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.

Thirty Days of CCS, Day 20: Jeff Lok, Ben Horak & Alex Kim

There's a small but growing "sick humor" arm of CCS grads. It's work that veers between humor and horror. Jeff Lok and Ben Horak personify the humor-as-horror side of things, while Alex Kim works the angle of horror-as-humor.

In Gag Rag #3, Lok's collection of strips and effluvia isn't quite as pointed and raw as earlier issues of his one-man anthology. The drawing is loose and in the tradition of classic comics: lots of bigfoot drawings, bulbous noses, spaghetti arms, and distorted figures. My favorite thing in this issue are the series of "Old Testament" strips that posit god as a sort of baker who has to deal with the bureaucracies of time and doesn't quite know what to do with his new creation, Adam. There are brutal strips about chickens, a Friday Night Lights parody that's entirely on-point about the horrible behavior of the kids and the totally unflappable nature of the coach, and several one-off single-panel gags that draw genuine laughs. That includes a gleeful, running pig squealing "I'm cured!" that works because his face is so genuinely joyful. There's a slightly lesser gag where a cop in handcuffs says "I've uncovered a ring of police impersonators! I'm the leader!" The drawing is functional at best, serving only to deliver the textual gag's excellent punchline. Lok's skill is taking familiar comedic elements and injecting them with an underlying and anarchic sense of nihilism. His difficulty is in maintaining that strong voice when he ventures off into other kinds of storytelling; a strip about a prison ship drawn in this style felt forced and mannered. A compromise of sorts could be found in his Oily comic Ox & Co. It's about an elevator operator in an old-time department store, set in the past. The vernacular of his characters makes it feel like a cousin to one of Milt Gross's many comics, but the sheer weirdness of the set-up is uniquely Lok. The brief comic works because of its density, its commitment to maintaining the integrity of its time and setting, and the darkly idiosyncratic nature of Lok's sense of humor.

Kim's Oily series Dumpling King has been astonishing me with surprises in every issue. In the span of just ten pages per issue, Kim has advanced the story from a noir mystery surrounding murder, a powerful family, an alluring woman and dumpling delivery to something entirely different. All of those elements are still present, only Kim has added mysticism, dragons, magic, witches and their towers and other craziness. All of this is done with a mix of cartoony drawings (Kim loves angular faces) and surprising amounts of detail (he loves stippling even more), and the consistency of the reality he's creating on a visual level allows for the sudden and dramatic shift from a realistic scenario to a fantastic one. The cover alone of #3, with the stippling of a cloudy night sky using negative space to indicate the moon, contrasted against the cartoony face of one of the characters gets at Kim's aesthetic. He's simultaneously creating mood while bending the reality of his world to his will. Kim is a bit slow, so savor each issue when it's published.

Horak is a fine gross-out cartoonist who likes to employ cute images in disturbing ways, and his skill with drawing only heightens both the humor and gross-out nature of his work. His best strips in his one-man anthology Grump Toast #4 are the long-form ones. The "Business Baby and Infant Insidious" are pretty much Goofus and Gallant with slightly more evil intent, as the villainous character actually wears a top hat and black cape. Horak's "autobio" take on being lost at a curiosity shop as a boy and wondering what it would have been like if his parents had taken home a lizard corpse passed off as him was hilarious because of the details: the corpse playing Little League, graduating high school, getting married, etc. Speaking of detail, the "Pinky Palms" strip, featuring a variety of monstrous and anthropomorphic creatures throws the kitchen sink at the reader in terms of weird visual gross-out gags, then reveals that it's all misdirection as it follows home the bartender to follow his seemingly idyllic life. The payoffs for this strip are tremendous, as watching bat-winged chainsaws tear through his family was both awful and hilarious. The other long-form piece, "The Bitchin' Trials and Tribulations of Cheese Hammy Sammy", is a silent, existential biker epic. It details the titular character's (everyone here is a form of anthropomorphic food, Jon Vermilyea-style) horrible and over-the-top deeds, his bun-flipping reformation and his eventual doom as the pigeons come home to roost. Horak continues to mature and refine the sheer horror of his work, and this has allowed it to become effective at multiple levels.

Thirty Days of CCS #26: Awesome Sound, Can't Lose, Stranger Knights 4

Awesome Sound is an anthology published by Sean Knickerbocker. The low-fi cover belies the beautiful contents within, which look like they were printed on a risograph. DW's endpapers, which forcefully push both text and image to the point of violent distortion, are fitting for a comic that's so visceral and unsettling. Dan Rinylo's "Beast" is told with an Ernie Bushmiller-style simplicity, as the young boy's face here is two big black dots for eyes, a black line for a nose and a mouth that goes from black line to black oval, depending on his emotions. Using a nine-panel grid after an initial splash page that establishes the boy at the edge of a forest, each page is interesting because the central panel is almost always a scene of stillness: we see the boy looking, see him smiling, see him in the middle of walking and then see him running from right to left when wild dogs start chasing him. That sets the story from amusing to frenetic, but the final middle panel is an image of an empty street--right before a wild dog who is chasing the boy is run over by a car. It's both dark and comedic, given the x over the dog's eye and the generally cartoony nature of the story, but the bright red blood on a page that's mostly black and white adds a level of terror to the proceedings.

Knickerbocker's "Do You Still Feel Alone?" begins with a brother and sister in the woods, on the run from something unseen. The way he throws the reader right into a chase scene propels the story right along, heightening its tension from the very beginning. That tension is ramped up when they are assaulted by a nude man, who is stabbed to death by the sister. Knickerbocker pulls back further, revealing that this is an island where a plane has crashed, its inhabitants reduced to life-and-death struggle. It's a brutal, unforgiving little tableau that has no pat ending, and the fact that it's drawn in that cartoony style reminiscent of Chuck Forsman and Sammy Harkham makes it all the more unsettling. Indeed, the later story where a young couple sets themselves on fire in a house (revealing a pentagram on the floor) is a sort of cousin to the sort of thing Forsman did in The End Of The Fucking World. Finally, Juan Fernadez's red ink two-pager is a perfect fit, as his scribbled-out faces go through a progression of consumption. This mini is short but every image packs a punch.

Can't Lose is an old-fashioned fanzine dedicated to the TV show Friday Night Lights. It's everything a fanzine should be: in-jokey, craft-conscious, and gently mocking in a reverent manner. "Coached" by superfan Melissa Mendes, this zine has an interesting sprinkling of well-known cartoonists. Popular topics include the Christian speed-metal band that the character Landry starts ("Crucifictorious"), the comically awful Billy, younger brother of lead character Tim (Henry Eudy does a fine job of pointing out just how weaselly he is while Nomi Kane posits a magical night the two share in the desert), and how doubters often come around to becoming obsessed with the show. Jon Shaw's "Friday Nightlife" speaks to this, as a character who mocks a couple mourning the last episode starts to watch it and eventually enters his own weird world of living out other, self-imagined seasons. Sam Spina actually made me laugh out loud in a strip where he and his wife are asked why South Carolinians are buying Texas beer, and they reply in unison "Texas forever". My favorite strips were Dan Zettwoch's hilarious story about Dillon getting routed because Saracen used photocopies from the playbook to hang up Crucifictorious flyers (lovingly designed and drawn by Zettwoch, of course) and Jeff Lok's tale of escalating terrible behavior being excused "They're good kids". Can't Lose even has a cut-out Tim Riggins paper doll. While bits of it might me mystifying to those in the dark, the premise is laid out clearly enough for the jokes to land.

Stranger Knights 4 was published, as always by Bill Volk. This light-hearted fantasy/sci-fi/superhero anthology has always been on the uneven and amateurish side. This issue is the first to look good from cover-to-cover, and each story is funny to boot. Volk's "Brega and Snurrd" sees him use a cleaned-up, simplified version of his line that emphasizes character expressiveness above all else. The story follows familiar Dungeons & Dragons/fantasy tropes, but it's really about the relationship between a mother and her teenaged daughter. Of course, the mother here is a bearded dwarf and her daughter is trying to pass as human at her wizarding school. When the mother demands the presence of her daughter for an adventure (ie, bonding session), tension arises in an amusing manner. This is a crisply-paced story that actually gets across real feelings in its fantasy context. I'd love to see more from these characters and their world. The Volk-written "Thousand Year Grudge" (drawn by Bryan Stone) is a denser, grittier story involving anthropomorphic animals, thievery, romances gone bad and multiple double-crosses. The thickness of Stone's line is coupled with cross-hatching, lots of spotted blacks and other noir visual effects to counter the funny animals and the wonderfully ludicrous character of Maggie, the young bird who decides to be a thief. Ann Lewis' "Headless" is a bit on the cruder side in terms of rendering, but her use of humorous body language in telling a story about an empty but animated suit of armor sells it effectively. Finally, the Volk-Mary Soper continuing collaboration "Incantrix X" continues to be a reliably amusing story with idiosyncratic character design and odd design choices.

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.

More From CCS: Jeremiah Piersol and Jeff Lok

One thing I've noticed about Jeremiah Piersol's work is that he likes to work big. I'm not sure if that's the influence of Gilbert Hernandez and the original format of Love & Rockets or something he stumbled on organically, but there's no question that he likes to have his figures fill up a big page. What's interesting is that the single work that seems to have had the biggest impact on Piersol is not Palomar or Poison River, but rather Love & Rockets X. Much like that tense story without a definitive resolution, Piersol explores issues related to race, class and gender and how tensions can develop along those lines. His new comics, Tableaux #1 & #2, aren't traditional narratives in the sense of following characters over time or using a panel grid. Instead, each page contains a single image that is meant to be juxtaposed to the image on the page facing it as well as all of the illustrations in the book.

Piersol stated that these drawings "contain cultural reflective snapshots of 'scenes' relating to disparity and the human condition". It's not always a polemic, but rather aims to have an unflinching take on the world. There are drawings of extreme wealth and extreme deprivation. There are also drawings of diverse families, confused children, angry protestors, steely taggers, elegant mothers, expectant and joyous mothers, along with scenes of desperate people trying to satisfy their most depraved desires. Piersol also weaves in "hybrid" drawings, in which a mash-up of several people is done to create a single jigsaw image. Despite how jarring these images are, there's something about them that allows the eye to rest, because these are still images that feel like looking at a sort of distorted stained glass in a church. Piersol's regular illustrations tend to range from the extremes of human existence (being present at a volcano erupting, surrounding a loved one as she's wheezing out her death rattle, seeing a nude stripper at work) to the most mundane of moments. The second issue ups the ante by going more extreme, depicting images of cadavers, concentration camps, murders and airplanes exploding while at the same time drawing cheerful babies, pop stars and actresses winning awards. It's as though Piersol is saying that aside from the ways in which people find themselves separating themselves from others, the only real juxtaposition to be made is alive or dead. It's an interesting project, made all the more tantalizing by only labeling the images with an index at the end of the book. I'll be curious to see how long he continues to do this, and how it will affect his work when he returns to more standard narratives.

Jeff Lok is developing his chops as a truly demented gag cartoonist. His desert island/baby cannibalism jokes in his comic Gag Rag were both disgusting and hilarious, downplaying the horrible nature of the subject matter by sticking closely to the structure of the gag. His new mini, Oh Babies!, moves his baby jokes into a bizarre Fight Club territory. Revealing what really happens in a maternity ward when the adults are away, his misshapen and slightly grotesque newborns get into fistfights and death matches, complete with chairs thrown and knives drawn. The comic takes a turn when a comically oversized baby with a nasty temperament appears in the incubator, leading to a bizarre series of events involving the babies using welding equipment to make a specialized shiv to jam in the huge baby's vulnerable fontanelle, the big baby damaging himself by accident, and a surgery scene where the babies-as-doctors need the supplies that make up a baby. While I love Lok's character work, there are some odd bits of white space in a lot of his panels that throw his images off-kilter. Some of those are intentional, but there are others that feel a bit odd in terms of composition and broke me out of a reading rhythm. I think that's the price paid for the delightful spontaneity of his character design, the looseness of which is integral to establishing the humor of the comic. I hope Lok continues to keep himself open to his strangest ideas even as he tightens things up in terms of format.

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.