Thirty-One Days of CCS #27: Rebecca Roher

Rebecca Roher's debut book, Bird In A Cage, is a sensitively rendered exploration of family, rituals, and the ways in which time acts both as a sort of familial adhesive as well as the ultimate solvent. Roher tackles a tricky subject (a gathering of family to be at the side of her grandmother as she neared death) with grace, avoiding melodrama and maudlin displays in favor of celebrating the life of a complex person who meant a lot to a lot of different people. Roher, in her earlier work, showed flashes of skill with regard to loosely and expressively recording slice-of-life details in a poignant but lighthearted way, but it's remarkable how fully-formed and confident this book is. There are some unique aspects with regard to the story that makes Roher's depiction all the more intimate for the reader. The first is how incredibly close her family is across generations. Throughout the story, we meet various aunts, cousins and other relatives who join the cheerful vigil. Second, the fact that Roher's family spend summers on a small island in Canada owned by her grandfather and created its own traditions only added to that sense of closeness. When the same extended group summers in a beautiful, secluded area for close to eighty years, those decades add up and act as bedrock, a generator of memories that provide comfort and create strength.

There's another unspoken purpose as to why Roher wrote this particular book in this particular way. Her grandmother had suffered a traumatic brain injury over a decade before this story took place, and it gradually took away much of her ability to function and lucidity. Roher's goal here was to free that titular bird from its cage, to honor her grandmother's life by recording it on the page in a way that was truthful and entertaining, reflective of her personality. She flips back and forth in time, as her depiction of her grandmother's life evolves in much the same way that her own relationship with her grandmother evolved. It started off in the way little kids process their grandparents: through the kind of food they served, the way they let them play, the places they lived, and their charming eccentricities. It progressed to providing a deeper account of her life, exploring her youth when she explored Canada on her own, converting to the Ba'hai faith, finding her activism on behalf of the peace movement and faith was interfering with her parenting, and taking care of her mentally ill youngest child for the entirety of her life until she committed suicide. Slowly but surely, a robust and complex portrait of her grandmother coalesces, right up until she slowly slips away.

Roher is careful not to focus too much on how unfair or frustrating it must be for her grandmother, a highly intelligent woman, to be so at sea inside her body, to be betrayed by her brain. Instead, she shows how tight the bonds of family are in the way the women of her family in particular gathered by her side to show respect and affection. The chief motif of the book was the ways in which a group of songs sung at an annual family event called Sing Song united generations of relatives. It was a language unique to this family, one that Roher's grandmother helped to create. Singing became a way of comforting each other and honoring her, up until a scene late in the book when Roher is singing to her grandmother alone and both start crying in a rare moment of lucidity for her grandmother. It's a moment where Roher says it's OK to let go. Another element of the book is the remarkable capacity for forgiveness and self-reflection each of the characters demonstrates. Roher's mother in particular adored her mother but learned from her mistakes with regard to how to deal with stress and redirect it, and there's a touching scene between Roher and her mother that reflects this.

Roher's pencils are loose and expressive and aim at giving the reader a strong impression of times and places rather than precise recreations. That reflects the way that Roher is depicting memories in all of their fuzziness and subjectivity. Roher adds shading and texture at some points, but this comic is all about facial expressions, body language and the ways characters relate to each other in space. Roher is aces in all three of these categories, as there's a remarkable sense of ease in each panel that comes with the intimacy and comfort that family can provide. Roher is also careful to keep her focus relatively narrow; the reader doesn't learn all that much about her in this book other than the ways in which she relates to her family, but it's not Roher's own memoir. As such, the book is always thematically and structurally clear in its modest 110 pages, and Roher's book became part of the family tradition of keeping memories alive through stories and images (photo albums). Bird In A Cage is a fine example of honoring the life of a beloved relative in an affectionate but forthright manner in a way that's humane and comforting in a specific way for herself and her family, and in so doing, created a book that is also generally humane and comforting to a wider audience.

Thirty Days of CCS, Day 23: Rebecca Roher, Jonathan Rotsztain, Peter Audry

Let's turn to some of the most recent CCS students.

Rebecca Roher's comics use a thick line and simple character design to relate observations about life, nature and human interaction. Her work reminds me a little of Eleanor Davis' in that she freely mixes in certain fantasy elements while keeping the character work grounded and personal. In Gotta Get My Veg, her brushy figures are lively and expressive, carrying a story that veers toward the twee at times. (The phrase "Gotta get my veg" is overused to the point of annoyance.) Still, there's a combination of gentleness and empathy toward her characters combined with a hint of mischief that makes the story worth reading. Short Stories features a mix of sketchbook-quality art that was hastily but expressively drawn, lush color work, fantasy stories with an open-page layout and autobio stories. One of the color stories, "Fireworks", is a slight but beautiful observation of the sky when fireworks went off; nothing more, nothing less, other than trying to convey a sense of beauty and awe she felt. Roher experiments by using a fuzzy line in a dream sequence in a different story, but much of her work has the running theme of conveying little moments of wonder.

The story Lost In The Sublime was the most interesting of the three minis and deals directly with this concept of beauty as defined by Immanuel Kant, the notion of the sublime. It is beauty so great that the nature of encountering it cannot be truly communicated. One can talk about, or react to, or think about the sublime experience, but all of these post facto activities are not the experience itself. For Kant, this experience of beauty was mystical in nature, despite that experience being rooted in temporality and corporeality. In other words, we encounter something at a particular time that looks or sounds a particular way, and it moves us as something sublime, something that we apprehend at a level beyond simply our five senses. This mini describes this experience as felt by Roher at various times, beginning with acutely feeling a sense of scale in nature: her smallness against the bigness of nature. The same was true when she closely observed an ecosystem and the way that insects, plants and animals interacted with it. It concludes with an acid trip, one where the interconnectedness of all things is seen as both painful and beautiful. Here, her character design is especially simple but engaging. While Roher is not nearly as innovative as Davis was even in her earliest days as a cartoonist, one senses a similar level of potential in drawing comics about what it means to be human and to interact with the world.

Jonathan Rotsztain, Roher's partner and a fellow CCS student, takes an entirely different approach to comics. His early autobio catalog/comic, Everything That's Wrong With My Body, is a bracing account of everything he finds disgusting or weird about his own nude body. It's an interesting exercise, almost a sort of autobio palate-cleanser that got a lot of self-loathing out of the way early on. The crudeness of Rotsztain's line lends a certain power and authenticity to the proceedings. That crudeness doesn't work quite as well in the autobio piece The Subjective Way, an account of his time as an employee of the popular fast food chain. It's really a story about trying to find his way as a human being who found himself drifting through life, dealing with the luxury and guilt of having the safety net of his parents the entire time he was working fast food as a young adult in his early 20s. Rotsztain is acutely aware of the nature of his "slumming", dealing with that sense of privilege with a tad bit of guilt by way of a lot of self-deprecating comments.

Indeed, self-worth is a running theme of his comics. In his truly strange A TailTale Tale, he creates an amalgamation of Archie Comics and Jack Chick tracts. Rotsztain imagines a world where humans never lost their vestigial tails, one that disappears in utero. This comic describes a world where the size of one's tail is essential to one's social status. A man with a stubby tail or a woman with a big tail is considered a freak. What's fascinating about this comic is the level of detail that Rotsztain provides in creating this world. It's obvious he's thought long and hard about the implications of having a tail, but beyond that, he nails the language of tracts and self-help books. He doesn't quite have the chops as a draftsman to pull it off seamlessly, but the sheer, crude energy of his line gets the idea across with deadpan humor and a certain relentless earnestness. Rotsztain certainly knows how to tell a story, but it will take him time to develop a style that fits with abilities as a draftsman in a more seamless manner.

Finally, there's Peter Audry. His collection of daily strips, Spirit Shack Vol. 1, is one of the more intriguingly scattered comics I've come across from a CCS cartoonist. Most daily comics tend to be about mundane, slice-of-life matters. There's some of that in here, to be sure. But Audry strings together bizarre narratives involving a baby character that acts as a stand-in as well as anthropomorphic weirdos who go on a quest to find the "Double Rainbow" guy. There are psychedelic ramblings, pointed satirical strips, echoes of character designs from a dozen other cartoonists, pop-culture parodies, studies from life and some plain old great gags. This is what a daily strip should be: a free-flowing lab for ideas and experiments. Like Roher and Rotzstain, Audry is at an exciting period in his career, as he throws any number of ideas and techniques against the wall to see what will stick. I could see him concentrating on any number of directions seen in this comic, or going in a completely different direction. It's fascinating to watch artists with potential flounder a bit, daring to get better in public as they figure out what they're doing on the fly. I quite like the quality of Audry's line, as it wavers between cartoony, dense and realistic. That versatility will serve him well down the road.