31 Days Of CCS #2: Gilmore Girls Fanzine and Doug Catches Up

A time-honored CCS tradition is creating fanzines for favorite TV shows, bands, and other pop culture. It's a very CCS thing to do, as it's collaborative, it's project-oriented, and it provides a fun way to blow off creative steam when not working on one's thesis. Considering that all of the equipment needed to whip out a comic is available at their fingertips in CCS's amazing lab, the urge for a project like this can be satisfied quickly. It also seems like fellow Keren Katz is at the center of a lot of these projects these days, be it comics or wacky dance performances or musicals. One person can mean a lot to a community as a catalyst, and Katz is truly a miraculous walking whirlwind.

Most of the fanzines from CCS have been about shows I don't know. However, the Gilmore Girls Fanzine (edited by Katz and Jess Johnson) is very much in my wheelhouse as a show I both love and love to hate. Of course, living in a small, quirky Northeastern town like White River Junction makes it easy to relate to the small, quirky setting of Stars Hollow in Gilmore Girls, with its vast array of cranks, weirdoes, dreamers, and artists. The heart and soul of this comic is Jess Johnson, who edited it but also provided a lot of interstitial material to bind its stories together. There's a funny segment imagining Lane, the childhood best friend of Rory, one of the main characters in the show, going deep into different kinds of manga to read in the same effortless, encyclopedic way she knows about rock. Johnson even ties this into Lane joining a comics circle in the same way she joined a band in the show.

Natalie Wardlaw zeroes in on Rory's romantic life and all of the horrible men she dated. She turned up the angst and even the undercurrent of physical threat presented by her Stars Hollow boyfriend Dean, based on a scene where he tangled with a bad boy at Rory's private school.  Rachel Ford's funny story digs in on the small character details and makes fun of the way that Lorelai, the mother of Rory, pretends to be humble but secretly revels in her relative glamorousness in town. Julia Alekseyeva talks in all seriousness about how seeing a bookish girl on television was very important to her as a teen, and she longed to have the same kind of relationship with her mother that Rory did with Lorelai. Pop culture and simply having the feeling of being seen can have a powerful effect.

Of course, funny strips by Emma Hunsinger and Kat Ghastly balanced that devotion as they imagined what the show was like, having never watched it. Ghastly imagined that cannibalism eventually would become a plot point. Isabel Manley and Ortal Avraham both get at the heart of the show: that putative protagonists Rory and Lorelai are both self-centered narcissists in the same way that Lorelai's mother Emily is. The tenor of this fanzine is at once loving, devoted, skeptical, and mocking: a perfect description of the Gilmore Girls fanbase. Now, pardon me while I start my essay on why Rory and Lorelai were the real villains of the series...

Kori Michele Handwerker and Pat L's Doug Catches Up is less a fanzine than it is fan-fiction, imagining an older Doug Funnie returning to his old town of Bluffington years after he had moved away. Doug was an interesting cartoon in the way that it addressed pre-teen angst and issues in a direct, honest manner, even if its visuals and details were absurd and cartoony. That's lost a bit in this black and white comic (although the cover preserves it), but the creators otherwise remain true to the spirit of the show. Doug has a long talk with his former bully, Roger, where he reveals that he's bisexual and engaged to another old friend of Doug's named Chalky. The entire comic has a tone of gentle forgiveness, understanding, and self-examination. As Handwerker notes in the afterword, the comic isn't a manifesto about the true nature of the show's characters or about forgiving bullies; rather, it's a logical extrapolation of how some of the kids might have turned out and dealing with issues that are more openly spoken about in today's culture (like coming out, or coming out as trans and using different pronouns). The artists really nail the visual style of the show to such a degree that this could easily serve as an updated version of the show.

Thirty One Days Of CCS #14: Amy Burns, Marshall Hull, Pat Leonhardt

Pensive Hedgehog, Hedgehog Detective, The Spirit Board and Love Letters, by Amy Burns. Burns' comics are an interesting mix. They are personal without being overtly autobiographical. They are cute but not cloying. They are frequently grim without being melodramatic. In Love Letters, for example, Burns tells the tale of a girl "who whispered a love letter to the stars". The stars passed it around until it fell into the heart of a boy, and he and the girl fell in love. So far, so cute, with Burns making good use of negative space as she makes her figures small against the vastness of the night sky. Their intimacy is that much greater in the face of infinity. Burns is not interested in "happily ever after", as an emotional rift opens between them because of pain they are unable to express. Burns' approach to this was artful and fanciful, and the bottom panel of each page was the ribbon of a song playing with its lyrics written out.

Pensive Hedgehog features her go-to character talking about mental health and the paradox of inner strength. When we rely on ourselves all the time, it makes it hard to seek help when we need it. Here, she uses the spiny creature getting ever smaller as it weakens. Hedgehog Detective #1 posits the mystery of hedgehogs being kidnapped, fed and tickled. It's a totally absurd premise with all sorts of dramatic angles used to give it fake gravitas. The Spirit Board starts with a typical ouija board session and then mutates into a bizarre scenario where Santa contacts them, tells them that god and the devil are battling for their souls, and not to eat anything red. It's creepy and innocent at the same time, and Burns adds an absurd "spirit trivia" glossary that spells out some rules. I like the way that Burns is exploring unconventional story ideas and expectations, as well as the way she frames them visually. She's still clearly figuring out what kind of cartoonist she wants to be, so future work by her should be interesting.

Over The Top Comix!, by Marshall Hull. Hull approached this biography assignment using a variety of interesting visual approaches. The story of Maria Bochkareva, a pioneering Russian soldier, was presented using a bright color palette, interesting page design and the running feature of a Russian bear in uniform who was narrating the story. Bochkareva petitioned the Tsar himself to get into the army, where she sloughed off the laughs she initially received by performing astoundingly brave feats, like saving fifty men caught in No Man's Land. Later, she formed her all-female Battalion of Death in an effort to shame male soldiers into fighting back against the Germans. Hull shares a lot of information with the reader, but he manages to keep it light and make every page interesting to look at. The use of a black background made the whole comic look more dramatically stark.

Margo #1 and Collage, by Pat Leonhardt.  I had the pleasure of sitting next to Leonhardt watching him work on Margo #1. He's chosen one of the tougher cartoonist career paths as a humorist. Like his nearest CCS predecessors Garry-Paul Bonesteel and Ben Horak, Leonhardt is mining horror in particular for comedy. What makes it work is his fantastic attention to detail, especially in the color portions of his work. Margo is the middle-school protagonist of this story, and as it begins, she's just another weird girl going to school--except she happens to be a zombie of some kind. A zombie wearing a dress with unicorns and pizza on it (a level of detail that made me laugh out loud), but a zombie nonetheless. Margo can only communicate in the form of picture-rebus puzzles that her best friend can translate, but she has to navigate the usual school problems. For example, there's the mean girl clique, the "Beckies" (one of them appears to be an alien, but she wears a cute hair bow, so apparently this is fine). When Margo gets mad, she bites--and this is what sets the plot into motion, even if almost all of it takes place in the background of the story.

Leonhardt drops clues throughout the story that though zombies are involved, this is another sort of tale--a Monkey's Paw story. That is, a story where a wish is made through an evil totem, and the wish comes true in a horrible & ironic fashion. This becomes evident with the behavior of her father, the fact that her mom's in a mental institution, and a flashback to her mom as an explorer. Leonhardt gives this story a bright and breezy feel with the extensive use of white negative space, though he uses a zip-a-tone effect for his characters to give them some weight. It's a smart, funny comic with clever character design. He needs more experience in terms of character interaction in space and naturalistic gesture (if only to violate it), but it's obvious that he's thought through this character and her story very closely.

As Collage proves, Leonhardt can work a variety of styles. "The Wallabies" is very much in a George Herriman vein, as he uses a thin line and stick legs to create action with a family of wallabies. He uses violence for different purposes, but one can see just how skillfully he worked this sort of style. "Wash Your Damn Hands" is a debate between a man and some kind of hygienic Greek chorus, as they tell him to wash his hands before urinating, and he tries to come up with excuses as to why he doesn't want to do it. When we see his penis, the various faces and fruit variations Leonhardt uses are hilarious, as he keeps escalating the humor. I'm not generally a big fan of bathroom humor, but there's an almost relentless level of meticulousness at work here that I admire.