45 Days of CCS, #20: Quinn Thomson and Alexander Washburn

Quinn Thomson is just a natural at slice-of-life sci-fi adventure stories. His Zero Point comics have been uniformly polished, funny, and engaging. They've actually looked better in black and white than in the color I've seen him use in some webcomics; the color on the cover, for example, is a bit on the garish side and detracts from his linework. Thomson's linework and use of grayscale shading balances naturalism and a strong line with quirky character design. Thomson also understands character-driven narrative, and Zero Point features a ship full of vivid personalities, with the new crew member of a space cargo ship being the most interesting. Shannon Kent is an anthropomorphic dog who, as it turns out, is a genetically-engineered construct: a "smart pet." This issue follows her disastrous first day on the job meeting the human and alien crew members who aren't there to make her life easy. It's a smooth, relatable story with a plot that hinges entirely on character interaction. 

Thomson's Unlikely Hero On Patrol is a short story about a young hero wannabe who inherits a suit she doesn't quite know how to operate. Her buttinsky roommate keeps telling her not to use the suit since she doesn't know what she's doing, but the hero Arlene has her head in the clouds. Predictably, things go horribly wrong in this light-hearted adventure that's an appetizer for more stories. 

Alex Washburn's two entries are a collection of his funny Clan Zargs stories originally published in the Fantology anthology and a diary comic. The diary comic (titled Almost-Daily Diary Comics For A Month) is excellent, and he uses it for its originally conceived purpose: as an exercise to work out creative issues and blockages. Some days Washburn goes for quotidian details, like the daily routine, road trips, or being reluctant to get out of a warm bed. On many of the days, he's much more reflective. thinking about his influences, his personal and cultural connections to Japan through his family, his relationship to his body and how this has moved him to draw fat characters, and in general what sort of artist he wants to be. This was so effective in giving me a sense of the artist that I'd recommend it for any cartoonist to tackle the specific questions that Washburn engages with. 

Washburn's biggest accomplishment to date has been the first three chapters of his Clan Zargs serial, originally published in the Fantology anthology, all of which I've reviewed elsewhere. He's printed each of the three chapters separately, but he collected them into a single mini titled Clan Zargs: A Fantology Story. Washburn pretty uniformly uses a thick, bold line that sometimes obscures certain facial features, but he makes up for that by giving his creations distinguishing scars and fantastical forms. The action sequences are a bit stiff and sometimes confusing, but that's much less important than the character interaction for the five principle leads. There are flashbacks, asides, and other moments that establish each of their personalities in a distinct and often tender way, which is unusual for typical fantasy characters. You can also see his progression as an artist: the third chapter is conceptually different, more ambitious in terms of backgrounds and layouts, and takes a darker tone without leaving humor out of it altogether. This series is very much Wasburn getting better in public, and I'm excited to see where the story will go next. 

31 Days Of CCS, #16: Quinn Thomson and Sam Nakahira

Quinn Thomson has quite a future ahead of him doing what he describes as "slice-of-life science fiction." This can be a really effective use of genre as kind of set decoration for character-driven narratives, and with a large cast, the focus can shift from character to character if it's a serial. Evan Dorkin did my favorite example of this with Hectic Planet, which shifted from sci-fi shenanigans to slice-of-life and romance. For Thomson, his stories center around the crew of the Squab, a space cargo vessel. Their actual job is quite unremarkable; they're not soldiers or explorers or adventurers; they are there to deliver goods. 

The central character is Shannon Kent, a "genetically engineered canine" who is one of the toughest and smartest crew members, albeit one insecure about a number of issues. Thomson balances short vignettes centering around gags (like someone who ties a knife to a cleaning drone) and narratives that explore Shannon's emotions. A bit of shore leave turns into a disaster when a kid calls her a doggy and wants to take her home. An embarrassing situation when a human tells her to leave a cafeteria is resolved when she bares her fangs in an attempt to demurely be more aggressive. There are times when her canine nature overrides things, like when a ball is flung in her direction. In Zero Point and Zero Point: Routine (a silent day-in-the-life comic about Shannon), Thomson spins small and gentle stories with a crisp line and attention to detail. Some of his drawings tend to be a bit on the busy side (there's a lot of clutter in addition to grayscale shading), but at this point, this is just his aesthetic. A story where the character's main problem is their own fears about fitting but is actually supported by her friends avoids easy conflicts and their cliched outcomes. This is a perfect hang-out comic, as Thomson's clear enjoyment of these characters comes across on the page. 

Thomson mines the same emotional territory in Delia, a comic that dips into horror tropes. A young man draws a woman who's clearly disguising her features with a hat, sunglasses, and a scarf over her face. When he tries to give her the drawing, she trips and falls, revealing that she's a monstrous, demonic-looking creature. After taking a moment to compose himself, he gives her her hat and the drawing, and they walk home together. There is a sweetness to the story that goes along with a general theme of acceptance in Thomson's stories that's heightened by his facility in drawing monsters, aliens, and anthropomorphic characters. Right now, Thomson is mostly in the mode of writing vignettes without much of a narrative arc, but his narrative arc is usually quite strong in his stories. I'd be curious to see him try a longer story or series of stories. 

Sam Nakahira is an interesting cartoonist because their overall project stretches out over several forms of genre. They have precisely the right voice to do comics journalism and history: curious, questioning, and confident, but not overbearing. Like all good journalists, they let readers fill in the gaps instead of telling them how they should feel. At this point of her career, while much of it has been journalism or history, she seems most confident doing fantasy. This is true in their comic The Moon Jar, which has a delightfully loose line while zeroing in on cleverly-designed monsters and creatures. The story follows a young woman named Diana who inherits her mother's curiosity shop along with her sisters. She relates accidentally breaking a stone that contained a sleeping dragon as a child, and how this informs her respect and awe for creatures--but also makes her a little cocky. 

When a tiny demon (a kappa) tricks her into removing the stone keeping something called The Moon Jar closed, the contents spill out, which includes an octopus who stole a piece of the moon. Diana and her sisters have to consult with an elder (a turtle) and consult local pearl divers for help. The missing piece of the moon is wreaking havoc with the tides and flooding the town, but Diana is able to convince the irascible octopus into trading the piece of the moon for her eye--an eye that can see spirits, as a child of Neptune.The story is well-paced, has a strong narrative arc built around traditional stories, and easily-understood relationships with Diana and her sisters. It feels like the first of many stories with these characters. 

Nakahira also collected a few short stories, which revolve around the indigenous populations of Japan and the ways in which the modern government betrays. A story about the endangered dugong (akin to a manatee) of Okinawa, which is treasued by the indigenous population, evolves into a protest against a joint US-Japanese military base. There's a story about how the Ainu, another indigenous group, created the "umami" savory flavor using a kind of local seaweed called kenbo. When the were colonized by Imperial Japan, they outlawed "primitive" hunting/gathering methods, despite the strong influence kenbo had in trade. Nakahira tells the bizarre story of "Battleship Island," which was once used a dense-packed living area for what was essentially slave labor, especially of Koreans. Nakahira notes a reluctance for the Japanese state and people to own up to its legacy. In terms of technique, this is the best-told of the stories, with a number of striking individual images that bring her point home in a way that she does less of in the first two stories. Finally, her account of the life of Kaneko Fumiko, a 1920s non-person who defied the Imperial government as an anarchist activist. Nakahira's enthusiasm for this story is especially moving, as Kaneko unsurprisingly meets a bad end but leaves a powerful legacy. 

Thirty One Days Of CCS #12: Quinn Thomson, Kristen Shull, Eddie J. O'Neill

Zero Point and Quinn Thomson's Comics, by Quinn Thomson. Zero Point is a self-aware parody of Alien, more or less, employing a mix of line weights that emphasize different aspects of storytelling. A spaceship is sent on a rescue mission to an uncharted planet, and there's one guy in the crew who knows that everything on this “routine” mission is going to go horribly wrong. The stark blacks in this comic work well on the slick paper that Thomson chose, and they help accentuate his excellent work with making his faces expressive in an exaggerated way. The cartoonish nature of his line made me wish he had chosen to hand-letter the comic, as the fonts he chose were distracting. This is a funny comic that gets a lot of mileage out of its horrifying aspects and the awful decision-making of its characters. Thomson's portfolio comic shows off his expressive cartooning in an even better light with comics like “Metro”, which looks like it could be a short story featured in a French anthology somewhere. It's about a guy with stringy hair that stands up (an excellent design) having a miserable time on a subway. There are bits of over-rendering here and there, but for the most part Thomson keeps things clear and focuses on the physical humor of the jokes. In “Bibliomancy” and “Meditation Comic”, Thomson makes great use of a lively, squiggly line to create a wonderful, zaftig character in one comic and alternates between heavily spotted blacks and wonderfully scrawled faces in a deep-sea diving adventure. There's also a little of Graham Chaffee to his work, in that I could see him working comfortably in either comics or animation.

Netflix and Chill, Bones Vs. Tomes and Infernal Nihilism, by Kristen Shull. Shull is adept at the comedy narrative, as each of her three stories featured somewhat cynical sense of humor with genre trappings. Bones Vs. Tomes is a four-pager about a sorcery adept who goes out to the woods to learn spells instead of studying books to get them like wizards. In the span of four panels, she sets up the premise and introduces us to the teenage story of the story. Things go wrong (because of course) and she accidentally summons up a bunch of skeletons out for blood. Then there's a page and a half of negotiating the killer skeletons, until she's saved by a bunch of dickish wizards. The final two panels offer her wicked revenge for dealing with those bullies. Her line is decent, looking great when dealing with the main character and a bit more unsure when drawing other people. That said, her storytelling fundamentals are solid. There's nothing spectacular-looking about this comic, but her execution made it memorable.

Infernal Nihilism is a take on Dante's trip to hell, done in the Ed Emberley style of simple geometric shapes. Like much of Shull's work, it is simultaneously funny and grim. For example, Virgil, Dante's guide, takes the form of a scotch-drinking, cigarette-smoking giant squid. The planets of hell that Virgil shows Dante are filled with inconsiderate people, people who don't clean up after their animals, and those that feel they're morally superior. When Dante's relieved that he doesn't fall into any of these categories, Virgil reveals that the afterlife is all made-up, and that Dante's made his own hell. The cuteness of the story works effectively in both adding to the laughs but also making its nihilistic ending all the more stark, juxtaposed against the art.

Netflix and Chill is a great shaggy-dog joke of a comic, wherein a woman is brought out of a cryogenic sleep six hundred years after she went in and finds that all of humanity was absorbed by artificial intelligence after the Singularity occurred. The AI is fascinated by her as one of their ancestors and wants to keep her happy while studying her. They wind up throwing in another subject into her cubicle, a handsome guy, and the punchline swerves away from the common parlance of what “Netflix and Chill” means (sex) into something much more literal. Shull's line is pleasing here, working in a mostly naturalistic way but allowing her faces to be distinct and even slightly exaggerated. In general, Shull is adept at making short stories memorable, thanks to her comedic chops and strong sense of storytelling. That said, this is an artist that I can easily see tackling a long-form comic in the near future.

Rising, Caged Birds, Flight Club and Rats, by Eddie J. O'Neill. O'Neill has a distinctive voice that uses grotesque and distorted images to tackle complex emotions. In Rats, O'Neill uses a blood-red patina to tell a brief, horrifying story of a person feeling rats crawling around inside of them but fearing for them if they get out. The last image is of the person swallowing the rat, because “I'm not a mother”. The fear of being an inadequate nurturer of one's own parasitical entities supersedes the body horror images of the art itself, which I found fascinating. The pathological fear of losing one's own demons is in itself a horrible fate. Caged Birds features a a group of birds-as-mental-patients. They are drawn as birds and more-or-less act like birds...except some of them are in there for hearing voices, OCD or other mental illnesses. O'Neill takes this to its logical, grim but funny extreme when one of the birds tries to escape—and runs into a window. Once again, O'Neill's images point to dehumanization and detachment from one's own body.

Flight Club was done as part of a non-fiction assignment, and it's a highly clever story about O'Neill's family's history with violent birds of prey. From a pair of auks at a highly dangerous open-air, walk-through zoo, to some hopping mad turkeys to ultra-aggressive terns at the beach, there's a lovely clarity to O'Neill's line that is aided by the highly-effective placement of spot reds that emphasize the homicidal nature of these birds. There's one panel comparing the “pure evil” of all three birds and noting that it's the same despite the size difference of each—and evil is just blood red on the chart. Rising uses a thicker line weight in this moving, grim story about a monk trained in specific sacraments relating to the dead. The monk's job was to carry the body to a certain place where the bodies would be eaten by birds, allowing the souls to move on to their next life. When a group of bandits cut down a child, the monk overcomes adversity and gets the body to the top of the mountain—only to see his image burned down. When he returns and he realizes that he can't move all the bodies, a miracle happens. It's a genuinely joyous and surprising moment, and O'Neill's careful use of spotting blacks on the final pages frame the characters in just the right way.