Thirty One Days Of CCS #25: Kevin Uehlein, Pat Barrett, DW

Pigeon Man #2 and #4, by Pat O'Brien, Zack Poitras (writers) and Pat Barrett. Barrett drew this visceral, disgusting and over-the-top satire of politics, capitalism and the culture that surrounds them. If anyone was up to the job of drawing the adventures of a superhero who combined the aspects of pigeon and man in the most revolting ways possible, it's Barrett. His humor comics have always had that quality of being game for anything, and that's certainly true here. I unfortunately was only able to read the 2nd and 4th issues of the comic, so I can't comment too much on the story. The basics are that the mayor of New York City is kidnapping orphans and grinding them into sausage, and only Pigeon Man and his friend the Commissioner of the police can stop him. Hilariously, the mayor uses the New York Rangers hockey team as his stooges. Pigeon Man himself is a disgusting character, frequently lapsing into heavy drug and alcohol-fueled binges as he does things like go down on a bat. Tucker Carlson gets seduced, various rescue missions are attempted, horrific sausage is consumed, and Pigeon Man's prison-bound daughter wreaks havoc. The comic is a bit of a grind sometimes because it never lets up, making it something of a breathless experience. Still, Barrett's saturated use of color and ability to mix a cartoonish style with realism make the gags work.

Kevin Uehlein's solo project was the immense minicomic Quit Rasslin' Me!, an epic deconstruction and parody of the WWE and pro wrestling in general. Featuring his anthropomorphic characters Disgusting Duck and Dumbass Dog, those two go from "back alley wrestling" to the WWE when the corporation was beset by steroid scandals, sexual harassment claims and being increasingly out of touch with the fans. As ludicrous as the action in this comic is (and it goes way over the top), virtually everything in it is based on something that actually happened. The Duck is chosen to be the new, hot babyface and even gets tabbed as the new champ, since he's cheaper than maintaining the older, Hulk Hogan-like mainstay. The Dog is chosen to be a heel who can reliably take chair shots to the head and get sent through tables, no matter the damage to his body. There's turn after turn here, as an arrogant Duck gets taken down by an Undertaker-like version of the Dog, who then decides to become a born-again Christian. This is a funny, silly comic with appealing, rubbery art that is entertaining in its own right in addition to being a dead-on satire of the WWE's greed and questionable ethics.

KJC 4 is Uehlein's sketchbook collaboration zine, done with the artist DW as well as James Stanton and Dakota McFadzean. Uehlein's bigfoot wackiness and DW's intense mark-making and pattern designs make for a compelling mix, and they do all sorts of things to create a variety of visual experiences. For example, there are pages that are transparencies, laid over a paper page. The drawings on the transparency interact with the drawings on the page in interesting ways, deliberately adding new details and contexts for them. In the middle of the comic, there's a stapled-in micro mini that features Uehlein-designed characters talking, only their word balloons contain DW's patterned drawings that feature strange animals and fossils in the middle. There are also occasional comic strips with interjections from DW that contribute to the dense glee of this project.

Compulse 10 and an untitled mini from DW round out the comics here. Compulse is Uehlein's micro-mini sketchbook project, and this edition focuses on a female character with various hairstyles in profile. Uehlein really has a knack for drawing angry cartoon degenerates. DW's zine has more of his current interest: circular designs that resemble mandalas, containing a bird, a lizard or some other creature in its center. He alternates between black & white and color, with the former looking bolder and the latter more visually appealing. They almost look like cave drawings or some kind of ancient image that's been long buried.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #30: Rio Aubry Taylor, Kevin Uehlein & DW

For Rio Aubry Taylor (who uses xe/xir pronouns), the urge to express xirself through abstract comics, lively genre comics and autobio are all tightly wound together. In Taylor's abstract comics series Tabe #12: Shed Your Blood For Pleasure, the repeated motif of dozens of vertical lines tightly packed together in a panel is used in some interesting ways. Taylor stops just short of making them hatching as xe adds a wavy quality to the lines that makes them all the more intense to look at. Taylor then modulates the reader's experience by experimenting with page design in terms of how many panels are stacked on each page and in what formation. Eschewing a standard grid, Taylor varies the height and width of the panels such that they alter the reader's experience by slowing them down on a page or speeding them up. By the simple quality of Taylor's hand, the line weight and the spaces between lines varies, creating a whorl effect on some pages. The reader's patience is eventually rewarded when Taylor (I'm guessing) improvises some figures that coalesce into musicians, revealing that the rest of the comic was a visual representation of experiencing sound. That was clever, but Taylor also carries this aesthetic into xir narrative series, Jetty.

Jetty is supported by Taylor's Patreon and appears as both a webcomic and a minicomic, of which five issues have been released. The series looks better as a minicomic than as a webcomic; something about it demands that it be on paper. This is an epic story that's clearly going to last a long time, and as a result, the first five issues are all over the place in terms of content. The first issue establishes the main plot, that "one billion minutes into the future", the sun disappears, causing worldwide chaos. As the series begins, a young girl named Mina is staying at a Buddhist monastery that's under attack by bandits and they have to escape. Along the way, we meet an explorer who's been stuck in the "dark internet" for two millennia, Mina is captured by a voracious shape-changing monster and then strikes it down when she suddenly evinces flame breath as a super-weapon, there's a blood-sucking insect who has intimate knowledge of important things, and meet a monk whose taste for alcohol gets him in trouble.

There is family turmoil and betrayal, physical and emotional trauma and greedy industrialists. Throughout the narrative, Taylor uses those abstract lines as a symbol for knowledge that's obscured or not yet attainable. Images, thoughts and beliefs fade in and out like a radio signal. The most remarkable issue was #4, which was an intensely personal story about Fill, a cyborg sorcerer's apprentice who is desperately looking for xir missing master. Fill was built to change xir appearance constantly and painfully, putting them in constant agony and making xir dangerous to others. Just as Taylor manifested addiction as a monster dragging people across jagged paths, so too did Taylor use Fill as a metaphor for being trans and desperate for human companionship. Taylor's intense and dense linework is at its pinnacle in this issue, as xe redesigns Fill in every panel with an astounding amount of detail each time. Fill's journey is far from complete in this issue, but Taylor's compassionate but unsparing account of xir life up to that point made for one of the best minicomics of the year. Overall, Taylor is really starting to get xir footing on the series, as each issue is more confident than the last as xe is allowing xirself to follow xir instincts on what storytelling instincts to follow. It's obvious that Taylor has truly found xir voice as a cartoonist as a result of creating this series.

Kevin Uehlein is an artist who seems to be on the verge of finding his voice, but is still trying to figure things out. He seems most comfortable working in funny animal style comics ala early Robert Crumb. In other words, anthropomorphic animals in adult situations. At the same time, Uehlein is interested in abstract narratives and psychedelia. Compulse 9 is an astoundingly beautiful collection of his color drawings, balancing that funny animal style with frequently apocalyptic, psychedelic imagery. It's sort of Joe Coleman meets Warner Bros. cartoons, as the images are funny, strange and yield more and more details upon close and long inspection. There's also the feel of a religious element as well, merging nature, death and life with ritual activities, as well as images that seem to bring to mind Hindu drawings. There are also anthropomorphic versions of Japanese samurai drawings from prints that are incredibly intricately drawn, as vivid as a Frank Frazetta drawing. Still, when I look at his drawings of cats in strange and psychedelic settings, I think of underground artists like Crumb or a more recent and perhaps sympathetic artist in Steve Lafler. It looks like he colored this using magic marker, and there's a rich, vivid quality to each page that makes this incredibly beautiful to study and appreciate.

Butt Gusters takes a different approach: black and white gag strips, mixing funny animal style as well as a highly cartoony but more naturalistic style. Uehlein is all over the map here. There's a funny autobio strip about giving up comics as a teen, a political strip about the absurd anti-trans "bathroom bills", and also lots of dark humor as well. There are inside jokes about comics (the "bad duck artist" gag was a good one), jokes about comedy (the stand-up for the elderly riffs on exactly what you would expect, but Uehlein still makes it funny), pop culture rants, joke mashups involving Caesar and pro wrestling, and plenty of visual jokes and puns. Every gag was so different that there wasn't much of a sense of rhythm, as it felt like Uehlein was throwing everything he could think of at the wall to see what would stick. Uehlein and DW teamed up KJC #3, their continuing collaboration comic. It's a nice match of DW's highly immersive use of patterns, collage and figures in a non-narrative manner with Uehlein's recognizable figure work, gags and psychedelia. They really went all-out in this issue, with everything in full color and some of the pages being done on transparencies, which was interesting on its own as well as when interacting with the art on the pages on either side of it. DW also engages in some dada narratives using his simplified figures, incorporating found text in the pieces to create a strange rhythm. This was by far the best of their collaborations: richer, more complex and more beautiful than the other issues. Again, Uelein seems to be on the verge of figuring out exactly what he wants to do, and I'm eager to follow whatever decision he makes.

Thirty Days of CCS #9: Amelia Onorato and D.W./Kevin Uehlein

Ultima Thule, by Amelia Onorato. Onorato has largely made fantasy her genre of choice as a cartoonist, albeit with a very specific point of view and aesthetic. Onorato has merged dark but fantastical concepts largely from a feminist perspective, all while closely hewing to whatever overriding idea is present in the plot. Ultima Thule is something of a departure in some respects, as a Roman engineer named Marcellinus (of African descent, which I thought was an interesting touch) gets exiled from the mother country and gets shipwrecked. He washes up in Ireland, in a remote village that depends on its sheep and rappelling down cliffs in order to steal birds' eggs. He's viewed as a sort of curiosity, unskilled in any of the activities that kept the tribe alive, until he engineers a plumbing system that drew water down from a mountain stream to the village. Onorato neatly ties together a village custom, Marcellinus' increasing affection for the village and his initial rescuer in particular and a tense moment to bring the short story to a neat close. It's an incredibly effective little story, thanks in large part to Onorato's increasingly confident character design and remarkable efficiency. The mark of a maturing artist is that their work has little in the way of filler or overdrawing, and this exercise certainly shows that Anorato is at that point.

KJC #2, by D.W. and Kevin Uehlein. Written by D.W. and drawn by Uehlein, this is a slick, engaging and wordless anthropomorphic story about a bull-headed male sent off on a mission by an alluring female. Its virtues lie chiefly in Uehlein's dazzling use of blacks and fluid panel-to-panel transitions, speeding up and slowing down the action as the narrative called for at the time. Given no information other than what was on the page, we start out believing this to be a hero's journey, as the bull-headed male has to think and fight his way through all sorts of obstacles. What appears to be an undersea adventure in the wild suddenly turns into a city adventure, where the reader starts to get clued in that not everything is at it seems. Then the story takes an almost Tarantino-esque turn for the violent, as the reader understands that this is a delicately-balanced caper that simply needed one last man for the job--and he and his crew wind up taking their just reward in the end. It's a well-paced, clever and simple story whose twists are eminently satisfying.

Thirty Days of CCS, Day 24: Kevin Uehlein, Red House

Kevin Uehlein's comics fall somewhere between the mark-making and underground traditions. Each of the minis he sent me looked ripped straight from his sketchbook, giving them a certain sense of freshness and immediacy. At the same time, there's little in the way of coherency or continuity to be found, though this didn't seem to be his goal to begin with. For example, Compulse 6 and 7 are pure sketchbook work, repeating themes and images. Uehlein experimented with color, form and variations on a theme: cute girls, bearded creatures, cat creatures, wolf creatures, etc. That underground impulse is strong, even if his attention to explicitly sexual issues is tangential at best. These are exercises of the imagination, not just the id.

Dumbass Dog In "Smell The Roses" makes a couple of winking nods to R.Crumb as it employs anthropomorphic animals, one of whom does a variation of the "Keep On Truckin'" pose. Trying to roust his horrible friend, Disgusting Duck, to go out on a walk, the comic goes as scatological as one can imagine, only there's a clever joke he manages to conjure out of the situation. The comic ends with what seemed like it might be a sad-sack climax, only to reverse reader expectations by making its protagonist a profoundly satisfying winner against a bully. This was my favorite of Uehlein's comics, partly because of the character design and partly because of the odd turns the story took.

Compulse 5: Hideous is a cross between autobio and sketchbook mini, as Uehlein ponders a day spent in Los Angeles as a recently minted thirty year old. The page design of this comic is especially interesting, as he crams up to a couple of dozen panels on each page of wildly varying size. George Herriman is as much a touchstone as Crumb in these comics, as there's a poetic quality to each page, both in terms of the images and the actual text. The use of funny animals allows him a certain flexibility regarding the depiction of reality, giving him a chance to get weird at the drop of a hat without jarring the reader. At the same time, the comic is clearly personal and a way to work out issues related to loneliness and a sense of purpose.

Finally, KJC #1 is a jam between Uehlein and fellow CCS classmate DW. It's a pretty exquisite merging of aesthetic sensibilities, The two color pages in particular are a surprisingly tasteful psychedelic explosion, mixing the sheer density of a DW page with the more open and cartoony Uehlein drawings, along with the typical DW use of collage and repurposed text. It's more interesting to parse and scan than actually read, which is true of much of Uehlein's work here.

Uehlein does lead off the mini anthology Red House, a funny and gross collection of misfortunes and misadventures. With his Disgusting Duck character, Uehlein goes way over the top in depicting a string of utterly disgusting events (including a street vendor selling vomit for some reason), leading to the duck's job at Subway and an unexpected punchline. Pat Barrett's shit-related interstitial material is brutal in terms of its satiric punch, especially the ones aimed at religion and belief systems in general. Beth Hetland's atypically nasty strip about a tiny female creature that torments humans in ways big and small is just a series of escalating jokes that simply keeps going. Ben Horak's "Fun Fun With Dumb Dumb" is a typically masterful account of a horrible person trying to get over on a girl by putting a squirrel in his pants (to emphasize his "masculinity"), only to traumatize the animal that eventually comes back for revenge. It's the tiny visual details (like the squirrel shivering in the shower or tentatively peeking outside while wearing a robe and smoking a cigarette) that make Horak's work so funny. Josh Kramer's joke about a raccoon as a chef in a fancy restaurant doesn't have quite enough of a wind-up to make it effective, but Dakota McFadzean's take on a Casper the Friendly Ghost type character is hilarious and terrifying at the same time. This group of CCS alumni is clearly quite simpatico, even when some of them worked a little out of their wheelhouse with regard to subject matter. Uehlein's sensibilities clearly set the stage for this anthology, as his piece didn't vary much at all from his regular work.

CCS Anthologies: Werewolf IV, Werepups, Kids, Visions of the Aporkalypse

Let's take a look at three recent anthologies by students and alumni from the Center for Cartoon Studies.

Visions of the Aporkalypse, edited by Kevin Uehlein. The theme of this very silly anthology was perhaps a bit too limiting: humans doomed by the revenge of the pigs. Most of the artists turned in the same kind of story: pigs (led by an all-powerful "swine-clops" figure) rising up, devouring or otherwise sacrificing humans. It's a pretty thin concept, made even thinner by an overabundance of pin-up pages, as opposed to actual stories. And of course, the revenge theme of an animal being bred for food makes some of these stories as subtle as a sledgehammer. That said, there were three stories that elicited a chuckle. Betsey Swardlick's "bacon-porn" story, while as subtle as that aforementioned sledge-hammer, was still funny in the extreme she went to in depicting a man sexually excited by bacon and the revenge his wife gets on him as a result. Nomi Kane's story about a pig king getting ready to sacrifice humans but being urged by a minister to spare the Jews (since they didn't eat pork) had a very amusing punchline (seems like everyone makes an exception for bacon, even pigs!). The best story in the anthology was Carl Mefferd's "Meat Is Murder", which features a group of anthropomorphic pigs liberating a human processing center...only to face a rather gruesome end when nature takes its course. All told, this was one of the lesser CCS anthologies I've seen, though as always its presentation was attractive and its design was clever.

Werewolf IV and Werepups, edited by Penina Gal, Betsey Swardlick, Josh Rosen & Nick Patten. This particular editorial collective has done a fine job of showcasing a wide variety of story types from what would seem to be a fairly limited theme. They wisely chose to end the series with their fourth volume after the third started to run a bit thin in terms of material, but piggybacked it with a minicomic aimed at kids. Given that a number of small press conventions tend to have kids looking for material aimed at them, it was wise of the editors to create Werepups. It's a lovely package, featuring (as always) glow-in-the-dark paint on the cover. It's a short anthology at just 32 pages, which again is a perfect length for its audience.


The line-up is a strong one, starting with Melissa Mendes' "Where-Wolf?". Already specializing in comics featuring the experiences of children, this story is a lark about a young girl trying to keep a bag of meat destined for grandma's house safe. When she invites her best friend to come along, she should have checked to see if there was a full moon out. Mendes' open page design is as reminiscent of children's books as it is comics. Penina Gal's "Crisis In Jamlandia" is another story with an open layout, this time two panels to a page. In her typically scratchy and expressive style, Gal tells a story of two twin musicians who befriend a group of werewolves who want to play in a band but are afraid to go out in public. Nomi Kane's clean line is a nice contrast to the prior two stories with a two pager about a wolf who is confused when he wakes up wearing a tie, only to make the horrible realization that he can turn into a human!


Colleen Frakes, who specializes in folklore and monsters, does a fun segment about "Werewolf Tips and Tricks", a handbook for dealing with lycanthropes that works because of her light touch and delicate line. After several stories that are mostly restrained, Betsey Swardlick goes broad with "Double-Team", a typically funny story featuring teen werewolves at a summer camp forced to play teen vampires in a soccer match. Her comics have a frantic quality to them, usually climaxing in some sort of loud bang-up or crash, and this one is no exception. Swardlick's work really came alive in the course of these Werewolf anthologies, mixing slice-of-life stories with the supernatural. Her scratchy pencils contrast well with Dakota McFadzean's "We Like The Moon", a Joseph Lambert-style tale of a girl wanting to see the moon with her dog but worried that it's too cloudy. This is a simple tale made clever thanks to McFadzean's page design, wherein the reader sees the moon in the top set of panels but the girl and her dog don't, thanks to the clouds acting as a very thick sort of panel border. In another clever device, everything the dog says about the moon winds up being true, including the rabbit in the moon who eventually blows the clouds away. McFadzean's storytelling solutions in this story are ingenious, making full use of the formal properties of comics without losing track of his narrative.


The last issue of Werewolf, is a solid send-off and an improvement over the third issue. What I like best about it is its varied tone, from autobiographical to genre adventure to slice-of-life humor to straight-up gag work to horror. Jesse Lonergan's "Battle of the Bands" was a cute series of riffs on genre types as indy bands, with groups like The Zombies singing about eating brains and The Mummies breaking of a Chuck-D style rhyme. The payoff gag, featuring a group's unlikely werewolf transformation, flatters Lonergan's compositional skills as well as his angular, cartoony character design. My favorite story in the book came from Annie Murphy, whose "Queerwolf" was an autobio story about going to an elementary school to teach comics and coming up against the way gender and identity get locked in at such an early age for children. She aims to break that up by working with the class on a comic about a female werewolf. There's a touching simplicity and sincerity to this story as well as a dose of humor that's not always a hallmark of Murphy's work. Murphy is an impressive young talent who hasn't published a lot of comics to date, but they're certainly all worth tracking down.

"Lock and Load" by Jon Chad is a typically well-drawn story by him that serves to provide an unexpected punchline to what seems to be a silly flub by its main character. Penina Gal's "Wolfsbane" benefits from her simple, stick-figure drawings and small panels. Quirky horror artist Denis St. John's "Mangia La Mia Carne" is a bizarre bit of fetish-fiction about a woman who is a bit too turned on by what wolves can do. Luke Eastman's "Knacker" is a visceral tale of an animal carcass collector who may not be what he seems. Only Ryland Ianelli's "The Curse of the Wearwolf" felt undercooked to me, with sloppy drawing and unclear storytelling. It felt like a last-minute submission.


Two of the series' editors, Swardlick & Rosen, have also turned in some of the most consistently interesting work in the series. The latest chapter of Swardlick's "FailWolves" serial finds the two twentysomething female werewolves meeting more of their kind but finding they fit in as well with other lycanthropes as they do with the rest of society. As always, her dialogue is witty (though a couple of spelling mistakes stood out) and her line is agreeably sloppy & expressive. She may not be a top-drawer draftswoman, but she is clearly a talented cartoonist. Rosen's werewolf hunter character is appealing both in terms of narrative possibilities as well as design, thanks to Rosen's clear-line style. At some point, a collection of the best of all four issues of the anthology would yield a strong volume. Collections of the serials from Swardlick & Rosen would also seem to make sense. The success of the anthology is a tribute to its editors' commitment to providing diverse material, while allowing each artist to do what they do best.



Kids, edited by Melissa Mendes & Jose-Luis Olivares. This is the strongest of the anthologies I discuss here, which isn't a big surprise considering that its lineup is similar to that of the Sundays anthology group. That includes Mendes and Olivares, who are the editors of this well-curated 64-page effort. The theme is simple: comics about childhood in its various incarnations. For many of the artists invited to contribute, writing about childhood was already one of their main storytelling interests, so doing a story for an anthology such as this was not much of a stretch. Mendes kicks off the issue with a wordless strip about a kid waking up in the night, quietly sneaking out of the house, and then dropping his/her pajama bottoms and dancing. The rubbed charcoal style resembles crayon and is a nice invocation of a story about a kid that involves some aspect of the sort of drawing a child would make.

Robyn Chapman's "Krissy's House" is done in her minimalist clear-line style, and it's an autobio story about hanging out at the house of a friend as a pre-teen. The tone of the story is purely joyful, even if Chapman's adult perspective makes her understand that Krissy came from an extremely poor family. Chuck Forsman's "Witch Beach" was a touching and strange story about a young girl who declares to her (witch?) mother that she had decided that she no longer needed parents and informed her of this. There's a great panel where her mother panics but decides to play it cool by telling her daughter Icky to go outside to see what her father was doing. In another heart-crushing panel, Icky tries to tell her dad the same thing but the broken man says "I'm really not up to the whole 'father' thing right now". However, Icky's proclamation makes him feel better, and the two then share a moment both absurd and intimate. Forsman's cartoony and slightly fragile line are key in how he wrings emotion from these encounters without becoming mawkish.

Nate Beaty's "LCB" is a bit of silliness about some 80s breakdancing kids busting moves, battling rivals and videotaping themselves for demo purposes. It shares the light touch found in the rest of the anthology's stories. Lydia Conklin's "The Kittens Hate You" is another story in a series of strips about the ways in which children can be cruel to each other. It's about a bunch of kittens in a barn and how two girls are each given a chance to hang out with them. When one girl's time is up, she imagines the kittens telling her how much more they like her--and a funny competition ensues as to whom can get the most affection on demand from one of the cats. As always, there's a scratchy ugliness to Conklin's style, as she refuses to idealize or make childhood seem cute in any way.



Alex Kim's story about a young girl who has an unspoken crush on an older boy who has a crush on her older sister does a lot of its storytelling without saying a word. The weird little girl has no way to verbalize her feelings in general, as she sets up a tent outside the house and growls at the boy when the boy comes around to try to talk to the girl. Kim's use of spotted blacks and his slightly vibrating line are his trademarks and they're put to good use here to lend a sense of the young girl's anxiety. An anthology about kids has to have a story by Joseph Lambert, and here Lambert contributes a two-pager about a pair of young brothers fighting sleep and each other. Lambert's lettering is a crucial part of his overall aesthetic, matching the outsized and exaggerated nature of childhood itself.

Melissa's sister Amy contributes a two-page memory of herself, her sister and their mother dancing outside in the rain. It's a lovely image, more of an illustration than a comic. The anthology then shifts from this realistically rendered story to Max De Radigues' more bigfoot, cartoony style in his depiction of a young boy discovering a witch in the forest trying to turn animals into children. It's not a scary moment, because he then reveals that he knows the witch intimately and even makes suggestions for success. It winds up being a wonderfully touching strip about familial connection with a gentle sense of humor.



Olivares' "Made of Sand" features tiny figures and small panels, mixing fantasy and magic. In it, we see a young boy who discovers a tiny princess in a sand castle who asks for a starfish. He finds one and sets out to bring it to her, only to find that the castle has been demolished. I love the way Olivares has his character close his eyes while walking, imagining a world opening up in front of him. James Hindle's "Trash Heap" is about a teenage boy who rebels against his parents and winds up making a friend on the street, and they're extremely close until the other boy tires of him and heads out of town with a rich girl. Hindle really gets at the ache of how teens attach so much meaning to the friendships and relationships, even if they don't quite understand how that attachment is frequently not reciprocated.


Once again, the anthology rarely presents the same style twice in a row, so the transition this time is to Dane Martin's scratchy, feverish line, anthropomorphic characters and absurd yet disturbing story ideas. Martin switches character perspectives in a dizzying and hilarious manner, displacing the upsetting narrative events he creates with a crazy transition. The final story is more autobio, this time by David Libens. It's another story with a fragile, scratchy line about the ways in which the roles of children and parents can switch in times of stress. Everything about this anthology is well-designed without being overly fussy; I love the touch of the photos of the contributors as children being posted on refrigerators (complete with magnetic letters that spell out "comics" holding them up) as well as the hand-stamped letters spelling out "Kids" on the cover in paint. Hopefully there will be future volumes of this anthology.