's that Terri is willing to take it, because she thinks of her as a friend, no matter what. What's left unsaid are the social forces that pushed Terri to think this was so, and how her faith in them clearly wavered in the comics' final, silent panels. 

Sanity Check was not only the most fully-realized of these three comics, it was one of the better minicomics I read in 2020. It's a collection of her shorter comics in the tradition of series like Eightball, and the small aesthetic touches and interstitial pieces in the comic make it greater than the sum of its parts. It's a satisfying read from beginning to end, starting with "Of Course, No One Knew." Allie begins the piece in media res, as she at first leads the reader to believe that this is a flashback comic of some kind with invisible narrators talking about a film they had made together. Allie deliberately confuses the reader as to the point of view in this story while relishing the opportunity to talk about the making of a small-budget horror flick. The swerve she introduces has a huge payoff that makes everything make sense while revealing how different projects can be hugely meaningful to people, especially young people. 

"I Made A Friend," with pink as its spot color, is a horribly tragic and tender account of the magic spark of creativity and how cruelly and quickly it can be snuffed out. "The Situation" is about a woman whose job it is to remove poisonous toads, but who didn't want to kill them. The decisions she's forced to make are heartbreaking, but it's even more heartbreaking when it's clear this experience hardened her emotionally. The pea soup-green in this comic is crucial in establishing its atmosphere. Allie's restraint as a storyteller and willingness to explore emotionally complex characters and situations signals that she's ready to sink her teeth into a longform comic or continue to build this body of short story work. 

31 Days Of CCS #15: Betsey Swardlick, Ivy Allie

Ivy Allie is a first-year CCS student who's demonstrated some sharp comedic instincts in her work to date. Funny Fables is her take on the CCS Aesop project, and she did a meta version of "The Fox And The Crow" that was hilarious. She took the original story, where the fox flattered the crow into dropping a desired pie, and then turned it into a Tom & Jerry routine where each animal sought revenge and the pie. All the while, the narrator kept going, alarmed at what was going on, and coming up with new morals for each story after the latest turn of events. The narrator even winds up playing a part in the narrative itself, as the animals could hear them. Allie's cartooning is fluid and appropriately cartoony.

The Castle Caper reminds me a bit of Mathew New's comics in that there's an unlikely duo going on Indiana Jones-style adventures. In this comic, it's a mummy and a professor's assistant who go on a treasure hunt. The mummy (nicknamed "Monty") had his tomb robbed hours after his death, and being trapped for 4,000 years wasn't going to make finding it easy. This is another breezy, silly, and funny comic whose action is fluid and clear. Allie's use of color brightens up the empty spaces in her panel and even heightens the action at crucial junctures. Allie's character design is a bit fussy in some spots, like the scribbly character of hair for some of the characters. It distracts from the clean aesthetic of the comic and wasn't really needed, given that strong use of color. It's really the only element of her work that isn't simple and fluid. Other than that, it's clear that she's ready to tackle longer work.

I've long enjoyed Betsey Swardlick's punk rock monster-comedy comics for years, from Failwolves to her collaboration on Glamera. She's currently doing a one-woman anthology called Spaghetti Punch, where she's throwing out different ideas in an effort to see what sticks. The first issue features a story about a witch-powered ice cream stand with unusual flavors, whose price is a brief blood-letting. The exasperation felt when half of the clientele want something without dairy or gluten is hilarious. There's also a "debate" between two wrestlers about going shirtless or not and the understanding that disassociating while driving is not a good thing.

Spaghetti Punch #2 finds Swardlick hitting on her next great idea: "Party People." The concept is a world where vampires hold parties where the caterers/waiters are expected not only to serve them drinks but also to be available for blood-sucking. This is an absolutely brutal satire of the idle rich, but it's also a fascinating account of a particular young woman who really got into the experience of having her blood sucked. It's a kind of horror version of Upstairs, Downstairs, looking at both the vapid aristocracy and the foibles of the workers. Finally, Swardlick was the key mover in Ratburn, a comic about a band of anthropomorphic rats. This is mostly fragmentary, but it bounces between the band in its decadent punk rock heyday and years later, when the lead singer is a teacher but still invested in the dream. There's also a rat couple that Laurel Lynn Leake and Amelia Onorato do pin-ups for. This is an interesting set of ideas that bear further fleshing out.