45 Days Of CCS, #7: Colleen Frakes, Coco Fox, Mary Shyne, Carl Antonowicz

Today's entry features short reviews of very short minis by a number of creators. Most of them are in the middle of longer projects, and these minis represent something they can have at shows. 

Starting off with Colleen Frakes, she's from the first CCS graduating class and is still at it. Her first major-publisher book, Knots, will be coming out in September of 2024. For SPX 2023, she did a mini called Where Have You Been?, and it's a funny little autobio comic that talks about the past few years. While Frakes usually does variations on fantasy stories, her self-caricature has long been one of my favorite in comics, and I enjoy the exasperated body language in these comics. Frakes flashes back to how the past few years have felt lost for a lot of people. During this period, Frakes had a kid (who is nearing kindergarten age) and had a book dropped from a publisher. There's a hilarious anecdote where an editor told her that the book was dropped not because Frakes got pregnant, but because her "art was bad." Frakes' pen line remains a joy to look at; she has a keen understanding of the in-between spaces in drawing big scenes. 

Another artist working on a longer book is Mary Shyne. Her brief but funny mini Robbing O'Hare's Weed Box features the main characters from her upcoming book, Graduation Day. It's a time loop story involving two best friends in high school on their graduation day. This fragment is about their wanting to rob the Cannabis Amnesty Box in Chicago's O'Hare Airport, and the various shenanigans they get up to in order to do it. Shyne loves crazy page composition, and even here, she uses a page with slanted panel lines (including the rare trapezoidal panel in the middle of a page) and an open page layout. That doesn't detract from her winning character design, because even in the span of these four pages, Shyne gets across a strong sense of self for both of them. 

Coco Fox also has a book coming out titled called Let's Go, Coco! Fox has leveled up as a cartoonist as much as anyone I've ever seen from CCS, and she did a quick mini for SPX called Just Kitten'. It's a beautifully designed mini with a bunch of cat puns that are awful, but Fox milks each joke with an elaborate visual set-up and doubles down on the pun. The one about "Caturday Night Live" is especially well-done, as she layers three levels of puns in the punchline. 

Carl Antonowicz is an artist who is fascinated by multimedia presentations of comics with performance and music. He did a performance of his upcoming book The Ardent (full disclosure: it's coming from Fieldmouse Press and I'm editing it) at SPX in 2023, with a full array of props and sound effects. His brief mini Open Casket Soundsystem: The Great Beast is paired with a set of musical pieces that can be found on Bandcamp or his patreon. It's the usual sort of Antonowicz comic and it continues to follow his extensive interest in cults and how they operate on a psychological level. Here, the cult in a postapocalyptic setting is following the Great Beast, a monstrous creature indifferent to their presence. He is unthinking and unyielding, devouring all of the detritus of a former civilization that's in his path, with his followers eating his waste. It's bleak and once again points out the utter uselessness of rigid belief systems in the face of a nihilistic and uncaring world. Antonowicz's ratty line is perfect for depicting charred, decaying flesh and piles of bones. 

31 Days Of CCS #1: Mary Shyne

Kicking off my annual feature on the artists of the Center For Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT, we have Mary Shyne's Get Over It. Shyne is a fairly recent graduate whose stylish early chapters of this book caught my attention last year. Shyne stands out because of her strong character design, attention to background detail, and firm understanding of how to draw frenetic action. The high concept of the comic is that a bike delivery woman named Leslie, who works for her father, can see the anthropomorphic emotional projection of everyone around her. When she happens upon some equipment at a college lab she was supposed to deliver food to, she realizes that the equipment makes these "emotional miasmas" solid...and punchable.

The high concept is clever but complicated, and Shyne explores this complexity with a couple of clever devices. First, the comic is in black and white, and while Shyne uses a fairly thin and fluid line, her dense use of spotting blacks and high level of background detail make the panel-to-panel reading of this an intense experience. However, to depict the miasmas, she uses the clever trick of drawing them all in red. It's a fantastic contrast, especially when there's a transition between the miasmas being invisible to everyone by Leslie to them having actual corporeal qualities and wreck the streets of New York. The depiction of speed and motion is also a crucial part of the narrative, as the comic is very much an ode to bicycle delivery and the ways in which the city becomes a kind of angular, high-speed adventure. Shyne does this through the use of Dutch angles, grid-smashing page layouts, high-impact splash pages, and visceral body language that bends and stretches with the action.

Shyne matches the visual complexity (yet fluidity) of the visuals with a complex layer of plot and emotional themes. There are a couple of emotional locked-room mysteries that steer the narrative, but Shyne hands out subtle clues from the very beginning of the comic without overplaying her hand. What's especially clever about them is that as Shyne unravels them, the mysteries surrounding them melt away in ways that seem obvious in retrospect but are tense in the moment. The lab tech whose equipment started Leslie down this road went through a brutal break-up, but when her ex is someone surprisingly close to Leslie, the mystery deepens. As the narrative stakes get higher when a piece of equipment disappears in a taxi, the emotional stakes similarly rise as Shyne reveals the final layer of the story: this is a comic about a father and daughter.

It's a story about resentment, and fear of abandonment, and loneliness. It's a story about unresolved trauma and how it was not only revisited on Leslie but on others around him. Shyne cleverly reflects the many complex layers of feeling with a literal fistfight with a monster, complete with acrobatics and lots of property damage. There are no monsters, there are no heroes or villains. There are just people, many of them with feelings of betrayal that never healed. This is a story about therapy (in its most visceral, outrageous form) and how healing can begin. That said, Shyne never abandons the mechanics of the original narrative. As a result, when we reach the end, there's a surprise reveal that opens up the possibility of a sequel. This is a confident debut for a skilled artist with a sophisticated understanding of fast-paced adventure storytelling and a lot to say about difficult emotional relationships.

Artists To Seek Out At SPX 2019

Here's my usual dive into artists that SPX-goers should definitely check out. As always, I try not to repeat names from previous years and other shows.

1. The Triangle's Finest (Table W67) That would be three excellent cartoonists from the Research Triangle in my state of North Carolina: Andrew Neal (Hillsborough), Adam Meuse (Cary), and Max Huffman (Carrboro). Neal is the former owner of the excellent Chapel Hill Comics and the artist behind the hilarious and strange Meeting Comics. Meuse has been producing funny, strange, and touching minis for years, including the classic Sad Animals and Square. Huffman is a fairly recent grad of the School Of Visual Arts, He's a wild stylist with comics like Plaguers Int'l and Garage Island. This will be one of the best tables at the entire show.

2. Lance Ward (Table J9). I've been a fan of Ward's scorched-earth autobio for years, and I'm pleased to see his work get wider recognition. His new book, Blood and Drugs, is a harrowing and honest look at how an injury forced him to adapt to using a scrawled, almost manic style. He'll be at the Birdcage Bottom Books table, but all of his work is highly recommended.

3. ShortBox (Table W8).  The cutting-edge publishing concern of Zainab Akhtar will have a major presence at SPX. Like any smart publisher, she's way ahead of the curve with regard to up-and-coming talents; she was one of the first to become aware of Rosemary Valero-O'Connell, for example. This table will be jam-packed with great comics you may not have seen before. Zainab herself will not be there, but the books will be!

4. Diskette Press (Table I14). Carta Monir & Co. have quickly become a force to be reckoned with on the publishing scene. Come check out the work of Ignatz Award nominees Emma Jayne and Mar Julia in particular, but there's a wide variety of material to choose from.

5. Eleri Harris (Table L9). This Australian and graduate of the Center For Cartoon Studies is also a Nib editor and find historical/editorial cartoonist in her own right. Her historical comics are consistently well-sourced, funny, and fascinating.

6. Rachel Masilamani (Table A6a). I've been following her career since her Xeric Grant days, and her personal, poetic, and sometimes enigmatic work is better than ever. I'm excited that she has a chance to show off her work to a new audience.

7. Kate Lacour (Table H8-9). Her brand-new book Vivisectionary is out from Fantagraphics, and this is an engaging, witty, and visceral bit of body horror. Lacour's dry sense of humor is ever-present in this collection of drawings that were previously published in minicomics form, but the production values on this book make it a bizarre, beautiful art object.

8. Mary Shyne (Table I13a). This recent CCS grad is coming armed with her new book, Get Over It. Shyne's work is a perfect combination of top-notch production design and color, a playful line, and dialogue that mixes fantasy and verisimilitude. This will be one of the best books of the show.

9. Rikke Villadsen (W68-69). One of many Danes attending the show, Villaden's The Sea was a surreal, erotic, and terrifying mix of tropes and genres. Her pencil work, in particular, is dense and visceral. She'll also be at the Fantagraphics table.

10. Breena Nuñez (E11b). Her personal and political comics are playful, expressive, and powerful. Her comics about being Afro-Guatemalan often delve into family stories, but she's just as adept in using dynamic and innovative techniques in talking about injustice.

11. Glom Press (W6). Marc Pearson will be repping this excellent Australian Risograph publisher in their first SPX appearance. Bailey Sharp's My Big Life and Aaron Billings' Mystical Boy Scout #4 are particularly great.

12. Keren Katz (C13b). Katz is one of the most brilliant cartoonists working today. I haven't taken the deep dive into her work that I've wanted (I've only reviewed one book out of her extremely prolific output), but the way she works dance, abstraction, and comics-as-poetry into her narratives is relentlessly fascinating and confounding. There aren't many artists with a more sophisticated color palette, either. Her new book, The Backstage Of A Dishwashing Webshow, will be out from Secret Acres.

Thirty One Days Of CCS #1: Laura Terry, Mary Shyne, Joyana McDiarmid

Welcome to another year of Thirty One Days of CCS! Every day this month, I will review the output of students and alumni from the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. I've been covering the comics and creators who've attended this school focusing entirely on comics education since close to its beginning back in 2005, and I've seen a lot of remarkable talents grow. The CCS ethos is to publish and get better in public, and so hundreds of minicomics have poured out of the school during that time. Let's see what's up with old favorites and new artists.

The Sweetest Curse, by Laura Terry. Terry had a big success with last year's Graveyard Shakes, and she'll be publishing Adorable Empire for them next. I reviewed the first couple of chapters of that in mini form last year. Her entry this year is a short, complete story that once again works in the fantasy milieu while subverting it. This time around, it's about a Bog Fairy, who are supposed to curse humans. The story follows a nice Bog Fairy who can't quite get the hang of cursing other creatures, doing things like turning a bush into a nice kitty. She takes abuse from bully fairies and gets mocked by a Fairy Princess. Terry neatly turns that conflict around and turns it into a sweet romance, as the Princess had a crush on the Bog Fairy, and the end sees them cursing bullies and having a grand old time of it. Terry's character design and line are both impeccable and irresistible. Her use of gesture and body language sells every aspect of the story, with a style that's wildly expressive while looking clean and precise. It's a great formula, because it gives her a template with which she can subvert expectations. Hopefully, she'll continue to return to this setting, because it seems fully-formed and capable of bearing a number of different stories.

Get Over It, by Mary Shyne. This is an extended version of a mini I read earlier that happened to be part of Shyne's senior thesis at CCS last year. The high concept for this comic is brilliant, as it's about a young woman who can see the emotional projection of each person, which takes the form of a creature of some kind. For those whose "emotional miasmas" have been damaged, they manifest as monstrous forms. The main character, Leigh, is a bit directionless as we start the story, acting as a bike delivery service for her father's restaurant. When she delivers food to a lab and puts on some equipment, it becomes obvious that others know about what she can see, and the equipment acts as armor. Putting it on allows her to literally fight trauma by getting it to become corporeal and punching it. The red ink she uses for the miasmas flatters her thin, careful line, giving her entire presentation a liveliness that just doesn't quit. Shyne barely scratched the surface of her narrative in this tantalizing excerpt, yet she left the reader with a fully-formed main character that was easy to root for. Shyne really succeeded here because she clearly understands the mechanics and pacing of how fights and action work.

Interstitial, by Joyana McDiarmid. McDiarmid's Long Division series (and hopefully upcoming book) was one of the best of the CCS projects that have been completed. She's certainly deserving of wider recognition. Interstitial sees her plunge into a new project, about three different young women who have been strongly influenced by a particular book of poetry. Elise and Quinn, in the present day, are lovers. Elise is in college and Hanna works there. Elise is friends with a third young woman, Hanna, who is also in college. At the beginning of the story, all three are in a very good place, as Hanna learns that she's going to be helping as a TA. The story starts with Quinn seeming to fracture across time as she looks out a window, from various ages of her life, and the rest of the chapter is simply set-up and introductions.

The second chapter winds back and starts to establish the actual story, as we look into the pasts of each of them. Hanna's part of a family where she's the second oldest and already a mother figure, thanks in part to an indolent older sister. Elise is neglected by her father in favor of her younger brothers. Quinn's in a turbulent relationship with a man, goes out dancing to spite him, and he tells her not to come home. The point of each of these flashbacks is to show them as unhappy here as they were satisfied in the first chapter. We get hints that that book of poetry, little poems for little girls, has some kind of transformative quality. Hints and pieces are all that McDiarmid reveals in this first issue, but there's a lot to think about here. Her character design is superb, as always. She draws bodies that look like real bodies, for one thing. Her use of gesture is a key aspect of the comic. The art isn't quite as elegant or intricate as her prior series, but it's obvious that she's going for a different, more cartoonist style here because the story's ultimate tone will be quite different.

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 Days of CCS #5: Joyana McDiarmid, Jarad Greene, Mary Shyne

Jarad Greene has distinguished himself thus far as an excellent YA comics maker, but in his Memories of a Former Porcelain Doll, he relates an autobiographical story about appearances, the cruelty of peers and eventual body dysmorphia. That was in the form of skin problems, which he experienced later than most teens. The irony is that in middle school, his skin was perfect but he still used Clearasil. Only he accidentally used the kind that had concealer in it, leading his classmates to call him a porcelain doll and make fun of him for “wearing makeup”. Things got worse in his senior year when he actually developed acne for real, and it proved resistant to every standard treatment. That forced him to go on Accutane, an effective drug with brutal side effects, including skin so dry that it peels off and horrible arm rashes. 

There are also psychological side effects that he managed to dodge, and the end of the first issue finds him happy and ready to go to college. However, this story is told in flashback, and he let the readers know that his problems would return. He presages that at the very beginning of the story, where it’s not just having skin problems, it’s the fear of them always returning, triggered by any number of factors (including stress and anxiety). Greene uses a simple, clear line in a mostly naturalistic style that still allows him to be expressive when necessary. The occasional bulging eyes, sponge head, skull face and other self-descriptors add to the drama in a way that doesn’t take the reader out of the story. In many respects, they’re a way of Greene telling a ghost story about himself; a tale of his own haunting from mysterious, outside forces that tortured him. 

Joyana McDiarmid's Long Division #5 concludes the bracing, honest and uncompromising look at depression and suicide that was based on true, personal events. The first four issues featured the main character, Elena, in her stay at the psychiatric hospital and flashbacks to what led up to her suicide attempt. Struggling with bipolar disorder, she found herself unable to take care of herself or reach out to others for help. Ingeniously, McDiarmid used the metaphor of the branching nervous system as a way of visualizing her mental state, with her depression slowly blotting out healthy functions. McDiarmid's line is fine and expressive, and she's especially great at character design and drawing clothing.

The last issue is deliberately quiet and understated after the frantic quality of the four issues preceding it, both in terms of the day-to-day events and the stark metaphorical imagery seen in the early issues. It's McDiarmid's way of acknowledging that life is not a neat narrative, and that the struggle with mental illness, even with all the support, therapy and medication that's needed, is one that will always have good days and bad days. This issue features a difficult conversation between Elena and her ex-boyfriend, with whom she discusses her suicide attempt for the first time. Their relationship had been rocky and he had come off as self-righteous, and while an understanding of sorts is reached between the two of them, he tried to make her suicide attempt all about him. "I feel terrible, I really should have seen it coming" is a phrase he repeated, as he in no way tried to show empathy. Unsaid in the narrative is Elena's understanding that while she felt a responsibility to talk to him about it, she was not in any way responsible for his feelings about it.

The rest of the issue features Elena's attempts at self-care: hanging out with friends and family, getting rest, and generally being gentle with herself. We see her struggle with weight gain and her academic work while finding ways to accept those feelings. We can see the background paintings in her room echoing the anatomical imagery McDiarmid used throughout the series. Finally, the imagery of branches meets reality as she climbs up a tree, rests on a firm branch, and simply breathes. The image of disappearing a little with each breath and then reappearing reflects an exercise in acceptance. It's a beautiful, understated way of providing not so an ending as a coda or a grace note.

Incompatible, by Mary Shyne. This is one of the smartest, starkest self-examinations I've ever read when it comes to relationships. The high concept is simple: she includes one example from each of the twelve Zodiac signs of a man she dated with that sign. It's in order of the traditional Zodiac, starting with Aries and finishing with Pisces. It's one page per partner, each page a six-panel grid. Shyne efficiently uses that space to offer highlights, lowlights and particularly visceral and graphic images that really drive home what each relationship was all about. For example, the Aries that she kicked things off with two panels about how she met this particular guy and his impeccable dressing habits, while noting (with raised eyebrows) that his penis was two different colors, "almost like a pudding cup". The last three panels touch on how conscious she was that he never took her out, most likely because of her weight. It's a marvel of great cartooning (clear, bold lines, with an extra thick line weight for her glasses, her dominant accessory) and efficiency, as there are no wasted lines.

Another relationship wound up with her hating herself for how much she wanted one sort of indifferent guy to love her. Another was a platonic relationship where she actually liked the role of Friend that men often assigned to her. There are almosts, guys she broke up with because they needed more than she could give, guys who friend-zoned her, and a guy who made her feel safe but with whom she didn't have a sexual connection. Shyne is great at drawing bodies, and her own self-caricature is both full of clever details (freckles, glasses, shape of nose and eyebrows) and economical in terms of its overall presentation. There are times when her choices regarding negative space (she only spots blacks here and there) give her pages a slightly hollow feel, but her line is so engaging that it doesn't matter much. Above all else, her understanding of gesture, expression and bodies interacting in space is top notch, and that's the key to making this comic work so well.