45 Days Of CCS, #29: Comox and Ionosphere

Comox is an odd little video game-themed anthology with an interesting gimmick: it's a flip book were two artists do the "flip-side" of the other story. Filipa Estrela and Kevin Fitzpatrick are both in it, and both of their stories are very amusing. Each chapter is two pages and focuses on a type of game: horror, RPG, fighter, etc. Estrela gets "simulation," and she approaches an Animal Crossing type of game with the concept of, "what if the farmer was actually kind of a lunatic?" The frenzy of activity following the farmer (including underground rock-breaking) is perfect for Estrela's cute character design, and the fluidity of motion (even on pages crammed with panels) allows the reader to fly right through. Their partner, Emily Wigglesworth, tells the story from the point of view of everyone else in the village who is slightly alarmed by the farmer. 

Fitzpatrick's story is a fantasy RPG, something he's quite adept at in his usual comics. While maintaining some trappings of the game environment (like a health meter), Fitzpatrick wisely steers away from the clutter of a typical video game screen (something that hurt several other stories) and sticks to the layout of a typical adventure. The story follows a hero looking for their young companion in a cave, fighting a monster, and being saved by their friend at the last second. Fitzpatrick is so clever in composing his pages, seamlessly fitting together 14 panels on one page at odd angles in a way that felt both fluid and exciting. The flip story, by Mica Liesenfeld, is told from the point of view of the younger companion. The non-CCS highlight of the anthology was Shoona Browning's first-person shooter story where the bored protagonist, after saving humanity from the zombie horde, restarts the game--much to the chagrin of their companion. 

Speaking of anthologies, Masha Zhdanova edited a very good science-fiction anthology called Ionosphere. It's not a surprise that the best pieces were by her and standout CCS alum Ivy Lynn Allie, but there were a couple of other good pieces as well. Zhdanova's story "This World Still Locked Within A Dream" is a variant take on time loop stories such as Groundhog Day. The story follows a young woman named Perilla who one day realizes she is in a time loop, but her life is so boring and routine that she only realizes it when she notices that the event banner on a phone game hasn't changed. A glamorous character from the game named Gigi Galore tells her she was selected as a time loop beta tester, and for a fee, she would be sent back to her normal life. When Perilla refuses, that creates a long series of loops with some surprising emotional connections, a long meditation on depression and loneliness, and just how hard it is to break out of routines. Zhdanova effectively combines the sparkly video game character with an extremely mundane environment. The story is also available as a stand-alone minicomic. 

Allie's story, "Playthings," is a fascinating account of how adult concerns and the concerns of children are often at such odds that there is a vast disconnection of how reality is perceived. The story takes place on another world, as a girl named Rissy tramps around while her parents feverishly work on a project that will flood a local create in order to grow oxygen-creating algae. Unbeknownst to them, Rissy has discovered a race of tiny aliens that she refers to as fairies, and her parents don't realize that in trying to reassure her about what they think are imaginary friends, they have missed out entirely on the ramifications of what they're about to do. Allie adds greater complexity when she completely misinterprets the actions of the aliens, thinking they've destroyed her robot chicken friend, and she lashes out at them in violence and anger. Allie's pages are so smooth and orderly, built around lurking misery and the creeping feeling that something bad is always about to happen. 

The other notable entries in the anthology are from Akira B. and Zab R., who spin a beautiful-looking story about a space explorer letting in a highly unwelcome visitor to his ship by accident; and Torc, whose story about the ramifications of asking a freed creature for help is emotionally resonant and highly disturbing because of the emotional connection between the characters.  

31 Days Of CCS, #23: Masha Zhdanova & April Malig

April Malig's zines are closer in spirit to classic perzines of the late 80s and 90s than typical diary minicomics, in part because she frequently eschews typical line art in favor of photos heightened with color changes. There's a wonderful, revealing chattiness to these zines, as Malig in the zine Leftovers says "I just made this for fun and to make something pretty (I feel like that shouldn't be such a weird thing to say?)" Indeed not--for Malig, there's no such thing as a guilty pleasure. Malig tends to favor bright and soft colors, taking photos and altering them to emphasize pinks, blues, and purples. A lot of Malig's zines and comics are about travel, especially in Asia, and she has a way of capturing the bustle of other places with both enthusiasm and respect. 

I Didn't Write Enough Postcards is Malig's travel zine about Singapore and Taiwan. It's text followed by a photo on its opposite page, and there's a wonderful breathlessness to Malig's narration. She's unconcerned with typical tourist interests; she's there to eat and buy manga and see friends, and other fun activities along the way (like seeing a Museum of Miniatures) are a byproduct of this point of view. There's an unspoken poignancy to all of this, as it was two months before COVID shut everything down. April's Food Zine #2 is great because it's so intensely local to her in Queens, and the reviews are so quirky, like a coffee shop that sells onigiri with a chatty, dad-like guy running it. You find that Malig doesn't care about "authenticity" in the least even as her palate is quite adventurous. Malig is after delicious food and doesn't care where it comes from, including a 7-11 with some surprising fare. 

Some Tender Nothing is a combo abstract drawing/photo zine that goes into full neon colors, mimicking the night markets and street lighting she sees. All I Do is Play Animal Crossing and Online Shop is a COVID journal that captures what that particular video game did for a lot of people: provide blissful distraction, pleasant interactions with friends, and a brief halt to thinking about grief and death. It's a mix of black & white cartooning and images taken from the game itself, which Malig deliberately blurs with reality. Finally, Rotten Roses 2 continues the story of four friends in a group chat who are obsessed with a particular boys love manga and its various adaptations into other media. There are two things of note here (beyond Malig's sharp character design): the celebration of fan fiction as a creative group exercise, and the ways in which a highly specific set of mutual and obscure interests can create lasting bonds. One tends to reveal oneself through the way one makes art, but fan obsessions can also expose intimate and personal details as well. All of this is somewhat impenetrable to a reader, but the specifics of the fandom are less important than the emotions it invokes. 

Like Malig, Masha Zhdanova's tastes are highly informed by manga, among many other sources. In her micro-mini A Comics Mixtape, Zhdanova offers an unfolding map of how and which comics influenced her over the years, starting with Vera Brosgol's Anya's Ghost, in part because it made her think she could draw her own comics. Zhdanova cleverly takes the reader's eye across the page, including "downstairs" as she continues to descend into her mind. She namechecks manga, webcomics, books, and frames from Soviet cartoons her father used to show her. 

Zhdanova emigrated to the US at age two, something she explores in A Grey Mountainous Curly Wall. This is about a song sung to her as a child and her subsequent feelings of alienation toward her old country. It's not just that she was socialized as an American; the fact that she's queer, Jewish, and progressive meant that she realized she'd never feel welcome. This comic represents an attempt to connect with the music of her childhood, music directly connected to resistance in its own way. 

Lilac, subtitled "A Horror Comic," plays on some of these themes. It's about a Russian girl whose mother forces her to devour 5-sided lilacs, because it will give you good luck on your exams. It's a horror story that's really about a mother denying her child an opportunity to be herself, as the girl (Lena) falls in love with another girl and they promise to go to school away from their small town. As her mother grows sicker and clingier, it's revealed that there's more than luck going on with Lena eating the lilacs. Zhdanova's line is simple, expressive, and harsh, even as she uses soft colors as a way to create emotional dissonance. Zhdanova has a lot of refinement and greater control of her line to work on, but she already possesses a special touch in writing stories about alienation. 

31 Days Of CCS, #5: The Ladybroad Ledger #5

The Ladybroad Ledger is a broadsheet anthology by women, femmes, and nonbinary cartoonists in Vermont. So says its back page. The original version of this folded a few years ago after four issues, but three CCS students revived it with a bunch of their fellow students and alumni, along with other local cartoonists. The editors are Violet Kitchen, Annabel Driussi, and Sofia Lesage, and it looks like Kitchen handled the editing and Driussi the design. Kitchen took the cover chores and she came up with a powerful, vivid strip filled with violent reds and oranges that exemplified her anger regarding the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and endangering a woman's right to her own body. It's an eye-catching, righteous bit of fury that demonstrates her considerable skill as a cartoonist. She's got every tool needed to become great. 

One of the fun things about a broadsheet is that cartoonists get to work big. Coco Fox's strip about her struggles with gardening is a 16-panel grid that still has plenty of room to breathe because there's so much room on the page. Her loose, scribbly style and extensive use of decorative flourishes along her panel borders aid in depicting the slightly out-of-control nature of gardening and how difficult it is to control. Kristen Shull's autobio comic addresses the problem of worrying about her readers and audience reactions in general. It also has a lot of interesting visual flourishes that reflect her other cartooning interest of fantasy, and the panel design is chaotic in ways that aid its overall aims. 

A lot of Daryl Seitchik's work involves wide-open spaces, and so working big in her story "How To Become A Mermaid" does a great job of using negative space and black/white contrasts. Masha Zhdanova's comic about summer and falling in love has a nice visual gestalt effect that encapsulates a brief, fleeting feeling. Sofia Lesage's comic about summer goes in a radically different direction: it's a depression journal that's an absolute howl. It's a comic about being trapped in one's own worthless, horrifying mind and body, where the possibility of communication that doesn't poison everyone around you seems impossible. Where one's creative impulses are self-muted and whatever distractions that can be generated are fleeting and foolish. She captures all of these feelings and more in a loose grid that emphasizes body language above all else. 

Leda Zawacki's "29 Miles" suffers from murky grayscale reproduction, marring an otherwise spare, emotionally resonant story about a desperate young woman making a hail Mary play to get a ride. Sarah Woodard's "Open Heart" is a slightly heavy-handed but certainly pointed story about the ways in which the absurdity of racism is highlighted in a medical care facility, with people of all backgrounds providing care and treatment. Driussi's own piece spreads across two pages, depicting the raw, visceral, and erotic experience of experiencing live music. The clashing and clanging images and density of the lettering all play into creating this experience for the reader. 

Sarah Oak's strip about her "Daisy Duke" character grossing out a guy who's hitting on her at work is funny, although her cartooning style is cloyingly stylized. Jen Jolls' piece about someone whining regarding a class has a funny punchline, although the cartooning is all over the place. Keilani Lime and Amy Burns' graphic medicine comic about giving blood (I think; it might be just getting a shot) is funny, reflecting how chronic illness can disrupt any experience. Franky Frances Cannon's full page strip about favorite Vermont bars is cluttered and disorganized, but the drawings are so charming and the actual reviews are so funny that it won me over. Finally, Gabrielle Tinnirello's piece on dresses beautifully uses up the space provided with a host of delicate, decorative elements in a fluid, open page layout. 

There are also essays on why making bad comics is a good thing, how to become a cartoonist, an interview with Kitchen, and a long interview with musician and comics fan Neko Case. Overall, the level of cartooning is superior to the original publication, and more of the cartoonists take advantage of the format to produce work that's outside of their normal comfort zones. 

31 Days Of CCS #3, Masha Zhdanova

Masha Zhdanova deals in science-fiction stories that focus on the effects of technology on human relationships. In Golly, for example, a lonely young woman named Cordy learns about what real friendships should look like after venting to a "companion bot" at a local restaurant chain. The Ollybot is programmed to remember its customers, listen, and make occasional promotional statements. For Cordy, these are things she needed but didn't get, especially from her friend Anise, who had left town to become a model. Anise only tolerated Cordy because of their mutual friend Kam, but a fawning Cordy would do anything for Anise. 

When Anise came to town (after she lost a key gig), she tried to keep that paradigm going. It took the Ollybot being decommissioned to make Cordy understand what she needed and wasn't getting from Anise. While I'm not an expert on the style, it seems clear that Zhdanova's clearly influenced by shojo manga in her character design, mixed with that strong CCS storytelling that all of its grads are trained extensively in. The drawing is stiff and awkward at times, but Zhdanova's storytelling is clear and her ability to portray emotion carries the comic.

Visiting Is Good, But Home Is Better is the best kind of autobiographical comic: one that's fictional. Zhdanova was born in Russia and still has family there, but she was mostly raised in America. In this mini, a child named Nika leaves Rustica with her family to go out as part of a colony on Setsunia. Her parents split up not long after the move and returns to Rustica. The comic is a series of visits by Nika back to Rustica over several years. Each time, the way she feels about Rustica changes as she grows older and builds a life on Setsunia. Her father marries again and has another kid, and Nika finds it harder and harder to keep up with a language she doesn't speak as much anymore. 

More than anything, this mini is about perspective and relationships. Places become part of your essence, and one's daily habits and relationships alter one's neural pathways. Returning to old places causes cognitive dissonance; not only because nothing remains the same forever, but because even familiar things aren't the same because you're no longer the same person. Zhdanova's art had to carry a lot of unspoken aspects of the narrative, and it was more than up to the task, even on pages where her line was a bit wobbly. I suspect as she continues to draw comics, her own style will emerge and smooth out her line. 

What's important, as evidenced in the micro-minis Memories Of K-Pop and Single Lines Of Songs I Know Completely Without Context Because My Family Sings Just These Lines All The Time, is that her line is highly expressive. Her initial, fast sketches capture a lot of emotion. They key will be refining that line slightly and experimenting with how bodies relate to each other in space, as well as how bodies relate to their environment. 

31 Days Of CCS, #10: Masha Zhdanova

Masha Zhdanova is a first-year CCS student, and her contributions to this feature were some of the classic CCS student assignments. Birds, Beasts, Bat is an Aesop's Fable that many CCS cartoonists have adapted, but Zhdanova's take on it was quite clever. The first two pages are a standard take on the fable, which begins with the beasts going to war with the birds drawn in a naturalistic style. Then she shifts over to the real narrative, which is a summer camp where two competing teams (birds and beasts!) are playing capture the flag, but there's one guy (the bat) who tries to play both ends against the middle. In the end, he's banned from the game for his indecisive deceitfulness. Zhdanova went heavy on grayscale shading, and the result looked muddy on a number of pages, especially since her line weight is so thick to begin with. I got the feeling that this was a comic that was meant to be in color to accent those weights. Her character design and use of gesture carried much of the narrative.

The Princess In The Tower was the Ed Emberley assignment, which means everything must be drawn using elemental shapes. It's a great exercise, because it reinforces an important idea: drawing and cartooning are two related but different disciplines. By emphasizing that it requires very little drafting skill to tell a perfectly coherent story, it allows cartoonists to focus on the fundamentals: pacing, panel design, gesture, the relationship of characters in space, etc. Once again, Zhdanova had a clever wrinkle for her story: since it was about a princess in a very tall tower, she formatted it as an approximately 4" wide and 12" tall comic. She made use of that height on one page when the princess parachuted her way down from the tower, creating a nice downward scroll. 

Finally, there's The Museum Of Masha's Mind, a "comics mixtape." It's an unfolding comic wherein she talks about her various comics and other influences over the years. This was a fascinating read, as she discussed the impact of manga and webcomics in particular as being formative influences. She also cited Miik Morinaga's Girl Friends as being important when she was figuring out her own sexuality. Of particular interest were images from Soviet-era cartoons that she used to watch obsessively after her family came over from Russia. The whole thing is tied together by a drawing of herself as a sort of tour guide for every page, drawing the reader's eye to the right places. This is an idea that I'd love to see more artists take up.