Thirty One Days of CCS #3: Colleen Frakes, Josh Lees

Iron Scars Book 1: The Changeling, and Iron Scars Vol. 5, by Colleen Frakes. Frakes is one of the first graduates of CCS and has been one of the most consistently prolific artists as well. She's always used a loose line that emphasizes gesture and expression, varying line weights depending on the situation. Most often, the typical Frakes figure is one with a heavy black line marking the outline and a relatively iconic facial expression: a few lines here, a few squiggles there. Most of the comics Frakes has done have been fractured fairy tales: dark takes on classical tropes, going back to their roots.

Iron Scars in many ways is the culmination of a decade's worth of experiments. Frakes' best work features children in conflict with terrifying, mysterious forces. She's also written extensively about her unusual childhood growing up on an island housing a prison that was fairly cut off from the outside world; it was accessible only by ferry. Iron Scars is similarly set on a small island with a few families on it, also accessible only by ferry. Frakes takes these childhood memories and fantasies and transforms them into a vivid, funny and frightening epic. Instead of a prison island, it's an island where the line between the mortal realm and faerie realm is extremely thin, and a group of witches lives there to guard over the link.

The plot revolves around the dark faeries ("the Unseelie Court") starting to kidnap the children of witches, breaking a treaty, and the efforts of some kids to get them back. There's also the matter of one of the children in this tight-knit community actually being a changeling, switched at birth with an actual human child. What separates the story from typical fantasy is Frakes' uncanny knack for writing children. There are nine different kids, all of whom are written as unique individuals. Frakes obviously has an understanding of what it's like to grow up in that kind of isolation and what effect that would have on a close-knit group of kids. She took that understanding and added the fantasy plot as an overlay, but the relationships have an authenticity born from experience.

Frakes also has a knack for alternating humor and horror in equal measure. One of the running plots is the relationship between the women in the coven, which include a sky witch, a sand witch, a sea witch, etc. They constantly squabble and are quite quirky, especially the slightly confused sea witch and her frequent offers of fish. The faerie changelings are inky creatures that look like part cat, part demon and part spider: they look like they're made out of nightmares. The Unseelie Queen is almost alien in her ability to terrorize. The most notable child is Tyee, a girl who actively resists her heritage as a witch but winds up embracing it in an effort to rescue her friends. The book is full of close friendships, betrayals, attempts at rapprochement, and kids outfoxing adults. It's a thrilling, funny story by an artist with a well-developed aesthetic, from her brush strokes to her vibrant hand lettering.

Liberty High School Detective League #2, by Josh Lees. Lees describes this as a "Teen Mystery series for fans of Nancy Drew, Disney's Fillmore! and Case Closed". The premise of this comic is clever, in that the high school that new student Ray Griego attends has its own amateur Detective League, dedicated to solving various local crimes. Lees ticks a number of boxes with this comic, including distinctive character design, varied and realistic characterizations, and a genuinely interesting mystery plot that has a satisfying and sensible conclusion. Lees also has fun with the series' premise, including the fact that the titular Liberty High has a rival that it engages in mystery contests. The only problem with this issue is that parts of it look rushed, especially scenes where characters are interacting with each other in space. There are figures here and there that just look awkward as a result. Lees also tries to cram in a lot of panels on some of the pages, and a number of them feel cramped as a result. The problems with the comic are mostly of reach exceeding grasp on a visual level, and while that kind of ambition is admirable, the comic's rough patches hurt the flow of its narrative. The Archie digest presentation was a nice look, but not for a comic as jam-packed as this one. Lees has a great concept here, and it's one that only needs some refinement.

Thirty Days of CCS #7: Beth Hetland, Mary Shyne, Josh Lees

Half-Asleep Volume 7, by Beth Hetland & Kyle O'Connell.. This penultimate issue of Hetland and writer O'Connell's sci-fi epic/familial struggle answers some questions and sets up a potential final conflict between teen Ivy and her mother, a scientist who's been using her daughter as the guinea for her experiments. Her mother has been trying to figure out ways to reach out between the realms of consciousness and sleep, and the previous two issues, where Ivy went under in the lab's dream vault, saw her encounter all sorts of horrible and wonderful things. Ivy came back to the world of consciousness in this issue because her craft was out of energy; her mother thought that Ivy had been gone for forty years of subjective time but it had only been six--still enough time to really mess with things. It's difficult to parse this issue out in terms of plot; indeed, it will require a complete re-read when it's collected to properly evaluate it. I can say a few things about the highlight of the issue, a brutal conversation between mother and daughter.

Ivy rightly calls out her mother for her monstrous behavior in terms of how she was being exploited for her unique abilities. Her mother simply replied that she was doing her best to make sure that Ivy was capable of handling the world on her own. It's that kind of chilling logic without empathy that created their conflict in the first place, as both have spent the entire series keeping information secret from each other. Her mom reveals that she knows more than was written down and coldly notes that it will be a way for her to stay involved in her daughter's life. Meanwhile, Ivy realizes that she was the prototype for this experiment, and that her mother was preparing others to try to retrieve objects from other dream worlds. I imagine in the last issue we'll learn what her mother's true motive has been all along, but that won't sting as much as the revelations that came across in this issue. Hetland continues to use a bold line and a creative use of the grid (chopped up in three rows per page in a number of different permutations). I missed the use of color since Hetland brought us back to the waking world, and there were some pages with sloppy gray-scale that made me wish for a one or two color wash. On the other hand, I enjoyed Hetland's subtle visual pops. Ivy's inability to get real sleep starts to have a horrible effect on her, as she starts to begin hallucinating that a miniature version of herself was sitting on her shoulder. It speaks to her partnership with O'Connell that he doesn't over-write and instead clearly relies on Hetland to get across subtle pieces of information through graphics alone.

Get Over It #1, by Mary Shyne. I have Shyne's work in two separate articles because the comics are so radically different. This isn't unusual for a CCS student, as they are often encouraged to branch out and try several different genres. This comic is a beautifully-executed set-up of a clever idea that's sort of in the neighborhood of Ghostbusters. In just twelve pages, Shyne manages to create a vivid portrait of Leigh, a slightly aimless young woman who delivers food from her father's restaurant in New York City. At the same time, using a vivid color overlay, she reveals that she can see the auras of people and that they in fact are creatures that reflect the mood and emotional state of each person. Unbeknownst to us, they can also get into fights with other auras and do severe emotional damage and trauma. When she delivers something to a lab at a university, she puts on a metallic glove that informs her that she's a new employee, confirms her aura theory and tells her that her job is to contain harmful auras (which they call "miasmas"). The issue ends just as the real fight begins, and it's an excellent cliffhanger. Shyne hit on a nice concept here, and her clear but bold line combined with the spot color for the miasmas makes this a smooth, fun read. I hope she keeps going with this, because it's close to being fully formed.

Liberty High School Detective League #1, by Josh Lees. This is a straight-up kids mystery-detective comic with Bernadette "Burnside" Snyder and new kid at school Ray Griego. Lees very consciously creates a group of characters that ring true both in terms of their interests and ethnicities. Burnside is a skater who's also a member of the school's Detective League, and in this story, she's presented with the mystery of who's tagging her locker and why. The production of the book had some quirks. While the size and shape is perfect for kids (roughly the size of the platonic form of kids' comics, the Archie digest), the vibrant colors of the first few pages dull a bit into spot color and gray scale. It's fine for what it is, but the transition was a jarring one and the story doesn't quite pop as hard with the revised use of color.

The story was clever enough, but the real attraction here is the subtle use of characterization. Burnside is smart, clever and independent, carving out her own space in school and as a skater. At the same time, she's sometimes oblivious as to who's attracted to her. When the tagger is revealed to be a boy who wanted to get her attention, she has a great reaction--try to talk to someone about things they're interested in, for starters. The repudiation of borderline stalking behavior instead of valuing it as some kind of grand romantic gesture was delivered in a stark and direct fashion. Ray's Hispanic identity is important, but Lees makes sure he's not just a cliche'. The low-stakes nature of the mystery here make those characters even more important, as they are investigating something that's personal. Lees' characters are sometimes a bit on the stiff side; there are times when they look like they're posing as opposed to being in action. That felt like a creator who was paying close attention to details regarding setting and character design and needed to work more on panel to panel transitions and overall storytelling fluidity. There is certainly a great deal of potential in this series.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #8: Beth Hetland, Josh Lees

Half Asleep Volumes 5 and 6, by Kyle O'Connell and Beth Hetland. O'Connell and Hetland reach the climax of their story about a researcher and her prodigy of a daughter that she uses as a test subject in exploring the limits of human consciousness in the form of dreams. Throughout the series, the tension between the girl (named Ivy) and her mother has played out in the form of a series of maneuvers by each to gain knowledge. Her mother holds secrets and details about the experiment that she is deliberately withholding (as revealed in issue #5) for the sake of the experiment's scientific integrity. Ivy withholds details of her dreams that her mother desperately wants. Volume 5 lays down more narrative pipe, as Ivy continues her training, her mother discusses with "Uncle" (the talking monkey retrieved from a dream) that the risks inherent in the experiment are worth going through and that telling Ivy about them would not jeopardize the experiment, but also prevent him from returning from whence he came.

When Ivy starts the experiment, something inevitably goes wrong. From her mother's perspective, the chronometer measuring Ivy's experience of subjective time inside the chamber starts rapidly cycling, until it's reached forty years before she's able to shut it down. The end of the issue shifts over to Ivy's perspective in her dream world, as the visuals switch from the black and white of reality to the swirling pastels of the dream world. The last image we see in this volume is that of an enormous, fanged serpent. Volume 6 is the big payoff issue that everything has led up to: Ivy's adventures in her dreamworld. Hetland made a few subtle changes in her line and use of color in this volume in order to allow for a more coherent reading experience. Prior to this, the dream sequences were denser and purposefully more difficult for the reader to parse. That said, there were certainly dream images that recurred throughout the series and that had a major presence in this issue. Whereas the color created a blurring effect in earlier issues, that effect is much lighter here. While Hetland totally abandoned the use of the grid in this volume, she was careful to create transitions that were still relatively easy to follow, both in terms of image-to-image and page-to-page. That flow was important in being able to understand the story as it unfolded and heighten the tension of the confrontation between Ivy and the serpent.

Hetland's dreamscape is fascinating, as it's composed of both images and words-as-images. She's in constant combat with the serpent but is aided at times by the man in the rabbit mask who helps her in her dreams. She travels to the land of Us, where she meets variations of herself and her parents. She manages to dodge the serpent again and attends to her actual mission in the dream, but an accident scuttles it at the last minute. After seemingly killing the serpent once and for all in a brutally visceral action scene, it rises again, menacing her like it did at the end of volume five. What's fascinating about this issue is the way that Hetland and O'Connell incorporate so much information from earlier issues of the series into the dream narrative, yet so much of this issue is still daring, beautiful and unsettling. The use of dream logic is impeccably presented after being hinted at for so many issues, but there are still a couple of chapters to go to resolve the story--including the cliff-hanger at the end. In terms of the writing, the clandestine nature of virtually every character comes back to haunt them in terrifying ways; after a series' worth of hints and slow pacing, having an issue devoted almost solely to jam-packed visuals made it that much more powerful.

Hetland and O'Connell's creative partnership is explored by the duo in the cleverly-designed mini Team Work Makes The Dream Work. As an artist, Hetland has always been fascinated by the possibility of creating objects that demand reader interaction as much as she does doing actual comics. This mini is a perfect example of that, as she uses pizza as a metaphor. The mini looks like a slice of pizza that then unfolds and can be read in a number of different ways. The parts in green ink are from O'Connell's point of view, the parts in red ink represent Hetland, and the parts in purple represent both of them together. The way that the comic is constructed allows the reader to flip around the pages to expand them like an entire pizza, and then a flip allows you to see the next level. It's a perfect match of form and content, as the collaboration goes far beyond simply "writer" (O'Connell) and "artist" (Hetland). They also make it clear that they are creative partners, not romantic partners and amusingly refer to Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy from 30 Rock as a comparison. The multiple meetings, the shared tasks like proofreading, and tightening up each other's work at every level paint this as a true collaboration, one born out of mutual interests and sustained through mutual respect and productivity. I like comics about process, and this was an amusing and entertaining way to depict the complexity and rewards of collaboration.

Triple Trio #1, by Josh Lees. Lees tends to write about teen adventurers, and he has a real sense for the rhythms of those sorts of stories. Triple Trio follows the formula of something like a Cartoon Network show (complete with a commercial break!) in telling the story of three young time travelers who are tasked with observing and sometimes fixing past events. They are led by Tracey Triple, a fantastically designed character with her green eyeglass frames, ponytail, and big frame. Tracey even comments on how she was called "Tracey Triple" as a derogatory term because she was bigger than most of her classmates but now wears it as a badge of honor. The first story involves a dance marathon in the 1930s that they are supposed to observe, but inadvertently summoning a dinosaur doesn't seem to affect things too much. The second adventure sees the group accidentally sent back to the Salem witch trials and inevitably accused of witchcraft and sent to rot in jail before execution. The punchline is that witches are real and break everyone out, and the story ends on a cliffhanger. It's clear that Lees' mastery over his line is still a work in progress, but his storytelling skills and ability to depict bodies interacting with each other in space are both solid. There's influence from both Archie comics as well as manga to be found in his character designs, but the other main characters apart from Tracey feel a little underdesigned in comparison.

In his more recent ashcan Liberty High School Detective League comic, it's clear that he worked diligently on these issues, as the five characters in the first panel look more distinct from each other in that one panel than most of the characters did in the entirety of Triple Trio. The concept behind this series is a mystery-solving club at the local high school, which is a fantastic idea that combines any number of influences (Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Scooby Doo, Buffy The Vampire Slayer) and remixes them in an entirely fresh way. Indeed, the mechanics of how mysteries are solved was a big part of this short story, as we get a taste of the main character (Bernadette), the school and internal conflicts. Lees is writing this as a long-form project, and I think it could have a similar appeal to Drew Weing's Margo Maloo series.