Thirty Days of CCS #15: Rio Aubry Taylor, Melissa Mendes & Michelle Ollie

Jetty # 5-9, by Rio Aubry Taylor. Taylor’s transfuturist sci-fi fantasy epic continues in short bursts, but by issue #9 it seems like Taylor is almost ready to move on from this particular storyline. Though this comic is science fiction, it’s also quite obviously intensely personal. The general plotline, that it’s the future, the sun has disappeared, and a girl named Mina is trying to escape capture thanks to some friendly monks who have vowed to protect her, is straightforward enough. It’s an a to b to c story, going from place to place and trying to find safety. At the same time, there are a number of other ancillary characters whizzing around, sometimes interacting with the main plot and sometimes off on their own. This is a story about transformation and loss, and how the two are navigated. It’s about demons and personal demons; one character is a recovering alcoholic who picks up a stray bottle of whiskey, and his self-loathing as a result allows a thousand-eyed demon to track them. It’s transfuturist with regard to trans issues, to be sure, but it also meditates upon the predatory future of capitalism that is far more efficient in eliminating those that don’t contribute to the bottom line. Issue six features a righteous barbarian witch who helps Mina by first clubbing the demon and then casting it into hell. Meanwhile, Taylor’s abstract comics background is used in the service of the narrative, as background characters continue to melt, transform and face incredible pressures.

Issue 7 features a cat creature named Leel’ Riot (a quasi-anagram of Taylor’s name) and zir friend Fill, the constantly and painfully transforming cyborg receiving an epiphany about the location of a missing friend, and Mina’s group gets some info from the witch. The eighth issue is the best of the group, starting with a hilarious flashback to giant underground worms (who seemed to be named after the alter egos of three of the original X-Men) who accidentally unleashed a horrific evil on the world. Taylor gets into some real eschatological stuff here, with demons feeding on pain and Mina’s anger and heretofore unknown powers playing a big part in everything. The sequence with the worms is a compact marvel of great cartooning and funny writing, as the melodramatic worms seem ridiculous until horrible things to start to happen. On top of all this, they are being observed by a sort of techno-Hindu deity up above. The very brief ninth issue is a big stop sign, as Taylor reflects upon zir nature as a sorcerer/cartoonist, conjuring up zir own worlds and creating zir own descendants. Dragging the story through abstract muck must be an incredible amount of labor on an issue to issue basis, and the story might be better served finished all at once. There’s no question that Taylor is creating a stirring, whimsical, queer, frightening and heroic narrative; it just simply needs to breathe a little.

The Weight, #1-2, by Melissa Mendes. I’ve read this in dribs and drabs for a while now, and I look forward to the collection of the original minicomics. That said, Mendes’ sense of design and willingness to delve into behind-the-scenes material makes each mini a valuable read on its own. Mendes’ comics have always been about families, but this is the first time she’s gone deep and to some dark places with a family that is not happy and supportive. Indeed, Edie (the latest in a series of characters who  gender is vague according to appearances, favoring the aesthetic and lifestyle of a tomboy) has an abusive father who took her mother away from her own parents. What makes it worse is that he seemed to have done it out of spite as much as anything else. As portrayed in the first two issues, her father Ray is a ball of resentment and cruelty, hating himself almost as much as he hates everything else in the world.

Her mom, Marian, is helpless against his rage and determined will. The first issue depicts Edie’s birth and Ray’s subsequent revenge on Marian’s family (especially her father) by taking away their daughter from them. The second issue is Edie at about age six or so, a portrait of both extreme toughness and tender empathy. When some local boys trap a rabbit in a snare, Edie takes it away from them, daring them to stop her, as she gives the coney a proper burial. Mendes truly stepped up what was already one of her greatest skills as a cartoonist, which is her use of gesture. With just a few facial expressions and with her body language, Mendes gets across the ways in which she is similar to each of her parents. The fact that none of the boys in this story would dare step to her speaks volumes as to what happened the last time they might have tried to do such a thing. Yet she clearly is nurturing, loving and kind. Seeing her tenderly comfort her mother after another beating at the hands of her father quickly established the lengths to which she would go to help her mother, as well as her rage against her father. It’s a remarkable exploration of some dark territory for Mendes, but she nailed the emotional content of the story not because she’s used to writing highly dysfunctional families, but because the way she’s portrayed loving families comes through so brightly with regard to Edie and her mother. I am eager to read the whole thing, as Mendes continues to become one of the best cartoonists with regard to portraying small but crucial moments.

From The Desk Of The President, by Michelle Ollie. This is the annual CCS pitch comic, and what was interesting is that rather than have a guest or an alumnus make it, the President of CCS, Michelle Ollie, took it upon herself to do so. While not generally a practicing artist, Ollie reveals in this comic a lifelong love of the form. In doing so, she subtly gets across the CCS message of both Applied Cartooning (using your skills in a career that’s not necessarily publishing typical graphic novels) and also the expressive power of comics that anyone can have access to. In the story, she discussed her difficulty reading growing up and going to a rigidly-run Catholic school. It wasn’t until her father noticed that Ollie could read the words in comics just fine that he realized that there was a new avenue to pursue here. Soon, Ollie was not only reading comics, but also writing & drawing her own material. With the comic in a landscape format, Ollie juxtaposed her own childhood drawings of Snoopy in black with blue-line Charles Schulz originals underneath. Comics, she suggests, are simply another means of self-expression. That combination of word and image has a transformative effect on many, including children and veterans returning from war. For those struggling to put things into words alone, the alchemy of words and pictures together unlocks something in the brain, especially when one gives oneself permission to do “bad” drawings. In other words, to simply enjoy the experience of putting pen to paper without worrying what others might think about it. Ollie’s own line is charming and expressive; it more than does the job, especially since she clearly thought out the composition of her comic.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #23: Melissa Mendes

Melissa Mendes has a gift for writing comics about the lives of children and their families that have a powerful but restrained emotional resonance without relying on sentimentality. In Lou, her second book, Mendes expands her narrative range from a single character like in her first book, Freddy Stories, to a wider array of children and adults. She has a remarkable knack for getting into the heads of each of their characters and considering what their day-to-day lives and mindsets are, and how living with other people can be an incredibly frustrating experience. The titular Lou is a tomboy who is obsessed with animals, looks up to her metalhead older brother Eddie and has a love-hate relationship with her younger brother John. Initially, the plot seems to revolve around the simple notion of how the three will survive a summer together without getting on each other's nerves too much, but Mendes introduces some real danger as a way of testing the family's strengths and weaknesses.

Structurally, what's interesting about the book is that instead of one central plot, every member of the family has a whirling set of emotions and activities that sometimes affect the others. Lou is desperate for a puppy, and when her mom Annie vetoes the idea, Lou reacts histrionically, even refusing to speak to her mother. Lou asserts her independence by playing in an abandoned movie theater with her friends, one of whom has a crush on her. John is tired of being low man in the pecking order and wants to assert his agency--which he does by running away from his house. Eddie is well aware that his pizza parlor boss Joey is in trouble with some criminals, but he steps up as a responsible person and takes over the business after Joey disappears. Annie feels increasingly worn down by her kids' incessant squabbling as well as the fact that the family is barely scraping by. She feels betrayed by her husband Eddie when he goes ahead and gets the puppy anyway. Eddie is simply trying to make everyone happy, a mostly impossible task, but he does his best and even has some successes. All of these plotlines are equally important, and they converge at the end when the kids and Joey wind up in the abandoned theater, with Joey thinking about holding them hostage.The minicomic translated well to book size, adding greater clarity without sacrificing the surprisingly fast pace of the story. My favorite aspect of Mendes' character design is how she draws hair: Annie's messy curls, Eddie Sr.'s beard, Eddie Jr.'s long, stringy hair, John's shock of blonde and Lou's short, straight cut. Without exaggerating the line too much, Mendes created an instant and expressive manner to identify her characters, allowing her the opportunity to provide nuance in the form of expressive eyes and body language.

The one problem with the book is that as easy and natural as it is for Mendes to tell stories about a family and have it feel authentic and warm, it's clear that her lack of experience writing the action part of the book made it feel a bit clumsy and jarringly melodramatic. Fortunately, the other 95% of the book is spot-on, beautiful and ambitious. The way she showed the family fraying and then coming back together was well-done, as each member of the family put aside self-recrimination to focus on the task at hand. Having the pet as the stand-in who got harmed felt unnecessary, even if the ending was ultimately a happy one. It wouldn't have cheapened the tension one bit to have had the situation resolve itself without violence, nor did the pet dog need this to make himself valuable to the family. He was already an important part of the family. Still, it was interesting to see Mendes push herself as a creator in that regard, and one can see how she's reaping the benefits of that in her current series, The Weight. As good as Mendes is now, I sense that her best is ahead of her.

Thirty Days of CCS #12: Angela Boyle, Melissa Mendes, Kane Lynch, J.D. Lunt

A big thanks to Craig Fischer in lending me the following minis for review, from his excellent show At The Junction Of Words And Pictures: The Tenth Anniversary of the Center for Cartoon Studies at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. Craig was kind enough to invite me to do a talk with grads Beth Hetland and Rio Aubrey Taylor, and I had a great time. Thanks to Craig, I was able to flesh out my CCS feature this year, because missing SPX meant missing a number of potential contributions.

Final Frontiers, by Kane Lynch. This is comics reportage about highly dedicated Star Trek fans who have built their own sets and have continued the original series from where it left off. Lynch uses a multicolor approach free of black ink lines that mimics the absurdly bright color patterns of the original show. Lynch gets at the sense of creativity and passion of the fans who want to break out of simple cultural consumption and want to be part of something collaborative. He also dutifully reports on how different fans have different aesthetic interests in the show, and how that's led to a number of rifts.

Coping Mechanisms, by J.D. Lunt. This is an excellent if rough comic about mental illness, both with regard to the artist and those he served. It kicks off with his job as a person who takes shift with people who are on suicide watch. He meets one woman named Nicole who was given a guitar, and he saw that being able to play and sing about her life (as well as silly things) has a tremendously therapeutic effect. A strip about dealing with his PTSD is fascinating, as Lunt discusses the mechanics of how making abstract art proved to be a soothing activity for him, partly through the influence of Lynda Barry's writing about how putting pen to paper can be therapeutic, even if it's just doodles and spirals. The same was true for him owning a dog, taking care of it, going out in public with it and forming a bond with it. The heart of the matter that he got at was that despite his own fears induced by PTSD, he could be brave for his dog when the dog was afraid of so many things in the world. Lunt gets at the idea that nurturing a pet that has come to trust and love you unconditionally is enormously therapeutic, because it gets you out of the headspace of trauma and into something active and positive. Lunt's draftsmanship is still functional at best and he suffers from over-drawing and over-inking at various points, but it's clear that he's learned how to tell a story and has a lot to say.

More Than You Wanted To Know About Horseshoe Crabs, by Angela Boyle. This is a light-hearted but informative comic about the titular arachnids, which combines her interest in sequential storytelling with scientific illustration. Indeed, while there are plenty of cute panels where the crabs engage in silly activities, Boyle places a premium on anatomical accuracy throughout the comic. It's a comic that's maybe a shade too technical for a young reader to enjoy due to the nature of some of the terminology, but certainly would be great for middle schoolers and above to enjoy. I think the comic's greatest virtue is that while Boyle is interested in accuracy, each of the drawings is cartooned and has a life of its own, rather than the more static nature of a more detailed illustration. The story was the thing here, even if that story was simply the horseshoe crab talking about itself, and that's why the comic works.

The Weight #3, by Melissa Mendes. Mendes has distinguished herself as one of my favorite storytellers from CCS, especially with regard to the real empathy with which she treats her characters. There is a tremendous amount of affection demonstrated on the page for them, which makes it all the more emotionally powerful now that she's stretching out more and more with what's happening with her characters. This issue follows a girl growing up in an abusive family on a military base and her relationship with her best friend. We see the girl and her mother go over to a friend's house after an especially vicious incident and the delightfully quotidian rituals the girl and her friend engage in the next day. That leads to an encounter with friends that looks like it might lead to tragedy, but it only serves to stir up rage in the girl when it proves to be a trick. That brush with death portends a real tragedy at the end, serving up a powerful emotional shock that works so well because of the way that Mendes established the comic's relationships. Mendes' powerfully expressive style has become more confident and richer as she's expanded her storytelling range, but its overall spareness emphasizes the emotions of her characters above all else. This will make a powerful impact as a book when it's collected.

Thirty Days of CCS, Day 10: J.P. Coovert, Melissa Mendes, Rachel Dukes

Frankie Comics #2, by Rachel Dukes. This is a collection of Dukes' elegant and sparely-drawn strips about her cat. Dukes became momentarily famous when her strip "Life With/Out A Cat" was stolen from her website and used elsewhere without her permission, pointing to the sheer, naked piracy that occurs on an everyday basis on the internet. Dukes, of course, is a comics lifer who's been making ambitious anthologies like Side A and Side B while still a teenager. No one every went broke by making comics about cats, and many smart cartoonists like B.Kliban and Jeffrey Brown have had mass-market success with their cat comics. Dukes' Frankie comics are clear, well-drawn, and (most importantly) funny. Building off video game tropes in some strips and quotidian activities in others, Dukes alternates between quick-hitting gags (like a Cat vs Human fight) and slow-burn gags that build to a single punchline (like letting the cat manipulate her into increasingly difficult and annoying requests). This black & white comic adds zip-a-tone to give it depth and weight, but they look far better using the two-tone approach seen on her website or even the full color treatment she's used in some anthologies. At some point, I hope she collects enough of these to present to a publisher.

Joey, Lou #17 and A Very Special Lou, by Melissa Mendes. If there's a running theme connecting the three artists in this column today, it's that all three have a genuine sense of warmth and empathy that shows through on the page. Mendes has slowly built up a body of work about the lives of children, from comics about a version of her own life to new series like Lou that deal with similar stories of outsider tomboy types. The last issue of her Oily miniseries Lou found her exploring unfamiliar territory: putting her characters into actual danger. The events that led up to the younger brother character getting a gun pointed to his head in an abandoned building are complicated, but they're all a byproduct of what Mendes does best: family dynamics, family conflicts and the relationship between families and their pets. I'm not sure she quite stuck the landing in this issue, as she seemed to struggle with providing a happy ending with creating dramatic tension. The way she created the latter almost seemed gratuitous and random, and these are qualities I never associate with her work. A Very Special Lou, a follow-up to the series, finds her on more sure ground. It's about the contentious relationship between Lou and her younger brother, John. On his birthday, the one thing he really wants is some kind of input from Lou, who seems put off by him. When he finally gets it after an otherwise idyllic birthday (complete with attending a local wrestling card), it's clearly the gift he values most. Mendes adds a single-tone red accent to this comic that doesn't quite show up right on many of the pages (there's lots of bleed), but it's interesting to see her experiment with color after relying solely on her scribbly, expressive line.

As such, Joey is a big step up, both in terms of content and form. It's more reminiscent of a Max de Radigues comic than her prior material in that it deals with a kid who's having a lot of trouble at school and at home with constantly arguing parents. His only ally is his older sister, who at one point buys him a wolf mask. Given the opportunity to be someone else, and someone scary and powerful to boot, he naturally never takes the thing off until he's confronted by bullies. When this happens, there's no chance for solace from his parents, who are too busy screaming at each other to notice that he's not there. There are several lovely grace notes at the end of this comic, which has what can be called an ambiguously happy ending. Adding that level of ambiguity gives this comic a different quality than her prior stories, even as the rigid 2 x 4 grid keeps the story on a steady pace. I'm enjoying the restless quality of Mendes' comics, as it indicates a cartoonist who's trying to grow and expand.

Simple Routines Volume 3 and Broken Summer, by J.P. Coovert. Coovert's a member of the great 2008 graduation class at CCS, and he's been slowly cranking out gentle, warm comics for a number of years. His autobio/journal series, Simple Routines, is always a welcome presence because of that warmth, optimism and general decency that emanates from him and his comics. I don't generally consider the works of an artist as a referendum on their lives or personalities, but it's hard to not like the Coovert that we see in these pages. He's someone who's not afraid of his emotions, as the strips about graduating from CCS show in some detail. Most of all, he talks about his friendships and the way that they keep him connected to his past, and the lengths he goes to in order to keep them fresh. The strips about missing his fiance' (and later wife) Jacie are equally touching. Not everything is sunshine and roses, as there is real desperation in the strips where he's looking for a job and worrying about his worthiness as a person .His spare and lovely line that is as expressive as Duke's is laid out in classic Kochalka-style four-panel grids, and he alternates between strips with punchlines and strips with memorable and more serious final moments. There's nothing ground-breaking about his work here; it's simply an excellent example of the form.

Broken Summer is, in many ways, what cartoonists should aspire to do from time to time: make a comic that literally includes all of your favorite activities. This is about a magical world where monsters, kids and anthropomorphic animals all hang around and play video games, ride skateboards and go to concerts. It incorporates Harry Potter-style magic in a library as well as body-image issues in one neat package, making it a perfect all-ages comic. The stories are episodic and slightly aimless, but Coovert has a few through-lines that connect the characters and their activities together. All-ages comics seem to be Coovert's calling, as he infuses them with an easy charm that still has a little bite and sadness to it.

Thirty Days of CCS #26: Awesome Sound, Can't Lose, Stranger Knights 4

Awesome Sound is an anthology published by Sean Knickerbocker. The low-fi cover belies the beautiful contents within, which look like they were printed on a risograph. DW's endpapers, which forcefully push both text and image to the point of violent distortion, are fitting for a comic that's so visceral and unsettling. Dan Rinylo's "Beast" is told with an Ernie Bushmiller-style simplicity, as the young boy's face here is two big black dots for eyes, a black line for a nose and a mouth that goes from black line to black oval, depending on his emotions. Using a nine-panel grid after an initial splash page that establishes the boy at the edge of a forest, each page is interesting because the central panel is almost always a scene of stillness: we see the boy looking, see him smiling, see him in the middle of walking and then see him running from right to left when wild dogs start chasing him. That sets the story from amusing to frenetic, but the final middle panel is an image of an empty street--right before a wild dog who is chasing the boy is run over by a car. It's both dark and comedic, given the x over the dog's eye and the generally cartoony nature of the story, but the bright red blood on a page that's mostly black and white adds a level of terror to the proceedings.

Knickerbocker's "Do You Still Feel Alone?" begins with a brother and sister in the woods, on the run from something unseen. The way he throws the reader right into a chase scene propels the story right along, heightening its tension from the very beginning. That tension is ramped up when they are assaulted by a nude man, who is stabbed to death by the sister. Knickerbocker pulls back further, revealing that this is an island where a plane has crashed, its inhabitants reduced to life-and-death struggle. It's a brutal, unforgiving little tableau that has no pat ending, and the fact that it's drawn in that cartoony style reminiscent of Chuck Forsman and Sammy Harkham makes it all the more unsettling. Indeed, the later story where a young couple sets themselves on fire in a house (revealing a pentagram on the floor) is a sort of cousin to the sort of thing Forsman did in The End Of The Fucking World. Finally, Juan Fernadez's red ink two-pager is a perfect fit, as his scribbled-out faces go through a progression of consumption. This mini is short but every image packs a punch.

Can't Lose is an old-fashioned fanzine dedicated to the TV show Friday Night Lights. It's everything a fanzine should be: in-jokey, craft-conscious, and gently mocking in a reverent manner. "Coached" by superfan Melissa Mendes, this zine has an interesting sprinkling of well-known cartoonists. Popular topics include the Christian speed-metal band that the character Landry starts ("Crucifictorious"), the comically awful Billy, younger brother of lead character Tim (Henry Eudy does a fine job of pointing out just how weaselly he is while Nomi Kane posits a magical night the two share in the desert), and how doubters often come around to becoming obsessed with the show. Jon Shaw's "Friday Nightlife" speaks to this, as a character who mocks a couple mourning the last episode starts to watch it and eventually enters his own weird world of living out other, self-imagined seasons. Sam Spina actually made me laugh out loud in a strip where he and his wife are asked why South Carolinians are buying Texas beer, and they reply in unison "Texas forever". My favorite strips were Dan Zettwoch's hilarious story about Dillon getting routed because Saracen used photocopies from the playbook to hang up Crucifictorious flyers (lovingly designed and drawn by Zettwoch, of course) and Jeff Lok's tale of escalating terrible behavior being excused "They're good kids". Can't Lose even has a cut-out Tim Riggins paper doll. While bits of it might me mystifying to those in the dark, the premise is laid out clearly enough for the jokes to land.

Stranger Knights 4 was published, as always by Bill Volk. This light-hearted fantasy/sci-fi/superhero anthology has always been on the uneven and amateurish side. This issue is the first to look good from cover-to-cover, and each story is funny to boot. Volk's "Brega and Snurrd" sees him use a cleaned-up, simplified version of his line that emphasizes character expressiveness above all else. The story follows familiar Dungeons & Dragons/fantasy tropes, but it's really about the relationship between a mother and her teenaged daughter. Of course, the mother here is a bearded dwarf and her daughter is trying to pass as human at her wizarding school. When the mother demands the presence of her daughter for an adventure (ie, bonding session), tension arises in an amusing manner. This is a crisply-paced story that actually gets across real feelings in its fantasy context. I'd love to see more from these characters and their world. The Volk-written "Thousand Year Grudge" (drawn by Bryan Stone) is a denser, grittier story involving anthropomorphic animals, thievery, romances gone bad and multiple double-crosses. The thickness of Stone's line is coupled with cross-hatching, lots of spotted blacks and other noir visual effects to counter the funny animals and the wonderfully ludicrous character of Maggie, the young bird who decides to be a thief. Ann Lewis' "Headless" is a bit on the cruder side in terms of rendering, but her use of humorous body language in telling a story about an empty but animated suit of armor sells it effectively. Finally, the Volk-Mary Soper continuing collaboration "Incantrix X" continues to be a reliably amusing story with idiosyncratic character design and odd design choices.

Thirty Days of CCS #6: Melissa Mendes

Melissa Mendes' Oily comic Lou represents an interesting evolution in her storytelling.She's unquestionably one of the best cartoonists when it comes to telling stories about children that are devoid of nostalgia and sentimentality even as they are affectionate and honest. She's especially adept at telling stories about tomboys, as a former tomboy herself. In Lou, Mendes expands her family dynamic narratives by telling the story of a larger family, as opposed to simply telling stories about her "Freddy" character. The titular preteen is a middle child, looking up to her metalhead artist older brother Eddie and her pain-in-the-ass younger brother John. The story begins as a simple one, as the three kids try to find things to do without killing each other during summer break. Mendes is always at her best when telling these sorts of in-between time stories, narratives about time that has to be filled in imaginatively. Throughout the course of this 17-issue (12 pages per issue) narrative, she does a remarkable job of capturing the voices of not only the three children but also their working-class parents.

Mendes introduces elements of danger into this storyline for the first time in her career. She wisely steers away from having the criminal plot dominate the series, instead serving as a catalyst for each of the three children. When Eddie's boss at the pizza parlor goes missing amid visits from thugs, he and his friend take over the business. Lou and her friends explore an abandoned theater as she deals with the first pangs of puppy love from one of her friends. John is tired of being bossed around (especially by Lou) and runs away from home when their parents are out on a date. Mendes is careful to avoid too much cliche' surrounding this scenario that eventually puts the kids in danger, and I'm curious to see the final issue to see how the plot pans out. I hope she continues her history of restraint regarding her storytelling and avoids sensationalism. I thought she did a reasonably job of ratcheting up the tension at the end of #16 in an organic way, though I would have been just as happy to see that plot turn into an anticlimax instead of a true confrontation.

Mendes' art is simple, influenced as she notes by the wobbly linework of 90s Nickelodeon shows like Doug and Rugrats. Her figures are powerfully expressive with a minimum number of lines, though it's the few details she uses that make her characters what they are. In Lou's case, it's the bangs, the thick eyebrows and the freckles to go with her uniform of t-shirt and Oxford shirt. For Eddie, it's that long, stringy hair and gangly body to go with the fuzzy mustache that's sprouted on his lip. John's shock of hair that makes him look more like his mother is just part of his makeup as Mendes uses a slightly stronger line weight for this forceful, loud character. Like all of Mendes' work, Lou's pleasures are simple but are confidently and authentically expressed. Mendes has developed a style not unlike John Porcellino, in which the events that are most important are those that carry a powerful aesthetic value, one that's stripped down and simplified so as to bring it to life more vividly.

CCS-Powered Anthologies: Irene 2 and Sundays 5

Irene #2, edited by Andy Warner, dw and Dakota McFadzean. This is another strong entry from this mostly-group of grads from the Center for Cartoon Studies. I like the push-and-pull in its sensibilities with Warner (a naturalistic storyteller), McFadzean (an artist with a delicate but cartoony line) and dw (who specializes in abstractions, patterns and text appropriations), leading to a book that has a bleakly humorous streak. Take McFadzean's "Standing Water", for example. This one features a young boy making his way around his neighborhood wearing a mask, only the entire area is under water. Friends, family and pets float limply in the water, and his attempts at interacting with the world reveal a hidden well of meanings that have lost all their significance in the wake of what is essentially the end of the world. What seem to be acts of revenge or cruelty lose their meaning, leading him to a sense of sad resignation in a totally absurd situation.

Both sets of "Drawings" from dw serve to accent and set off the more conventional narratives, sounding a discordant and occasionally confrontational note in the way they use text and challenge the eye with their psychedelic patterns. After his first set of drawings come three dark stories in a row: Beth Hetland's "1838g", Warner's "Champions" and Sean K's "Ghosts". The first story is about the steady drumbeat of a nightmare that stops and starts. Is the woman in this story pregnant and afraid, imagining her baby to be a hideous parasite? Is she giving birth in the end or having an abortion? Warner's story is from the point of view of a young teen living in the rebellious glow of his older brother, following him as he storms away from his step-father and gets into a drunken snowmobile race that can only have tragic consequences. That Warner has the young narrator filled with nothing but hope makes its subtext all the more sad. "Ghosts" is shockingly straightforward: a young couple enters their house, douse themselves with gasoline and set themselves on fire. The causes of their despair are never mentioned; the drawing of a pentagram on the floor simply indicates that they had run out of options.

I was unfamiliar with Omar Khouri's work before seeing it in Irene, but his smudged, brushy story about a young man in Lebanon refusing to accept his father's legacy as a political strongman was funny and fascinating. The story is filled with scathing political satire that reflects both the sense of hope and cynicism inherent in the "Arab Spring" of the past few years, getting across the sense that the reins of power are loose enough for protest to make a difference but leaving a lingering sense of doubt that any change could be lasting or real. The back half of the comic is slightly less bleak, as Sophie Yanow's account of being escorted by a kind African cabbie in Paris consists entirely of the view from the cab, with no human figures present at all. Marc Bell's rubbery drawings and comic eye-pops make for a nice contrast to dw's drawings. Jonah McFadzean's "Monster Soup" actually works to reduce a sense of active dread with a child's logic and problem-solving. Finally, Bailey Sharp's story about being a poor cartoonist working in an art gallery and being confronted by a high-rolling elite asshole ends the book on a much-needed laugh. Her grotesque approach and willingness to take the piss out of everyone (artists, punks, the rich) leads to a number of very funny plot and character twists, and her critiques of the art world are as dead-on as her self-critiques. The book is well-edited and nicely designed, and it has the potential to be an impressive series if the editors decide to do future volumes.

Sundays #5, edited by Chuck Forsman, Sean Ford, Alex Kim, Joseph Lambert and Melissa Mendes. The Sundays anthology debuted years ago at the MOCCA festival and caused a big stir, thanks to its production values, ambitiousness and unusual format. This was especially the case because it came from a group of total unknowns, and it acted as a shot across the bow from CCS that its cartoonists were worthy of attention. The third and fourth volumes were absolutely outstanding, with the third coming in an innovative three minis in way package and the fourth simply loaded with cutting-edge cartoonists. The fifth volume, released a year ago, is filled with strong work but doesn't hold together like past volumes. Simply put, I'm not sure every participating artist had the same commitment to publish their best work here as they had in the past.

For example, editor Chuck Forsman didn't even contribute a comic--just a two page illustration. Max de Radigues seemed to have contributed a few pages from his Moose comic. The first four pieces in the book took up a lot of room but looked ill-suited for a black & white anthology. The lack of a clear link or theme also made these stories a slog; I eventually gathered that a loose theme may have been "life and death" or more specifically the line between the two. Damien Jay's "leaf writing" comic was fascinating as an experiment in immersive comics making, but once again it seemed to cry out for color to add greater clarity. Some of its pages were very difficult to read.

Things picked up in a stretch that included a grim but hopeful story by Melissa Mendes and a James Hindle story that popped off the page thanks to its cartoony clarity. Joseph Lambert stepped up with one of his best-ever short stories about a fight between two best friends. No one expresses sheer rage quite like Lambert does, and though its protagonist winds up in hell, she makes things very unpleasant for the Devil. Michael DeForge contributes just a couple of pages, but he manages to cram in a lot of story, as a hunter brings back a stray animal from the forest for his family to eat. It's just that the animal is a human child, eaten entirely with nonchalance. Alex Kim's young girl bringing animal heads to her "papa" in the forest is chilling and enigmatic; even if this is just an excerpt.

John Brodowski's "Wolf Eyes" is a typically hilarious piece that follows his exceptionally-rendered heavy metal fantasies out into the desert, as a sax player's furious solo and the cries of a wolf become one. The final image, of his sports car driving off into a sunrise that features the image of a woman's legs and ass boldly astride mountains, is typical of the wonderful ridiculousness of his comics. The highlights of the final third of the book include Warren Craghead's fascinating drawings of what seems to be a tidal pool over the span of a few hours, his drawings directing the reader's eye by numbering lines as he tries to depict simultaneity; his comics are as much about time in a single image as they are about place or object. Jeff Lok's chicken comics are typically alarming in their comedic structure, as his use of static images clashes in an interesting manner with the cartoony nature of his stories. Colleen Frakes' story about a woman getting food from the ocean was later expanded upon in her own mini, but it fits snugly here. Finally, Alexis Frederick-Frost's short about balloonists encountering a giant bird was typically elegant, horrifying, funny and delightfully-rendered. Sundays 5 is not a bad anthology. At least 2/3 of the work is good-to-excellent. It's just not quite as groundbreaking or sharp as its most recent predecessors, which to be fair is a tough standard to live up to. Given that its editors are busier than ever with their own projects, I'll be curious to see if they continue to publish the anthology.

New Comics from CCS Students and Alums

Let's take a look at some comics from current students and alumni of the Center for Cartoon Studies.  Some of these cartoonists have recently signed publishing deals and others are just getting started, but they all have differing techniques and approaches.

The End Of The Fucking World #3-6, by Chuck Forsman.  I was going crazy trying to figure out what artist Forsman's figures reminded me of in this series until I hit on it: Dik Browne drawing Hi and Lois.  The way Forsman draws eyes, hair and most especially big, bulbous noses reminds me of the simple but effective style used for years in that most conventional of comic strips about a family.  TEOTFW is about a makeshift and dysfunctional family of two.  As a sociopath teenage boy and his eager girlfriend leave town in his father's stolen car, they manage to create their own utopia of sorts in a lavish home left vacant by a vacationing college professor.  Those moments of beauty prove illusory when the boy finds some disturbing photos implicating the professor as a merchant of horror, but they really serve to give the boy an excuse to kill.  This changes the relationship as the couple are forced to flee, but the girl finds that she has little choice.  Each issue flips the narrative voice between the two leads, with the boy narrating issues 3 and 5 and the girl 4 and 6, and each issue fills in certain emotional gaps in the form of catch-up.  Forsman does quite a job foreshadowing the potential violence in the series and then ratcheting it up quickly, but defuses the visceral nature of the acts with this deliberately cartoony art and languid pacing.  It's the first major story that he's done without a fantastic element of any kind, but it certainly doesn't suffer for the shift away toward grim naturalism--especially since it seems to share the same sense of inevitable doom that his other comics possess.  He's hit upon a loose, sketchy style that works extremely well in telling the sort of psychologically disturbing but slightly absurd stories he seems most interested in.

Lou #1-2, by Melissa Mendes. Like Forsman and  Max de Radigues (in Moose), Mendes is crafting a minicomics series, 12 pages at a time.  Mendes is a master of depicting family dynamics.  In her Freddy stories, Mendes focuses in on a single child and the way she relates to the world as a cheerful outsider.  Lou is a story of three brothers of varying ages and their various concerns.  The youngest loves to antagonize his pre-teen older brother, while the oldest is thinking about heavy metal and smoking cigarettes.  The second issue throws in a dinner-time conflict between the younger brothers punctuated by their father's haltingly discussing maybe bringing home a puppy, to the chagrin of his wife.  There's a scene at the end where the middle child walks into his brother's room right before bedtime in order to rock out with him; it's a perfect depiction of the ways in which younger siblings seek out and absorb their older sibling's taste, as well as the way that such experiences create bonds and memories.  Mendes has a way of depicting family dynamics with warmth and sincerity but without the slightest trace of sentimentality; the ragged expressiveness of her line is a key to the success of this depiction. 

The Man Who Built Beirut and Two Stories, by Andy Warner.  These are three different exercises in storytelling for Warner, who has highly polished chops.  His character work is subtle, and it's obvious he can draw anything.  What's also clear is that he's trying to find his voice as a cartoonist.  The Man Who Built Beirut is part Joe Sacco-style reportage (his hand is heavily felt in this piece), part autobio.  Warner tries to make sense of why the death of a Lebanese plutocrat and politician could spark a new civil war that draws in any number of other countries into the conflict and finds that he can't come up with a pat answer.  I found that realization to be refreshing, actually: that an outsider has no better chance of understanding the complexity of a Middle East conflict than an expert or native.  The problem in this comic comes with Warner trying to link his own experiences to what he observes.  For example, when he talks about trying to repair a relationship via email in Beirut at the same time the politician, Rafik Hariri, was assassinated, the former feels like extraneous information.  There's no compelling reason to care about Warner's life or struggles at this point of the story, especially when he unleashes a massive Sacco-style crowd scene on the next page, pulling the reader out of Warner's story and into a different one.  Throughout the comic, he talks about his love of Lebanon and is clearly disturbed by the conflicts to seek out more information, but there's no synthesis of personal and political elements.

In Two Stories, Warner has more success with "Squirrel", a visceral and emotionally powerful story that seems to lead with the climax (his pet cat killing his pet squirrel), but it cleverly ends with Warner's later recall of that incident and the way in which he unexpectedly reacts at a public event.  It's a quiet, restrained story where his grief is a palpable thing, but Warner wisely doesn't linger on any one image or memory for too long.  "A Ghost" is the story of a childhood friendship unraveling as one boy has moved on to a private school and left his friend behind, despite his protestations about how much he hates it.  The friend left behind is naturally resentful of this, and concocts a story about a kid-seeking ghost to frighten his friend, which works.  This story's dialogue feels emotionally manipulative and predictable, as Warner simply spells things out too plainly with regard to their relationship.  Warner has a strong sense of design (I love the way that black smoke dominates the cover of The Man Who Built Beirut) and imbues his characters with a highly expressive quality, even when he's telling a story naturalistically.  One gets the sense that he's trying different narrative styles out, looking for something that fits him as a cartoonist.  Once he finds his niche, he has an interesting career ahead of him because of his skill and work ethic.

Kid Clampdown, by DW.  DW is an unusual CCS student in that he's almost entirely disinterested in narrative and is more in the tradition of Fort Thunder-style mark-making.  These minis are collections of sketchbook and blog drawings, and while there's no narrative per se, they all bear the stamp of the artist in particular and peculiar ways.  In some respects, these drawings represent his own process of cycling through and exploring his influences while putting his own stamp on them.  On some pages, one can sense the heavy hand of Ron Rege' in the intricacy of his pattern-making and the design of each page.  On other pages, one can see the raw power and ratty line of Gary Panter. On others, the absurd sense of humor and detail of Marc Bell seems to be what DW is exploring.  Throughout the comics, there's a particular set of visual motifs that repeat: a sort of psychedelic set of semi-circles that form a maze pattern.  There are moments of Sam Henderson-inspired gags, random commentary and inspired bits of lunacy.  I don't have a sense of where DW is going with all this.  These aren't purely abstract bits and it seems clear that there are germs of narrative on nearly every page, but it seems as though DW is working through style before he actually tackles a true narrative.  For the artists whose work he admires, there's virtually no division between style and story.  The question for DW will be not what style he settles on, but if he hops between styles to tell different kinds of stories.

Oak & Linden #5, by Pat Barrett.   This issue of Barrett's one-man anthology features the next two chapters of his odd serial "Petrified Girlriend", which is part relationship comic and part dystopian sci-fi/horror.  The premise finds a young couple who seem to be an unlikely match wind up in an unusual situation: she simply freezes up and petrifies.  Initially freaked out by the situation, he simply goes about his business as usual and even picks up a woman from his job and brings her back to the apartment.  (In a brutally funny bit of disrespect, he starts piling his dirty clothes on top of his petrified girlfriend.)   Meanwhile, the girlfriend wakes up in a terrible world where she's pursued by a monstrous bird and winds up being pinned under its corpse.  Those moments where she's trapped allow her to reflect on her relationship, both when she cheated on him but he stayed with her and the many times he was whiny and selfish.  Barrett doesn't spell out the relationship between the two worlds, nor does he need to at this point.  Instead, he allows the details of the relationship to spill out in a way that successfully frames the story and throws in volatile story beats that jolt the reader at the end of each chapter.  Barrett's another cartoonist with tremendous chops who doesn't let his drawing get in the way of his cartooning.  What I mean by that is his naturally eccentric character design is given free reign in this comic, but the drawings possess a vital and kinetic element as they lurch, reach and stumble across each page..  The way he draws the girlfriend's bushy eyebrows and squarish face provide her with an unconventional kind of beauty, whereas the male lead is constantly in search of a look that makes sense for him, setting on an unshaven look, horn-rimmed glasses and slightly poofy hair.  Barrett also threw in an interesting art object with this comic: a flip book that doubles as the world's thickest business card, promoting his website with a vomiting frog.

Artists To Seek Out At SPX 2011; High-Low @SPX

I will be at SPX 2011 this year. I'll be hosting a panel on 9/10 at 3:30 in the Brookside Conference Room on "Stories Of Cultural Identity". I'll quote the blurb from the website: "America’s own culture wars are only part of a global struggle with identity, as nations the world over attempt to address the challenges of assimilating multiple cultures within a stable society. Moderator Rob Clough will talk to Jessica Abel (La Perdida), Marguerite Dabaie (The Hookah Girl), Sarah Glidden (How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less) and G. B. Tran (Vietnamerica) about comics that deal with issues of cultural identity." I'm looking forward to it.

As always, I'm happy to review whatever comics cartoonists choose to give me.

Here are ten young artists to seek out at SPX, on the basis of their potential and/or significant debuts at the show. A number of them are up for Ignatz awards. In alphabetical order:

1. Darryl Ayo. Ayo is an Ignatz nominee for Promising New Talent and is someone who has been steeped in comics and comics culture for a long time, even for a cartoonist as young as he. He's become a sharp observer of social mores as well as a mark-maker whose style has begun to coalesce.

2. Pat Barrett. This graduate of the Center for Cartoon Studies is one of its best draftsmen and stylists. His Oak & Linden minicomics are well-crafted one-man anthologies, and the actual anthologies he's been a part of (Nymphonomena and Tag Team in particular) are rather good.

3. Marguerite Dabaie. Dabaie is on my panel and has proven to be an interesting young voice with her Hookah Girl comics, which are autobiographical stories about growing up as a Palestinian-American. Dabaie is a fine draftsman with an eye for intricate detail.

4. Mike Dawson. Dawson is one of the more established cartoonists on this list, but his new book Troop 142 debuts at the show and it's his strongest work to date. He'll also be hosting a panel on his Ink Panthers co-host (on ten years since the publication of his first major work, Box Office Poison) that will likely be hilarious. Look for an extensive interview with him (by me) at tcj.com very soon.

5. Lisa Hanawalt. She's one of the top humorists in comics, full stop. I don't know if she'll have anything new, but now is your chance to pick up both issues of her awesomely gross and hilarious series I Want You.

6. Melissa Mendes. This CCS grad has a bright future ahead of her and will get a bit of spotlight with the release of her collected Freddy stories. Mendes' scratchy line and ear for children's dialogue make her comics a wistful pleasure.

7. L.Nichols. Nichols is a talented artist still restlessly searching for her ideal style. Her Jumbly Junkery one-woman anthology comics feature an assortment of diary strips, longer autobio stories, fiction, comics-as-poetry and other experiments. Like the other young cartoonists on this list, she has a relentless work ethic and it shows in her improvement.

8. Laura Terry. Terry's up for an Outstanding Minicomic Ignatz award for Morning Song, a comic I greatly enjoyed. Terry's work has a lyrical quality that complements her interest in formal experimentation quite snugly.

9. Matthew Thurber. Thurber is the genius behind the 1-800-MICE series, which is now done and will debut in its collected form from PictureBox. He'll be on a panel at 1pm on Saturday titled "Drawing The Grotesque".

10. Noah Van Sciver. Van Sciver is another hard-working cartoonist who's gotten better thanks to his willingness to publish everywhere possible. His recent mini The Death of Elijah Lovejoy will likely be one of my top 25 minis of the year. He has a book coming out with Fantagraphics next year, but until then I'd buy up copies of his one-man anthology comic book Blammo.

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.