31 Days Of CCS, #18: Reilly Hadden

Reilly Hadden has long been one of my favorite CCS cartoonists, even as his work is hard to classify. It has fantasy elements, to be sure, but it's a sort of alt-comics fantasy: rough around the edges, filled with moments of weird humor, and frequently absurd. Despite that absurdity, there was always a terrifying edge to his work, where horrible things happened to innocent people for no reason. 

Since ending Astral Birth Canal and after just a couple of issues of Astral Forest, his fantasy series, Hadden has spent much of his time on a different project: the adventures of Kricket The Cat. These are all-ages fantasy comics with a wonderfully gentle sense of humor that rely on the reader's desire to hang out in this particular world. Indeed, the plots, such as they are, are cursory at best. Instead, we are presented with the things Kricket does on a particular day and the people that he meets. An early version of this from 2017, Krikkit Goes Outside (note the different spelling) is drawn with a spareness resembling John Porcellino, as young Krikkit meanders around the forest. He searches for mushrooms, chases a frog, and rides down the river on a raft. The only use of color is a hand-drawn yellow for Krikkit's fur. There's a simple pleasure to be found in just seeing how Hadden lays out each page, leading the reader on in some pages dominated by their negative space and on others with simple drawings but a dense layout. 

Hadden has refined and changed the character a bit, releasing other minis in full color. Kricket The Cat introduces him as a "gentle young man" who "loves mysteries," so Kricket sings to periwinkles on the beach to draw them out, waves hi to the ghost in the forest, and meets the monstrously large Old Man Catfish. The color strips remind me a bit of Pablo Holmberg's Eden strips a little, as the narrative wanders from character to character. His friends Joey and Jenny get the spotlight, then we follow the ghost at home, worrying about a growth on their faces, and finally follow Kricket down into a well-labeled dungeon where a mimic gives him onions as his treasure. There's a light, easy, self-consistent logic at play in these strips, where everyone is languid to the point of inertness at times. When Hadden counters this slowness with actual action, it perks up the reader. The strips also knowingly play on fantasy tropes without mocking them, it's as much a part of daily life as laying in the grass is. His line is a little more developed in this mini, ut Hadden mostly keeps it simple, prefering to let the color fill in gaps and give the pages weight. 

Free Boots follow Kricket on a single adventure, as he puts on a pair of free boots but discovers they are full of slugs. He doesn't seem to mind, however. Indeed, he becomes obsessed with them, and the slugs not only start rapidly multiplying, they become a single, belligerent consciousness. Only the intervention of Old Man Catfish saves the day. The nature of his adventure and the fight make it seem like something that wouldn't be out of place in one of Hadden's old series, but it still retains the essential gentle quality of the character. 

The Tower Underneath is entirely in black and white, printed on yellow paper. It starts as a take on tourist traps, turns into a dungeon crawl that subverts expectations (the big, sword-wielding lizard man is actually quite nice), goes up the stairs of the Tower of Destiny, meets the Wizard in the Wall, and learns that his fate is to be entirely average. Hadden pulls off the trick of wrting a fun fantasy narrative that subverts the genre at every turn without mocking it entirely. This is the heart of his work right now, as he's slowly assembling a beautiful body of work that's easy to glide through, yet immensely satisfying to read. 

31 Days Of CCS #18: Reilly Hadden, Andi Santagata

Reilly Hadden's comics are truly right in my pleasure-center wheelhouse. His art, his character design, and his pleasantly rambling fantasy plotlines have a deadpan quality that veers between horror and absurdity. Hadden just ended his long-running Astral Birth Canal series and has rebooted (with many of the same characters) as Astral Forest. The main difference is that unlike in the original series, which focused on a couple of characters per issue, Astral Forest flips between a few different characters in each issue. The first issue dives into a new storyline for Valentina, the earth woman who took off with space god Bork. In this story, they are living on a remote, icy planet with their baby Edward. In a long bit of scene-setting, it's revealed that some sort of anthropomorphic bird creature is watching them. In the second story, Hadden introduces Kath, a badass warrior who is on a quest while avoiding a bunch of demons who want her dead. An imp sent by her enemies winds up as her companion. Finally, there are brief interludes with Rona and Bird-Girl, who are told that there's an ancient tablet with their likenesses on it.

The second issue advances each of these stories. A group of rabbit bards hires Bork as muscle--uninvited, Bilbo Baggins-style. Kath uses the imp to escape some wolves. The tablet is actually part of a stone golem who declares that Rona and Bird-Girl are to be saviors of the Astral Forest. What I like best about these comics is that while Hadden spins a fun yarn, it's the corners and cracks of the narrative that he likes to invite the reader into. It's Bork trying to get the baby to sleep. It's Kath going on and on about the perfect sandwich and its ingredients. It's one of the bards singing an extended song. The small moments, the silly moments, and the absurd moments are the ones worth sticking around for.

Andi Santagata's work tends to deal with the reality of being embodied. It's just that the last comic I reviewed by him, Jed The Undead, was about a demonic teenager dealing with infernal ejaculation issues. The comics from this year are much more personal, including the autobio Trans Man Walking #1-2. Santagata employs a thin, scratchy line that offers that hint of horror expressiveness. It makes sense, given how many of these funny strips are about feelings of being trapped, or scared, or alienated. Santagata talks as much about being Asian as he does being trans. The highlight of the first issue was Santagata's CCS application strip, where the applicant is asked to include a robot and a snowman in their story. Santagata makes it funny and poignant, turning it into a relationship story gone horribly awry.

The second issue sees Santagata really lean into this kind of expression. The comics are tighter, funnier, and hit harder. There's a strip about how Santagata feels masculine most of the time...until he is hit with a period. The viscera and the scrawled lettering in that strip really pound its point home in a manner that's disturbing and hilarious. Santagata also points out in one strip how everyone always says the current year had so many bad things happen and counters it by noting that in 1997 his home country was returned to tyrannical overlords (Hong Kong, I presume), 9/11 happened, etc. It's a good point, one that he repudiates a few pagers later in an insert where Andi from the end of 2017 comes back from the future to warn present Andi that this really was going to be the worst year ever. The Time-Knife is a funny balance of sci-fi and autobio, as Santagata imagines how each decision we make creates an alternate self and universe where things are different. It's a warm story, as Santagata feels filled with regret at some of his decisions, but is well aware there are many others where he's truly an asshole. What it really does is speak to one's own potentiality at any given moment, and how powerful that truly is.

CCS Extra: Reilly Hadden

Somehow, I missed that Reilly Hadden had sent me the final issue of his Astral Birth Canal series when I was covering his work last December. Issue #13 wrapped up some storylines and left some questions open as well, which will be picked up in his follow-up series, Astral Forest. This has been one of my favorite-ever CCS-related series, packing fantasy, horror, slice-of-life intimacy and even women's professional wrestling into a single and often bewildering package.

This issue is subtitled "Ghosts Stories," and it is a self-contained story that also acts as a framing device for last issue's cliffhanger ending. It all sort of hooks together a number of elements present in the series without quite explaining them all the way. For example, it follows the story of Bork, the god-warrior and his lover Valentina, a human pro wrestler. Bork was on earth to capture a "disgraced god-king" but was decapitated by him in the previous issue. This issue follows Bork's rebirth and Val's apparent death. The framing device is a series of stories told by a bird-creature and his apprentice on a boat, sailing the titular Astral Birth Canal. This is the first time that the series' title has been addressed since the 0 issue that brought humans to another realm by way of a video game. The bird-creature is similar to the sort we've seen in the other main storyline of the series, and it's clear that he has some sort of influence over life and death.

What makes this issue so effective is that Hadden doesn't burden the reader much with details and continuity. Instead, the focus is on the bird-creature's storytelling, which is almost folksy in tone. In many respects, this issue recapitulates the running theme for the series: the thin veil between life and death. The Canal actually being real and accessible for travel is a manifestation of the series' many deaths, resurrections, and reincarnations. It's an incubator for myths and legends, but what makes the series fascinating is that Hadden depicts these stories as being terrifying rather than heroic. People are thrown into the middle of a horrifying and inexplicable magical world and forced to attempt to survive. The reader is thrown into the middle of an epic storyline with no backstory, meaning that one simply has to accept the absurdity of the situation when reading it. This issue brought a small amount of clarity while creating any number of new mysteries. Throughout the series, Hadden kept the reader guessing and constantly entertained as he pursued his storytelling whims, and I'm curious to see what the tone of the new series will be like.

Thirty One Days Of CCS #30: Reilly Hadden

Reilly Hadden is one of the most prolific and talented CCS grads, and in his case, his sheer work ethic and willingness to follow his ideas to some strange places have made him a better cartoonist. His regular anthology series Astral Birth Canal is up to twelve issues, and he has several different side projects he's working on as well. His comics are smart, funny, fearless, strange, horrifying, bleak and humane. He's moved way past his influences at this point to create his own strange aesthetic, intermingling fantasy violence and moment-to-moment personal details.

Krikkit On The Creek is the second of his minis to feature this gentle cat character. It's a small mini that has no real plot: it simply follows Krikkit as he explores his environment in a mindful, happy manner. Every moment he spends walking around the creek and its accompanying waterfall, fields, stone bridge and cave is a happy one. He's delighted to eat from a blueberry bush and observe lobsters, ostriches and a new. Hadden offers spot color using colored pencil for Krikkit, making him a light orange that contrasts nicely with the simple black and white renderings. Like anyone doing a comic for young children, Hadden makes the comic a series of lists of things: things seen, things eaten, things interacted with. It's a delightful little object.

His series Kath starts with a standard Hadden technique: beginning a story in media res and then slowly filling in the backstory as the action propels the narrative forward. The comic starts with the titular character eating a sandwich by a fire, before she's interrupted by an imp. Their interactions lead to a monster sent by the gods coming to destroy her, a conflict that plays out with him defeating him just long enough to get away. Kath is a marvel of character design: her stringy hair, scarred face and battle-hardened body only become more interesting to look at when she dons her huge, horned helmet. In the third issue, we learn her quest, see her take a tough moral stand and make a daring, clever escape. There's an admirable straightforwardness to this comic that Reilly sometimes eschews in his work, and he accomplishes the neat trick of laying down narrative pipe while keeping the action going at the same time. Every reveal leads to the next big action, as the story comes into greater focus even as Hadden keeps increasing the stakes. The quest of looking for her child and bonding with her son's memory by eating the sandwich they invented together adds a level of humane sweetness to the proceedings.

Finch Island #4 is the continuation of yet another series, involving an anthropomorphic bird paddling to an island founded by an ancestor. We also see him from another point in time, his story commented on by a pair of frogs who happen to be traders. This comic is a model of restraint and tensions literally roiling beneath the surface, as Hadden masterfully reveals in the water as Finch is leisurely bringing his boat ashore. There are monsters, underwater societies and other bits of oddness rendered in a light hand, giving the impression that the reader can only barely make out what's there. Considering the rest of the issue is Finch exploring the island with a dog that he rescued, and one comes away with a weird tension that something's about to happen, but it's not clear what that might be. There's an almost poetic feeling to some of the sequences in the book, particularly the still ones where Finch is just stargazing.

Finally, there's the interlocking Astral Birth Canal #10-12. This series is still Hadden's best work, and it's his own mad science laboratory for exploring long-form, improvisational storytelling. Hadden loves pushing new ideas and images on his readers and letting them figure things out on their own. He's wrapping up this title in favor of a new one to be called Astral Forest, and it's a split that makes sense in the same way his nearest comparison in comics, Chuck Forsman, did when he ended his Snake Oil series. Both of these series explored fantasy tropes in unusual contexts with weird, often absurd humor in the face of horror. For all his flourishes, Hadden never strays too far from creating a traditional narrative here, only mediated by his own sensibilities and desire to keep things from getting too calcified and safe.

 

The bulk of the narrative here concerns Edward, son of Bork, who is a space god often sent on missions to eliminate certain horrible people and monsters. Bork is dead and Edward's just been killed, but they are watching lives playing out in an effort for Edward to learn more about his mother Valentina. She's a pro wrestler whose career takes off when she falls in love with Bork. With key songs in the background amplifying the action, Hadden takes the reader out of the story to remind them that other people are watching this, including Edward's horrified reaction to seeing his parents have sex. #11 has Bork's reveal that he's a god after he helps her win the wrestling championship, and she offers to come with him. Hadden interjects tons of humor in Bork's awkwardness, the way the wrestlers are drawn, and the horribly embarrassing moments involving sex that alarm his son. #12 has an escaped prisoner that Bork captured on his ship wreaking havoc, ending up with a shocking cliffhanger ending that reveals not all is as it seems. He then added tremendous depth to this storyline, with the sweet and bizarre relationship between Bjork and Valentina on display and told with complete sincerity and a surprisingly heavy erotic charge.

The back-up stories as strong, as Hadden continues to find a host of interesting artists to work with for back-up features. Cooper Whittlesey's dense story is told through a nine-panel-grid, each page upping the ante of danger for its main character. Steve Bissette draws a forest monster, while Anna McGlynn's choose-your-own-adventure comic for her main character is clever, as it comes up with a cosmogony for a primitive society using yes/no questions. It's enjoyable to explore major events disrupting such societies in this way, as these disruptions often lead to significant long-term changes. Audry Basch's peek at a couple of dog superheroes, Hadden & Susan Dibble's delightful fairy tale about lovers, and Iona Fox's over-the-top story showing Val and Bork having sex are less impactful but still add a lot of depth to this world-building process. We're learning about how and way many of the characters do what they do and why.

I suspect Hadden's new series will be another leap forward for him, allowing him to tell some new stories while still dabbling in this world he's created. It's a world where anything can happen, the powerful are merciless, and hope is still present albeit way in the background. His cartooning is confident, his understanding of narrative is sharp, and his approach continuously explores the idea of gender and gender roles in fascinating ways.

Thirty Days of CCS #26: Reilly Hadden

Reilly Hadden’s Astral Birth Canal may be my favorite continuing series published today. Hadden’s really taken advantage of his Patreon platform to create issues that not only forward his own idiosyncratic, epic fantasy stories, but he also includes a couple of back-up features in each issue now as well. I’ve made this comparison before, but it bears repeating: Hadden’s model here reminds me a lot of what Chuck Forsman did in his Snake Oil series. There are multiple, connecting storylines that blur fantasy and real life. There is a sense of existential dread as well as the absurd that inhabits each page. The cartooning is scratchy and gestural, harkening back to artists like George Herriman in terms of mark-making. It’s a raw and powerful kind of art that builds on spontaneity in the way that Chester Brown’s Yummy Fur did.

Of course, I’m not saying that Hadden is at that level or is even consciously emulating those artists. Rather, he’s working in a similar imaginative path, one that emphasizes the journey over the destination in every work. Consider the slight Krikkit Goes Outside, which may as well be a kid’s mini. It’s about a cat who leaves home for a day, looking for mushrooms, the big toad and the river. This is unlike all other Hadden comics in that a character goes on an adventure, knows exactly what is in store for them and has a wonderful time. More typical is another one-shot called YOORM, which is about the first creature in the universe being created (in the evocative “chamber of mouths”) and its subsequent struggle. There is no path, there is nothing familiar and there is only confusion and pain for poor Yoorm. Its first thoughts induced paralyzing terror before Yoorm mastered them and eventually split off to form identical beings. Not having figured out biological imperatives like hunger, Yoorm soon died, “tears and rain, forever.” This cold, callous universe is what Hadden tends to lean toward in his narratives, though this is certain an extreme.

When Hadden grounds a narrative in characters who are familiar with the terrain, like in Finch Island (parts 1-3), a comic he did with his brother John, the entire narrative itself seems friendlier and more sure-footed for the protagonist. Here, a couple of anthropomorphic frog fishermen act as a kind of Greek chorus for Dr Finch, a scientist looking to find an island that his ancestor had come upon hundreds of years earlier. There is a warmth to be found in the story’s relationships; Finch befriends a dog who had been ensnared by a trap and is aided by the frogs. Finch feels warmly toward a breakfast partner as well as his ancestor. The trip is taken with no eye toward profit, but rather to achieve a kind of profound silence and stillness. I imagine the story has a few more chapters, but this is an example of pure curiosity being rewarded.

Of course, that’s not always the case. In the flip book The Wizened One/Our Fearless Hero (with Fionn McCabe doing the latter), the first character is a watcher whose imperative is to watch a system, and by doing so ensure its destruction. She doesn’t have the strength or inclination (she’s bound by duty) to look away, but she doesn’t like it either, which makes it all worse. The hero of the back half of the story is a self-deluded idiot who manages to survive horrible situations until he doesn’t, but it doesn’t matter because his entire universe dies thanks to the events of the other story. While there is a certain amount of nihilism involved in this beautiful, Risographed comic, on Hadden’s part it’s self-chosen by the character.

On to the main event: issues seven, eight, and nine of Astral Birth Canal. Issue #0 began with some teenagers from our planet being deposited in a mysterious other universe thanks to a video game, but each issue has begun and then turn away from several other bewildering narratives. The combination of brutal violence and wacky absurdity in each issue gives them a certain whipcrack sensibility where the reader has to be prepared for anything. One of the storylines involves a young warrior named Strongboy Edward and his impossible-to-please warrior father Bork. Edward dies at the beginning of #7, but that’s far from the end of his story, as he’s taken on a tour of the afterlife. In #9, the reader is introduced to the story of Valentina, an earth woman who’s a cashier during the day and a pro wrestler at night. It’s one more example of Hadden pulling out yet another seemingly unconnected narrative until her first solo match, which is a smash triumph. After the match, she meets an eight-foot warrior named Bork; as it turns out, Edward was watching highlights of the past with his also-dead father. It turns out to be a tender love story and also puts a bow on the familial tragedy that was Edward’s relationship with his father. This is some of Hadden’s best drawing and character design, mixing lumpy bodies with expressive faces.

Issue 8 features the remaining one of the three earth teens, Rona, and the native Bird Girl. They have been subjected to horrible, agonizing torture by a bird creature called the Cleric; those early scenes where Rona was terrified by a lack of understanding of anything happening around her combined with the utter terror of her new reality were unnerving. Again, very simple cartooning, almost at stick-figure level in some places, yet Hadden’s ability to stick the reader into that position of confusion and fear come from that raw, gestural sense of expression. Issue 8 features hope, because while the super-team designed to defend the land from the Cleric (the Mighty Bird Five) was utterly routed, one of its dying members passed on powers to the girls. If Edward’s story is a family tragedy slapped on top of non-stop mayhem, then the girls’ story is one of slowly learning to understand and adjust to one’s situation until it’s possible to overcome it.

As noted, there are plenty of great short back-up features. Anna McGlynn focused on the video game aspect of the story and told a tale about children in the future playing a version of Dance Dance Revolution as they’ve achieved immortality. Dean Sudarsky’s gritty style fits right in with a story about a Bork-like champion and his rivalry with the sun. In their separate stories, Simon Reinhardt and Stephanie Zuppo both zero in on the strange world and how it seems to draw people in from other dimensions. The former has a barbarian finding an idol and figuring out what to do with it—even if it wasn’t the best decision. The latter features a girl slowly revealing that she’s not an ordinary teen—she was brought to the world and learned how to fight, and that’s just what she was going to do, against all odds. Bridget Comeau does a story about a little mushroom creature encountering the Cleric, Luke Healy does a story about a religion rising and falling around a bird, and Hadden & Jenna Marchione (art) do a strip and ballad about a mighty warrior named Brenda. Josh Bayer, Sophie Yanow and Tillie Walden all provide pin-up pages that are all spectacular on their own merits. Hadden really went out of his way to make each issue a wholly satisfying read, and that’s why it’s such a great series: he is thinking both as an artist and an editor.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #4: Reilly Hadden

Reilly Hadden continues to center his comics around his Astral Birth Canal universe, a bizarre and frequently absurd fantasy world that continues to expand from issue to issue. The loose threads that Hadden has been casting since the first issue in what seemed to be an improvisational fashion are slowly being drawn together, even as his storytelling and drawing continue to tighten up from issue to issue. Hadden has created a world where he can do anything, from conjuring up an epic, visceral and slightly silly battle to veering off to a far corner to see how one character is feeling at that moment. It gives these comics an elastic quality, knowing that while it's set in a fantasy world, Hadden might be telling a slice-of-life story just as easily as he might be depicting psychedelic weirdness. And of course, none of these possibilities are mutually exclusive.

The fifth issue introduces the "bear bus" in a sequence that contains a stick figure girl as well as a highly detailed and slightly grotesque drawing a of a bear bus driver. Hadden loves cognitive dissonance in his narratives and is able to produce that effect with both his drawings as well as the narrative tone. The fairy tale tone of the story and some of its characters is offset by the ever-increasing sense of weirdness and dread as the story proceeds, especially when the dialogue from seemingly-benign characters grows ever more bizarre. This story's destination, Land Grove, is exactly where the reader has been since issue one, and chapter two of the book reintroduces a human girl and the bird-girl friend she made. When last seen, the bird girl had had her beak ripped off her face by a frightening figure, and so the other girl replaced it using a sno-cone and some string. Hadden here uses the thinnest of lines and a great deal of white negative space to create an airy, strange atmosphere in a minimalist setting. The reader also gets a brief taste of a fight between Edward, son of Bork, against the Mega-Rat and the Rat-Snake-Man who turns into the Snake-Rat-Man. It's both a total lark on the part of the artist and a carefully constructed craft experiment. The final story involves a couple leaving their world thanks to climbing onto huge but harmless creatures who shed their bodies and go out into space. The story is unconnected (for the moment) to anything else in the series, yet the kind of logic used in its progression is the sort that's been the rule for the whole series, and it has the additional feature of being emotionally compelling as we follow the couple's ultimate fate.

Issue six features a long, funny battle with Edward and his opponents, making use of its backgrounds like a breezier Mat Brinkman comic. Again, the dominant visual on a Hadden page is not just what he draws, but what he doesn't draw: wide amounts of space. Just like in the segment where we catch up on bird girl and the adventurer, Hadden builds up "the Mighty Bird five", a powerful group of heroes sent to hunt after that, only to have them killed in a single stroke by the real creature that's hunting them. Hadden uses a kind of shaggy dog joke with a horrific punchline, once again keeping the reader off-balance. In the same way, the reader is surprised that just when it looks like Edward is going to get killed, one of his enemies does something surprising and flips the narrative around introduces an entirely new element. This issue also features side stories from John Carvajal and Hannah Kaplan. Both stories juxtapose the familiar against the strange, as Carvajal's is about a father and son explorer team finding a sleeping creature, discovering a gateway in its navel, and then disappearing as the creature barely notices their existence. The latter features a picnic where a sentient pizza's pieces are having a debate about moral philosophy before being eaten, but Kaplan makes it clear that the pizza is having an effect on those who ate it, both in terms of their words and their appearance. Both have a visual approach utterly different from Hadden's, as Carvajal favors a lot of spotting blacks to give his figures some more weight, while Kaplan fleshes out her more realistically drawn figures with a greyscale that slowly builds atmosphere. James Sturm adds a strip featuring the stick-figure girl from the first chapter that's drawn more in Hadden's style than Sturm's.

In The Grass is a short Hadden mini set in the same world. In it, we see a humanoid figure desperately trying to hunt down its dinner and failing. There's a narrative in the form of a letter that seems like it's written in the hand of the protagonist that's all about missing a friend and partly envying their freedom but also warning that what they're doing is a mistake that's too late to rectify. At the end, after a comic worth's of travails, it's revealed that the letter is about this figure, and he reads it again when he arrives home, knowing that he's made a tremendous mistake. It's cleverly-paced slice-of-life fiction disguised as a fantasy story and shows just how versatile Hadden is as a storyteller, even when working within the same milieu the entire time.

Thirty Days of CCS #20:My Pace

Rod and Cone is the publishing imprint of Anna McGlynn and Iona Fox, and My Pace is their latest anthology that's mostly from CCS students and grads. It's a very nicely curated anthology whose contents manage to fit together well despite veering from confessional autobio to visceral weirdness. There's a scrawled, intimate quality common to all of the work here, beginning with Hannah Kaplan's "Summer Diary". These are almost embarrassingly confessional in nature, as Kaplan lets her insecurities and her sexual encounters out into the open and on to the page. She's not afraid to plainly draw her own nude body as well as those of her lovers, but the effect is raw and immediate, as opposed to titillating. Kaplan deals with the loss of an important relationship, the confusion of sleeping with her boss and the emotional challenge of living around in a loose, freehand pencil style that's all about capturing emotion through image as quickly as possible.

Cooper Whittlesey's four-panel and one panel strips veer somewhere between intensely personal and intimate and absurd at a Sam Henderson level. His drawing style is a sort of frenzied scrawl, with lots of difficult-to-read lettering and smudged images. Like Kaplan, it's like he's trying to get these thoughts about sex and "photos of every man she's ever been with--with erections!" out of his head an onto paper as quickly as possible. After the harshness of the first two artists, Fox's own "November Diary" is a smooth counterpoint. It's a lovely account of a trip from Vermont to Quebec for a zine fest, though not before Fox (who is also a farmer) stops off to examine a farm in Quebec. These strips are every bit as intimate if not as revealing as the other strips, as Fox doesn't stop to provide context to the information she discusses, nor does she seek to conceal anything. Her self-caricature is amusing, with a loop of hair on her head, and one gets a sense of contentment with considerable labors and struggles by the end of the story.

McGlynn keeps up the diary theme, only she goes back in time with "My Future Boyfriend", written by a fictional character named Vivian Howard. The rhythm of the narration is meant to mimic both a diary as well as a director's notes for a movie. The writing is beautiful and painful, as Vivian is spun around in a million directions by her own brain, her own hormones and the wonderful and terrible confusion of adolescent being. Drawing the strip on lined paper gave it a certain authenticity, and the use of imagery not directly related to the narration was clever and hinted at the way Vivian fought off feelings of jealousy and distrust and embraced those around her.

Reilly Hadden's "Land Grove" uses his thin, cartoony line to create another story about a dangerous, unstable environment and attempts to find safety in it. When a man goes out in a bicycle away from his partner and their tent, how he negotiates danger and the reward he receives is not unlike an Aesop's fable. Stephanie Kwok's textual diary provides yet another take on the concept, as she uses a variety of fonts to create a visual framing device for her rambling thoughts and observations. Throughout, the theme of wanting to connect but feeling isolated is repeated, her own shouts into the void an act of defiance against loneliness. Sophie Yanow's "Gaslight", featuring a figure off-panel talking to a prone figure on-panel, offers a different take on intimacy. The figure off-panel conflates honesty with intimacy, as though being honest about doing horrible things excused the horrible things we do. It's an appropriate capper to an anthology where every artist explored their emotions, their limits and their struggles in each story in an attempt at authenticity. Yanow reminds us that authenticity without humanity is no virtue. As always, her command over her line is so precise that she uses a handful of tremulous slashes and geometric figures to get at that sense of being devastated. All told, this is one of the strongest CCS-related anthologies I've read.

Thirty Days of CCS #13: Reilly Hadden

Reilly Hadden has an intriguing series called Astral Birth Canal, which reminds me a bit of the early Chuck Forsman Snake Oil series. There are interlocking, nightmarish fantasy stories that weave in and out of each other. One follows a girl who appears in a forest and is immediately surrounded by giant crows, one of whom places a noose around her neck. She becomes friends with a bird girl and ends up in an even worse situation, in the sky house of a demonic figure on stilts. Then there's a narrative that features a young boy waiting for his warrior father to come home, but when the event happens, his father ignores him. A third narrative involves a peaceful race creating a warrior to avenge their yearly disaster when a monster comes around to raid their city. The warrior is surprised to find that the monster robbed them to build a staircase to the sun--and she is invited to join the monster.

All of this happens in just the first issue, and the other three issues follow from this. I'm not sure how much of this was planned out and how much of the storytelling wound up as improvisation; either way, there's an appealing looseness to Hadden's line without sacrificing coherent narrative structure. If it is improv, then he's following the rules of long-form improv, a story-based art that keeps adding on to an initial premise while creating surprising links between sketches through callbacks. The second issue (in glorious color) features the stubby young boy, Edward (son of Bork) trying to find his dad and winding up in a series of caves suspiciously shaped like his father. The third issue finds the female warrior going up the stairs, only to have the narrative pulled back to reveal that the demonic feature was reading a story to the girls--and literally ripped the face off of the bird girl when she tried to escape. The fourth issue is a cosmic adventure featuring Bork that ties back in with the second issue.

What's immediately noticeable about this series is that it has so many possible but disparate influences that it's impossible to really isolate them, because Hadden has created his own style and visual language. I mentioned Forsman before, but there's touches of Jack Kirby, Josh Simmons, Chester Brown and possibly Jesse Moynihan as well. Horror and absurdity are mixed in equal measure, often in the same panel. The effect is disorienting, even dizzying, at times, as Hadden's aim is to keep the reader off-balance while still keeping his various narratives afloat. In many ways, Astral Birth Canal feels like a comics PhD project, where Hadden is exploring different styles and techniques while attempting to expand his limitations. There are still plenty of rough spots as he doesn't quite stick the landing on some of the drawings, and the line between loose cartooning and sloppy cartooning can be a thin one. That said, Hadden's greatest attribute is his understanding of effective and memorable character design, putting weird characters into strange situations with a great deal of restraint. Every issue expands on the ideas more and more, as each of the characters must deal with being out of place and in a totally insane new steady-state. While there are lots of fantasy and horror trappings to be found here, it's all in the service of a greater psychological probing of his characters and not just dumb fun.

Thirty Days of CCS, Day 11: Reilly Hadden

Bird Girl, A Mass Of Shapes and Scratches and Astral Birth Canal 0, by Reilly Hadden. Hadden is a talented second year CCS student, and these three comics show three radically different styles and approaches. Bird Girl, a tiny mini with a dashed-off and scribbly approach, represents Hadden at his most spontaneous. It follows around the titular character and her abuse at the hands of her fellow birds, and then takes a hard left turn when she's abducted by aliens and pecks the eye out of a carrot-like creature. The entire thing feels spontaneous and free, as though Hadden wasn't sure how he was going to solve a storytelling problem until he got there. The heavy use of blacks, the sullen but expressive bird characters and the freewheeling scribbles on each page represent a cartoonist who's in his own private comfort zone, simply making up silent stories as they come to him.

A Mass Of Shapes And Scratches, on the other hand, is a little more labored. It's essentially an argument between two friends about finding meaning and the essential fruitless meaninglessness of life. That argument is given a kick in the pants by the end of the story, as they work through the one man's nihilism, only to see him trip and hit his head hard on a table, leading to his demise. It's kind of an obvious gag, and the neurotic energy Hadden brings to the page with extensive use of hatching, cross-hatching and spotting blacks is undermined by the stiffness of his character design--especially in how characters relate to each other in space. While there are interesting ideas here, this is a comic that feels underbaked on the whole, though it clearly represents the artist trying to break out of his comfort zone.

Astral Birth Canal #0, on the other hand, sees the artist hit upon a winning idea and absolutely seizing it. He uses a simpler and modified style of his character design from Mass of Shapes, one that puts greater emphasis on the character itself, rather than the labor that went into making the character. It also allows the characters to connect to each other in a more meaningful fashion, It starts as a "teen in distress" comic that's not uncommon for CCS students to write about, as a boy named Crockett is forced out of his house by his ridiculously oppressive and abusive father. Hanging out with his female best friend (who is concerned about his welfare and wants to talk to him about it, to no avail) and her brother at a bowling alley/arcade, they happen upon a new video game called Astral Birth Canal. When her brother flips a switch, the game transforms into a shape and takes them to another planet, and an adventure. All of the original themes are still intact when the trio arrives on the planet, but the story takes a hard left turn into genre weirdness. This fusion of genres should prove to be interesting, especially since Hadden seems to have found a visual style he's happy with.This will be a series to watch.