31 Days Of CCS, #22: John Carvajal

John Carvajal has done a lot of work illustrating genre stories as well as writing and drawing his own short stories.  His first long-form book, Sunshine State, is clearly a much more personal work, drawing on his own experience as the child of immigrants and trying to find his way as he doesn't feel entirely a part of either Latinx or Anglo culture. Set in Tampa, it follows a directionless young man named Milo as he tries to navigate post-high school life with his friends. It's a slice-of-life story that follows Milo from innocent house parties where he dulls his existential ache with pot and alcohol to him engaging in riskier and riskier behavior. The core of the book is that because Milo doesn't have a true sense of identity, he also has a corresponding lack of agency. There's nothing he really wants to do or be; it all seems pointless. 

There's a clever visual trick that Carvajal uses throughout the book. Whenever Milo smokes up, the smoke billows up around in the form of little skulls. Later, when he feels anxious (especially around his parents), the skull-smoke wafts up from his imagination. The skulls represent a number of things: when he's high, he's experiencing a "little death" of his consciousness, his awareness, and his grip on reality. While Milo didn't want to be aware or connected to his daily reality, that came at a cost, and directly tied back into that loop of anxiety. 

Much of the dialogue in the book is in Spanish, and that in itself is a pointed form of commentary, because it's Milo's family that only speaks to him in Spanish as Colombian natives. Carvajal seems to connect Milos feelings of alienation toward being Latinx to his father's constant, withering disapproval and disappointment. His father isn't a screamer or yeller, but he's blunt in clearly wanting a better life for his son and has low tolerance for his son's bullshit. Milo seems to connect the identity of being Latinx in America with being like his dad, and it's something he clearly doesn't want. But though he's white-passing (unlike his friend Aldo, who is dark-skinned), he doesn't feel like he's part of that mainstream culture either. 

It's no wonder that not only did he find himself drifting, but that he found his way to increasingly alienated subcultures. He kind of fell into selling pot, but Carvajal masterfully portrays that constant tension and feeling of paranoia that begins when you step outside the law. Even seemingly benign interactions have that moment of danger where it feels like it could all go wrong. His depictions of the kinds of things people do while high, while blackout drunk, and on psychedelics all resonate, as he accurately portrays the pleasures and risks of each.

Carvajal divided the book up into different seasons, allowing time to pass more quickly. He goes from not knowing what to do with his life in summer to starting to sell pot and getting caught by his father in fall. That was a brutal scene, as he lied through his teeth about why he had a pipe and pot, and his father calmly instructed him to flush away the drugs and smash the pipe, telling him that he didn't come to this country for this shit. His mother tearfully wailed that his uncle tied because of this. The drug business in Colombia was serious, and the sheer disappointment from Milo's father (encapsulated in a visceral sigh as he knew his son was lying) had those smoke skulls welling up again, as Milo simply couldn't confront his own actions in a meaningful way. 

In the winter, Milo has moved out and immediately not only experiences his apartment getting robbed, but is roped into going with his roommate and a mob and trying to track down their stuff door-to-door. It's an initiation into a new world he's also not comfortable with, but it's a symptom of how alienating himself from his family hasn't done anything to actually find himself. He has a hard-partying girlfriend and he's doubled-down on his dealing, starting to meet far more dangerous dealers further up the food chain. Worse, his identity has become that of a drug dealer, alienating his friends. Another set of dealers comes to his house, looking for money and drugs, and he tries to finger his neighbors. Then he gets blackout drunk and in an accident. Then the neighbors confront him about him trying to narc on them, and his life gets threatened. It's an all-too-predictable chain of events for someone like him at the bottom of the food chain. He loses his place to live and his girlfriend.

Milo is self-aware. He doesn't want to be doing all of this, but when Aldo asks him what he does want to do, all Milo can say is "I've never really had any desire to do or be anything." Milo was never given the template to fit into a pre-existing structure nor the personal agency to choose his own path, because he felt his own agency was worthless--in part because of things his father said to him. When Aldo reminds Milo that he can draw, and that there are possibilities there, that sets events into motion that not only give Milo a new future outside of his Tampa bubble, but also sets the stage for his father to tell him that he loves him and will always be there for him--and that he understands Milo has trouble expressing emotions. It's a tender and true moment, because Carvajal is careful never to portray Milo's dad as villainous or abusive--just as someone who didn't understand how to support his son emotionally. 

Carvajal's use of color adds much to the comic's emotional narrative. So much of what happens to Milo is left unsaid, and the watercolors emphasize his moods and those of the people around him. His figures are cartoony, which makes some of the trippier and more surreal images in the book easier to understand and hook back into the overall emotional narrative. Carvajal's use of Tampa itself as a background is a key element of the book as well. When you grow up in a tourist town, its bright trappings can seem rather drab if you're inured to them. Carvajal also clearly has his finger on the pulse of what it's like to be Latinx in a Florida city, as it's possible as an immigrant to never actually have to assimilate to white American culture, depending on where you're from and where you're living. That's certainly true of the Cuban community in Miami, but many Central and South American countries have huge communities in Florida. That's why for someone like Milo, who never had a strong sense of self, it was so easy for him to feel a kind of personal and cultural paralysis. He never found a place to belong until he actually listened to his friends who loved him best and drew encouragement. Even at that, the dramatic nature of his travails is deliberately undercut by his flat emotional affect, so that him going to art school is a good first step, it's only a first step. Carvajal doesn't overplay his hand in transforming the character, because he clearly had so far to go, and that was an interesting variation on this kind of story. 

Thirty One Days Of CCS #5: John Carvajal, Beth Hetland, Sophie Goldstein

Today's reviews feature comics drawn, but not (solely) written by, CCS cartoonists.

Anterran Day 0: 1-3, by John Carvajal and Simon Mesnard. Carvajal drew this post-apocalyptic fantasy set on an alien world where smart phone-like objects wound up causing the end of the world. With only a few survivors left on earth, there was a war between the President and his soldiers and the mutants whose addiction to the devices known as Sok'as caused them to turn. The story follows a scientist, a teen that he rescued and a mysterious woman that they save from mutants. It's a solid story with some good twists and turns, but Carjaval's grotesque, funny art is what really sells it. Big bulbous noses, beady eyes, sharp teeth and backgrounds that vary from ramshackle to high tech make this series fun to look at on every page. What really sells it are the watercolors (or watercolor effects) that Carvajal uses, especially the way he uses them to create a particular facial design for each character. The red noses and flushed cheeks stand out, making the whole project look like something that resembles E.C. Segar's Popeye more than Mad Max. 

Half Asleep Volume 8, by Beth Hetland and Kyle O'Connell. This is the final chapter of this epic story about a scientist and her daughter Ivy at odds over their exploration of dream space. The cover flap is a marvel of design, neatly summarizing and explaining a few of the comic's central ideas in a spectacular manner. In terms of the story (which is way too convoluted to go into at this point with regard to the last chapter), one of the things I liked best about it was the central ambiguity of its characters, especially Dr. Lassette, Ivy's mother. She lied and kept secrets from her daughter for years and treated her like a research subject. However, she also clearly loved her daughter and saw her potential as a dream explorer who could make a better life for everyone with her discoveries. As previous issues revealed, something went horribly wrong when Ivy was off in the dream world, and this issue revealed the reason why: the scientists found it easier to enter through nightmares than dreams. Hetland went all-out in this issue, using several different line weights and drawing styles to get across the way in which Ivy was starting to find herself seeing things from the dream world in the real world, and how objects were disappearing around her. The climactic battle with a horrifying nightmare creature sees Hetland's art at its sharpest, as the inky jet black creature really fills up every panel. This is going to be a story well worth revisiting and chewing over.

An Embarrassment of Witches, by Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan. This was the team responsible for the sometimes rambling, frequently entertaining webseries Darwin Carmichael Is Going To Hell. That series saw both writer and artist trying to figure things out on the page, and it's obvious that their second project together is going to be much more self-assured. For one thing, Goldstein has become one of the best artists in comics. Her science-fiction work is brilliantly pointed and challenging, if downbeat. Jordan's tone is much more lighthearted, allowing Goldstein to stretch a different set of creative muscles. This mini is an ashcan featuring some of their work to date, with the final results set to be published by Top Shelf. Whereas Darwin Carmichael was a slice-of-life comic revolving around a set of apartment-mates and their friends, Witches has a tighter focus. It's a post-breakup comic about a recent college grad named Rory whose boyfriend tells her that he wanted to see other people right before they were going to get on an airplane together and head to Australia for several months.

All of this is the foreground information. The background is that this is a world where magic is real and part of everyday life, much like the background of Darwin Carmichael is that every religion and mythology was real and its gods and creatures lived on earth. Magic here is used in storytelling terms as a way of bringing metaphors to life in extreme ways or expressing strong emotions. It's also very much cringe comedy, as we follow Rory make a series of bad decisions, starting with lying to her controlling Mother about not going to Australia. The mini sets up that like and her decision to live in a closet in her sister's place. Goldstein has a talent for instantly communicating a character's qualities through her design. The boyfriend, Holden, has permanently arched eyebrows that are a tell of his know-it-all tendencies. Her wiry mother has a taut quality that reveals her tendency to crowd her daughter. Rory herself has somewhat blank eyes (indicating her journey ahead) but also an edgy quality that displays her thorniness. Her sister Angela is all gentle curves and straight black hair, but even that mild-mannered quality has some darkness to it. This has the potential to be a big hit, if Top Shelf markets it right.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #29: John Carvajal

John Carvajal has a pleasantly chunky, cartoony style of art that doesn't really remind me of many American contemporaries. There's a slight resemblance to Tom Hart, but the bigfoot stylings are far more reminiscent of French comics. That extends to his restrained, tasteful use of watercolors, especially in the post-apocalyptic sci-fi series he's doing with the writer Simon Mesnard, Anterran: Day 0. The story is about a scientist named Stan and his younger friend Oliv'r as they navigate a world filled with zombie-types and ruthless agents of the dictatorship. The apocalypse was brought on by something that Stan was involved with: a sort of Motherbox technology in cube form called Sok'as that was used worldwide, until one day something went wrong and millions died. The story is very much about how a utopia dependent on an all-invasive technology is a fragile one, as technology can be manipulated. It's also implied that the psychological aspects of the cubes had an addictive quality; indeed, the mutants transformed when "Day 0" (the day of the apocalypse) arrived are junkies for them. Stan's goal is to populate a spaceship to move off-planet, and the creators throw in a wild card character named Cl'ar whom they rescue from mutants. While the series is heavy on info-dumps to catch the reader up on this particular bit of world-building, Carvajal's lively art animates the characters and keeps the readers interested in the action. The storytelling and composition of each page is fairly conventional, as the character design and expressiveness of the art is the real star of the series.

His one man anthology, Scraps, is predictably a mixed bag. It collects stories done for anthologies at CCS as well as other places. "Hidden Truth" is about an adventurer who stumbles upon an ancient temple and is seemingly aided by the spirits inhabiting it...until it's too late. It's a silent story, though its greater point beyond the ending as evidenced seemed oblique. Carvajal uses a lot of misdirection in his narratives, and "Saved" initially seemed to be about how the protagonist went on native on an alien planet but instead likely suffered some kind of hallucination...or did he? "Power Outage" does something similar, turning a story told in caveman times back into a modern yarn when the power came back on after an outage, leaving the dad initially upset that he didn't get to finish his story, until he finds his own distraction. It's a nice story about how losing one's attention to interpersonal connections is so incredibly easy. Carvajal's cartoony style is especially effective here.

"La Parcea" telegraphed its absurdity-of-war message, but "Mel's House" once again threw a real monkey wrench at the reader in the story of a man trying to escape from pursuers with his baby in a forest. Carvajal has a way of getting the reader to buy into the narrative from the perspective of the protagonist and then totally flip reality around to reveal that all was not what it seemed. "Forgotten", about a robot on a quest, is one of the best-drawn comics in the book. It goes on a few beats too long, but the drawing is so fun to look at that it was not a huge impediment. In general, however, the drawing in Anterran was considerably more confident and accomplished than the work here, which I think speaks to the power of experience. "Memories" and "Anxieties Of Life" are two of the stronger pieces in the comic, which gets better as it proceeds. Carvajal's autobio is restrained and thoughtful, as he recalls an idyllic time earlier in his life with his friends at the local swimming pool as he was riding a bus home. The latter is about the front he has to put up in front of his young students when he's teaching, as he's hit with an anxiety attack afterward. The best story in the book, "De Aqui Alla" was originally an entry in Frank Santoro's correspondence course, and the use of the grid and overall sense of discipline in his storytelling was evident in this story of a young trans woman who is frustrated by life, seems to meet her end in an accident, goes through a metaphysical journey and comes out the other side alive. That life has a cost, as Carvajal reveals in the final panel. It's clear that Carvajal is well on his way to doing some interesting things, and that the CCS experience allowed him to find his voice as a storyteller.