31 Days Of CCS, #10: Leise Hook & J.D. Lunt

Leise Hook has had some early success in her career with the New Yorker and other venues, and given her spare but expressive line and thoughtful approach to storytelling. There's a reserved quality to her work that provides an interesting contrast to its inherent emotional content. For example, The Nest is a story about COVID and quarantining, as related to various attempts at mourning doves laying eggs outside her windowsill in the New York apartment she shares with her partner. The eggs laid were always a sort of physical manifestation of the renewal of life that chased away the existential dread of the pandemic. Each time, something would intervene to kill the eggs. Sometimes it was a storm, sometimes it was shoddy nest construction, and finally it was wily crows who were aware that Hook was trying to shoo them away. As COVID rates rose and Hook wondered how people become aware when the world has turned against them, she endeavored to keep trying with the doves, and as it is implied, with her own struggle against giving into despair. 

One way Hook does this is through humor. Some Jokes & Drawings contains a number of single-panel gag strips rejected by the New Yorker, but it also serves to act as another kind of COVID journal. There are a lot of very amusing conceptual gags here, like the masks of comedy and tragedy being obscured by N95 masks, so there's no way to tell which is which. There are jokes about social media, masking, the anxiety of zoom meetings, and the apocalypse. Many of these things are related. There are some solid gags here; a few are a bit dated, but most of them still land in a direct but mostly gentle way. 

Birthday Blues, by J.D. Lunt. Everything about this comic is big: the pages, the drawings, and the feelings. Lunt uses 8.5" x 11" paper for this memoir about the passage of time and changes in identity and circumstances. A lot of this comic is about processing things creatively; he discusses being part of a life-changing comics residency but notes that he's had trouble finishing projects since then. He talks about his strained relationship with social media, and how travel can be an antidote for it. Most importantly, he discusses the role of the folk artist Bert Jansch and his album Birthday Blues have had in his life at various points, including as a younger man at an evangelical college. Ultimately, this is a comic about coming to terms with mourning, empathy, and isolation. Lunt's PTSD (as detailed in previous comics) often leads him to isolation and melancholy, but the comic itself is a way to reach out and acknowledge the perils of isolation and embrace the gift (and risks) of connection. Lunt's willingness to be open and vulnerable is a gift both to readers and himself. There are times when his line looks like he's perhaps worrying too much about naturalism, and it can make some of his pages look stiffly drawn. In other spots, he abandons that for a more cartoony and expressive style that's far more adept at expressing the immediacy of his feelings.

Thirty One Days Of CCS #24: A Whole Lifetime Of Firsts

A Whole Lifetime Of Firsts. This is the second collaboration between CCS cartoonists and the White River Junction VA, featuring veteran's stories focusing in on women. The first CCS/VA collaboration was good, but this one is excellent. There's a level of depth and execution in transcribing the stories of women in the military in a variety of ways that's striking. On top of that, telling stories that haven't necessarily been part of the public discourse up til recently is also something that adds to their impact.

"Mitzi's Story" is written by co-editor J.D. Lunt (CCS president James Sturm is the other editor). She is a former NCO who wound up in places like Kosovo and Iraq. For her, even though she's a closeted lesbian, military service was her life. That was also despite a sexual assault and soldiers of lower rank frequently ignoring her orders. When she was honorably discharged because of an injury, she was ill-equipped to face civilian life despite being married. She got hooked on drugs, arrested and tried to kill herself before really deciding to embrace rehab. After a lifetime of being told she wasn't good or smart enough and enduring enough PTSD for a dozen people, her ability to endure and thrive is simply remarkable. Garcia uses a standard nine-panel grid with a visual approach that's a little ragged, yet appropriate for the subject.

"I Got Your Six" is from Daryl Seitchik & Dan Nott, and it's about an Army nurse who was in Viet Nam. There's a lot of story to tell here, and Seitchik & Nott use a twelve-panel grid to pack it all in. Despite that, they tell the story with a great deal of clarity, making frequent use of switching black & white negative space. Every panel is well-balanced in this regard, making the linework easy to grasp and contextualize. This story focuses more on her experiences in the war as a nurse and less on what happened afterwards, though she does note how much hostility she faced as a veteran of Viet Nam when she returned. What I found most fascinating is her intuitive understanding of how important psychological care was for soldiers in addressing PTSD at a time when it was not understood or used.

"Isolated Duty" is a story with the opposite scenario: a woman in the Navy in the 70s got injured and met the love of her life who was also a woman in the military. Drawn by Rachel Ford and written by Sarah Yahm and Kurt Shaffert, this is a nicely-constructed comic that at times is perhaps a bit too spare with regard to facial expressions. The theme of being taken care of and now taking care of her partner resonates, especially with the way they keep their romance alive despite her partner's increasingly diminished mental capacity. Finally, "Kathi: A Life Well Traveled" is about an Air Force nurse who was in Europe and later Viet Nam, and it's by Catherine Garbarino and Kelly L. Swann. The artists make extensive use of grayscale shading to add to the sense of this being akin to an old book of photos, filled with memories. Kathi is a relentlessly upbeat presence and was regarded as such in Viet Nam, even earning a Bronze Star for the way she enhanced morale. This is not to say that there weren't painful moments, like a truck accident that she still couldn't discuss, and a young boy in a leper colony that she wanted to adopt but couldn't, but she still mostly stayed positive. All of this was told from her perspective of being treated for cancer at eighty years old, staying positive to the end. The way each story had a different focus and featured several different armed services spoke to the variety of experiences, as well as the need for each of these women to tell their story. These are stories that needed to be told, and the artists found different ways to get there.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #11: J.D. Lunt

J.D. Lunt came to cartooning later in life, and he's been quite upfront that expressing himself through comics has been a way of dealing with his Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Without going into too many details, Lunt revealed that it came as a result of years of working in the mental health industry and one debilitating case in particular. However, as he discusses in one of his minicomics related to the subject, Watching The Stick, his PTSD was triggered in part by unresolved traumas from earlier in his life. This is both a personal and instructive comic, as Lunt details what's involved with EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprogramming). This is a form of trauma therapy whose goal is to help the patient process trauma by moving it from its perpetual home in short term memory into the part of the brain that processes long-term memories. It involves following the therapist swing a stick in from of the patient for a couple of minutes, paying close attention to the end of the stick, and then talking about what one is immediately feeling at that time.

In Lunt's case, it unlocked some remarkably detailed memories of being a child and going through various traumas with his mother. The therapist also worked with him in moving him into a mental space after she asked him how he wanted to feel, and his reply was simply: safe. Lunt compared that question to the Biblical quote of Jesus asking a blind man if he wanted to be healed; in many ways, it's a loaded question, one where there's a lot of responsibility in answering yes. Lunt's bluntness is refreshing, as the last thing he wants is a comic where he's feeling sorry for himself, because "it seems both exploitative and predictable in a comic", as he has illustrations of comics like "Neurotic Boy Outsider" and "Mama's Boy" below that caption.

Lunt's drawing skills are rudimentary at best, and it's clear that the subject matter of these comics is hard for him to sit with, as there are a number of misspellings. That said, it's clear that the training he received at CCS had an impact on him, as his page design and composition is striking and his storytelling skills are strong. Looking at Comic In October, this is a comic where Lunt clearly slowed down and worked hard at making the visuals in the comic a crucial part of the overall storytelling. From the wrinkles on his forehead (with the rest of his face obscured) when he's triggered by the sound of frightened children to the way he faded out the presence of birds but left little cross-hatchings that his dog could sense and sniff, Lunt piles on details that reinforce this comic about his birthday. The comic is in the vein of John Porcellino, as Lunt thinks about the poetry of Dylan Thomas and how much it's meant to him, the ways in which a walk with his dog is not only meditative, it's a therapeutic activity, and what poetry itself means to him and what lines of poetry should mean. It is a comic about presentness without stating that that was its purpose, as Lunt identifies and is willing to sit with his emotions during the walk.

Monk Funnies takes the accumulated wisdom of Buddhist monks, Catholic monks and jazz musician Thelonious Monk and puts it into comics (and comical) form. Lunt asserts that it's too easy sometimes to overlook the wisdom of ascetics and assume it's all doom and gloom. Indeed, he notes how the effect of a good zinger is precisely the kind of short, sharp shock that can lead to enlightenment. It removes the questioner from the expected path they thought the answers to their questions laid upon and instead forces them to think laterally. That's why the Monk quotes were so great, because an artist like him has more in common with monks than one might think. Lunt identifies the ways in which he was attacked by society for his intelligence and unwillingness to bend with the status quo, but I would also add that the artist and mystic are two sides of the same coin. It's just that the artist expresses their understanding of transcendent experiences through their medium, while the mystic can only talk about it in terms of paradox, koans, jokes and other methods designed to recalibrate the mind. That's because enlightenment eludes language, and getting people to think differently gives them the potential to find that transcendent experience on their own. Visually, Lunt stays within his lane, adding a bit of weight to some panels with greyscale but keeping things simple. That allowed him to really get in some expressive, funny drawings in, like the faces of Monk and a reporter after Monk gave him a zinger, or an acolyte's expression when he gets whacked on the head with a stick by his master.

The main reason Lunt has quickly improved is that he clearly works very hard at his craft, as cranking out several minis like this would indicate. He took on, along with fellow CCS alum Kelly Swann, the co-editing duties of the anthology When I Returned. This comic falls under the new CCS designation Applied Cartooning, as it deals directly with education and medication in a very practical way. The anthology's theme was to match up CCS students and alumni with willing veterans from the local VA Hospital to see if they wanted to tell their stories about what it was like to return from service. The results were raw, bracing and honest, as each artist clearly worked hard to do each story justice. Jeff Lok, ordinarily a humorist, did a story straight from the perspective of a veteran named Vince that incorporated Lok's cartoony and slightly grotesque style with the matter-of-fact narration of the soldier. Without judgment, the story simply relates how things slowly went from good to bad to much worse for Vince, as he was sent to an active front in Iraq and slowly lost touch with his wife and family before incurring serious conditions by the end of his stay. There's no moralizing, just the facts.

Kotaline Jones & Ben Wright-Heumann teamed up to tell Thomas Marino's story. Or rather, they tried to get him to talk about his experiences but soon learned that Marino was a talented artist who did years of daily diary strips, several of which they reprinted here. Some of them are utterly banal, while others are absolutely shattering as he drew in a style that very much approximated the craft and style of an average newspaper strip. Mike Crosier's strip is about an officer who was an engineer that helped build weather satellites. Here, the difficultly was less about leaving behind a nightmarish experience and more about leaving behind a life that he was proud of and finding a way to move on from that. CCS alum Iona Fox teamed up with veteran Mike Rodriguez, each doing comics about their own interpretation of a conversation that they had.. Fox's stylized, cartoony line is wonderfully angular and idiosyncratic, while Rodriguez (a graduate student at Dartmouth) prefers a more naturalistic approach. Rodriguez's perspective, that there is no such thing as transition, only adaptation, is fascinating because he asserts that once you are turned into a soldier, there is no coming back.

Lunt and Swann took on the most harrowing story, which was that of a soldier named Kevin. He declined to talk about his time as a vet but did open up about a time when he was sexually assaulted by two men. There's a devastating set of panels where he says that after the experience, he spent the next 33 years getting as high as possible as a way of self-medicating--all the while drifting from city to city. When he had to go to the hospital for a leg injury, the admitted him for detox and he got into therapy. Eventually, he stopped isolating and avoiding the public. Lunt and Swann's approach is pretty basic, letting the details of the story unwind with minimal fuss. That said, their selective use of close-ups and the way they were able to unspool the narrative was impressive, as Kevin himself was a remarkable subject because of his openness. Wade Simpson's WWII story from his grandfather has beautiful Alex Toth overtones with his varied line weights and use of black & white. It's about how even the brotherhood that surrounds being a soldier cannot begin to compete with the reality of the horrors and senseless, mass death that one could encounter. Singing "White Christmas" while praying that bombs from your own side didn't destroy your POW building may have been briefly life-affirming, but it didn't make up for the fact that every other building got destroyed. All told, this was a well-constructed anthology with a number of different styles and storytelling approaches. What could have been didactic or repetitive instead let the reader draw their own conclusions, especially since there were so many points of view represented.