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 #30: Rio Aubry Taylor, Kevin Uehlein & DW

For Rio Aubry Taylor (who uses xe/xir pronouns), the urge to express xirself through abstract comics, lively genre comics and autobio are all tightly wound together. In Taylor's abstract comics series Tabe #12: Shed Your Blood For Pleasure, the repeated motif of dozens of vertical lines tightly packed together in a panel is used in some interesting ways. Taylor stops just short of making them hatching as xe adds a wavy quality to the lines that makes them all the more intense to look at. Taylor then modulates the reader's experience by experimenting with page design in terms of how many panels are stacked on each page and in what formation. Eschewing a standard grid, Taylor varies the height and width of the panels such that they alter the reader's experience by slowing them down on a page or speeding them up. By the simple quality of Taylor's hand, the line weight and the spaces between lines varies, creating a whorl effect on some pages. The reader's patience is eventually rewarded when Taylor (I'm guessing) improvises some figures that coalesce into musicians, revealing that the rest of the comic was a visual representation of experiencing sound. That was clever, but Taylor also carries this aesthetic into xir narrative series, Jetty.

Jetty is supported by Taylor's Patreon and appears as both a webcomic and a minicomic, of which five issues have been released. The series looks better as a minicomic than as a webcomic; something about it demands that it be on paper. This is an epic story that's clearly going to last a long time, and as a result, the first five issues are all over the place in terms of content. The first issue establishes the main plot, that "one billion minutes into the future", the sun disappears, causing worldwide chaos. As the series begins, a young girl named Mina is staying at a Buddhist monastery that's under attack by bandits and they have to escape. Along the way, we meet an explorer who's been stuck in the "dark internet" for two millennia, Mina is captured by a voracious shape-changing monster and then strikes it down when she suddenly evinces flame breath as a super-weapon, there's a blood-sucking insect who has intimate knowledge of important things, and meet a monk whose taste for alcohol gets him in trouble.

There is family turmoil and betrayal, physical and emotional trauma and greedy industrialists. Throughout the narrative, Taylor uses those abstract lines as a symbol for knowledge that's obscured or not yet attainable. Images, thoughts and beliefs fade in and out like a radio signal. The most remarkable issue was #4, which was an intensely personal story about Fill, a cyborg sorcerer's apprentice who is desperately looking for xir missing master. Fill was built to change xir appearance constantly and painfully, putting them in constant agony and making xir dangerous to others. Just as Taylor manifested addiction as a monster dragging people across jagged paths, so too did Taylor use Fill as a metaphor for being trans and desperate for human companionship. Taylor's intense and dense linework is at its pinnacle in this issue, as xe redesigns Fill in every panel with an astounding amount of detail each time. Fill's journey is far from complete in this issue, but Taylor's compassionate but unsparing account of xir life up to that point made for one of the best minicomics of the year. Overall, Taylor is really starting to get xir footing on the series, as each issue is more confident than the last as xe is allowing xirself to follow xir instincts on what storytelling instincts to follow. It's obvious that Taylor has truly found xir voice as a cartoonist as a result of creating this series.

Kevin Uehlein is an artist who seems to be on the verge of finding his voice, but is still trying to figure things out. He seems most comfortable working in funny animal style comics ala early Robert Crumb. In other words, anthropomorphic animals in adult situations. At the same time, Uehlein is interested in abstract narratives and psychedelia. Compulse 9 is an astoundingly beautiful collection of his color drawings, balancing that funny animal style with frequently apocalyptic, psychedelic imagery. It's sort of Joe Coleman meets Warner Bros. cartoons, as the images are funny, strange and yield more and more details upon close and long inspection. There's also the feel of a religious element as well, merging nature, death and life with ritual activities, as well as images that seem to bring to mind Hindu drawings. There are also anthropomorphic versions of Japanese samurai drawings from prints that are incredibly intricately drawn, as vivid as a Frank Frazetta drawing. Still, when I look at his drawings of cats in strange and psychedelic settings, I think of underground artists like Crumb or a more recent and perhaps sympathetic artist in Steve Lafler. It looks like he colored this using magic marker, and there's a rich, vivid quality to each page that makes this incredibly beautiful to study and appreciate.

Butt Gusters takes a different approach: black and white gag strips, mixing funny animal style as well as a highly cartoony but more naturalistic style. Uehlein is all over the map here. There's a funny autobio strip about giving up comics as a teen, a political strip about the absurd anti-trans "bathroom bills", and also lots of dark humor as well. There are inside jokes about comics (the "bad duck artist" gag was a good one), jokes about comedy (the stand-up for the elderly riffs on exactly what you would expect, but Uehlein still makes it funny), pop culture rants, joke mashups involving Caesar and pro wrestling, and plenty of visual jokes and puns. Every gag was so different that there wasn't much of a sense of rhythm, as it felt like Uehlein was throwing everything he could think of at the wall to see what would stick. Uehlein and DW teamed up KJC #3, their continuing collaboration comic. It's a nice match of DW's highly immersive use of patterns, collage and figures in a non-narrative manner with Uehlein's recognizable figure work, gags and psychedelia. They really went all-out in this issue, with everything in full color and some of the pages being done on transparencies, which was interesting on its own as well as when interacting with the art on the pages on either side of it. DW also engages in some dada narratives using his simplified figures, incorporating found text in the pieces to create a strange rhythm. This was by far the best of their collaborations: richer, more complex and more beautiful than the other issues. Again, Uelein seems to be on the verge of figuring out exactly what he wants to do, and I'm eager to follow whatever decision he makes.

Thirty Days of CCS #32: Rio Aubry Taylor and Jan Burger

Rio Aubry Taylor has been experimenting with weird, psychedelic comics that slip between narrative and abstraction for quite some time. Xir new webseries, Jetty (two issues to date), is an attempt to combine commercial and aesthetic interests in one clever package. The story follows a girl named Mina, living on a future earth where chaos is everywhere because the sun disappeared. With her parents gone in the disaster, she lives with a group of monks who are chased from their monastery by bandits in the first issue. It's wonderfully episodic young adult fiction with a certain fierce, scribbly density in its line. There are monsters, there are weird friends (some of whom are monsters), there are adventures as well as a larger and more sinister set of subplots.

While following Mina's adventures, we are also introduced to a couple of adventurers in "the dark internet", which gives Taylor a chance to draw the sort of line patterns that appear so often in xir work. The second issue retreats a bit from the first narrative, delving into the series' central medium of searching for the "jetty of the mind", retreating from rationality into intuitive thought. That internality comes back around to following up on the dark internet adventurers, where as it turns out one of them is Commander Grok, who has been asleep for two millennia. Taylor uses each page here as a full-blown, separate chunk of narrative: flashes and fragments of story meant to flow across the reader like a flood of hidden memories bubbling up in one's consciousness.

This kind of journey through the images of the artist's consciousness reminds me of the sort of thing that Theo Ellsworth does, only Taylor has created zir own visual language and symbols. The series pulls from a thousand separate influences, but what really comes through is Taylor's own sensitive, playful and intense aesthetic sense. One can subscribe and support Taylor through zir Patreon at
I also wanted to quickly mention a couple of Taylor's intricate microminis: Commander! and Carnitas! These aren't so much narratives as they are unfolding images (one per page) that flip and veer thanks to Taylor flipping around and folding the accordioned pages of ach comic. Each begins with a text statement (the former about an all-conquering villain, the latter about Taylor's relationship with meat. Neither comic is a narrative, but each drawing is a variation on a theme.

Taylor's friend and fellow CCS grad Jan Martijn Burger, is an extremely talented cartoonist as well as being one of the minds behind the avant-garde puppet troupe Paperhand Puppet Intervention. That last word applies to his mini Awake Sleeping Moles, which originally appeared in the anthology Irene #5. It's a personal but fanciful story that winds up being a statement of purpose, as his unborn child is called forth from his wife's womb by the family cat. It's a warm and wonderful story about waking up and facing the demons that keep us distracted from what's important: being creative. Burger's supple line is perfect for crafting fables such as this.

Thirty Days of CCS #15: Mishra, Taylor, Parrish, Carvajal

Thanks once again to my pal Craig Fischer for lending me these comics (with the exception of the preview by Taylor).

Dust, by J.A. Carvajal. Carvajal uses a fairly unobtrusive sci-fi conceit (robots that act as caretakers, especially for the elderly) as a key aspect of this downbeat story about a daughter who is worried that her father is going insane. He's become obsessed with the idea that dust contains some kind of virulent species, and we learn that he believes that they are what killed his wife. As such, he's constantly cleaning in an effort to get rid of the dust. I like Carvajal's line, as it's simple and stark with a touch of the grotesque in the character design. The tragic end of the comic is aided by the robot caretaker's logic being without any understanding or empathy for what's really happening.

The Night Time, by Emily Parrish. Parrish is an excellent example of someone who came up with a way to vividly and strikingly illustrate a story with a minimum of actual drawing. Experimenting in a manner similar to both David Lasky and Aaron Cockle, Parrish uses a twelve-panel grid to tell the story of how night slowly got longer and longer each night on earth, the harbinger of a slow apocalypse. Many of the panels were either all-white or all-black, creating different kinds of story beats on the relentless grid. Some of the panels just had text, and others had a single image referring back to that text. On the final page, when she refers to the end of the world as "a slow dimming", she cleverly uses a dark sunburst--every panel seems black at first, until you notice that they are dim rays from the sun. Parrish's use of color is important in this comic, as a way of breaking up the black and white contrasts created by the rhythm of the page structure. Each color panel is a little jolt for the reader, and while some of the images are merely reiterations of the text, there are others that veer off into an almost poetic abstraction.

It's All For You, by Shashwat Mishra. This is an interesting collection of "romantic short stories", with each entry done in a different style. "Numbers" is drawn in manga style, and Mishra nails the angularity of the figures as well as the nature of the story's hook. There's a guy who sees numbers above other people's heads, and he knows they mean different things: their age, how much money they have, etc. He happens upon a woman that he figures out has the same ability and strikes up a conversation. Her number talent allows her to see how many lies a person has told in their life. In exploring this interesting concept, he learns--in the most heartbreaking way possible--what his numbers are actually telling him. "Distance" is drawn in an open-page format (no panel borders) with a cute, stripped-down approach that emphasizes both the playfulness and the seriousness of a couple coming together in the middle of a long-distance relationship. "Time" is a dense, shadowy story about someone at the end of their rope after a failed relationship, while "Elevate" takes the conceit of using the reader's view of a couple in an elevator be a surveillance camera; hilariously, it takes them through the entirety of a relationship and back again as the elevator is stuck. The elongated nature of the view and the clipped and jarring movements forward in time make it seem as though the reader is watching a film get fast-forwarded and then played for brief bits before being jolted ahead into time again. "Fame" is the most melodramatic and over-the-top story, as it's a naturalistically-depicted story of a rock star who's just lost his true love. There are certainly some interesting experiments in here, as Mishra was clearly fishing around for ideas that worked.

Thirty Days of CCS #25: Max Mose, Rio Aubry Taylor, Casey Bohn, Bill Bedard

Max Mose's recent comic The Grove is another of his sci-fi/horror commentaries on capitalism and culture at large. With a beautiful and disturbing silkscreened cover, this full-color piece (printed on a risograph, perhaps?) is one of his most striking works. Working in similar waters as Matthew Thurber, the story concerns a rapacious city literally draining the inspiration out of its artists for the benefit of its corporate classes, overseen by a sort of magical deity of capitalism. When one of the city's citizens rebels, he's shot out of a cannon into the nearby forest. Of course, when he messes with the "unnatural" order of things, a reprisal is ordered and the book's final conflict occurs. Mose leavens this critique with absurd imagery, jokes, self-aware critiques of his critiques and a general sense of awareness that the state of nature is no more welcoming or just than humanity's need to construct and eventually exploit its resources and then each other. Mose's pencils have become much sharper and cleaner while still retaining the grotesque and frequently bug-eyed quality that makes his pages pop. His use of color has been a big boost in getting him to make his pages cleaner and simpler, but he also seems to have found just the right groove and sense of confidence in letting go of clutter and over-rendering. That new simplicity only makes the images we do see all the more powerful, weird and funny.

Bill "Billage" Bedard is another CCS cartoonist whose work I only saw for the first time at SPX. Coffee Hunters represents the silly, sketchy side of the artist. With cartoony characters and stick figure warriors that are heavy on gesture and body language in telling their story, this mythological spoof features a tribe hunting for wild coffee. Rife with coffee and bean puns, this scratchy little mini is packed with eye pops and other visual jokes as well. It's dopey and good-natured, understanding that this is a bit of entertaining fluff that's nonetheless prepared with care and affection. On the other hand, his full adaptation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's epic lyrical poem The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner represents the serious, delicate side of the artist. Bedard truly engages the poem, using a thin line but a lot of grey-scale shading to add a bit of depth. Still, the whole story conveys the ethereal, monstrous, fantastic and spiritual aspects of the poem, with the Mariner's spectacles giving him a further sense of removal from his crew and the reader as well. The nightmarish qualities of the poem translate quite well to comics, with a number of lines leaving Bedard plenty of room for visual interpretation regarding violence, spirits and storms. In other, more still scenes, Bedard captures that deathly tranquility as well, his illustrations a fine counter-point to Taylor's rich and evocative language. Bedard's natural sketchy, grungy style eventually takes over the story, which is all for the better for this comic, as it's not a neat or comforting tale.

Rio Aubry Taylor's first issue of the moving and unsettling Love, Currently sees him break new ground as an artist.Told in a distinctive white-on-black page with various color fields and patterns popping into panels, it's a story of a man named Lan who fails to come to terms with his own anger and fear after the death of his daughter. First his marriage disintegrates, and then his life in general goes to hell. This is a first-person account of his own attempt at self-destruction and abandonment of his faith in the world, god and humanity. Taylor's art is haunting and evocative, as the way he often likes to use abstract patterns, light fields and dense cross-hatching serves a narrative purpose as a reflection of Lan's consciousness and emotional state. At just eight pages, it's Taylor's most coherent, dense and emotional work; I am eager to see where he will be going with this series.

Casey Bohn is one of the more distinctive stylists I've seen from CCS. His comics have tended toward loopy science-fiction that is conversant in all of the genre's tropes yet subtly commenting on its cliches and tendency toward obvious metaphors. It's a gentle nudging to be sure, as Bohn's art both celebrates its Jack Kirby influence with its bold, almost abstract use of thick lines and odd angles and is well aware of the silliness of its imagery. President X concerns an astronaut who becomes aware that aliens are about to invade Earth and establish a puppet president (the titular President X, who barely appears in this comic despite his distinctive appearance--it's a sort of shaggy dog element). It takes him years to get back, and no one believes him but a hilariously depicted group of hippies. Of course, they prove to be crucial allies, but Bohn plays up the violence vs non-violence angle in an amusing, heightened manner. The climactic fight is absolutely hilarious, as the eyeball-shaped alien is thwarted by its own digestive juices ("I'm eating myself! I...I'm delicious!"). Bohn represents the sort of humorist whose knowledge of and ability to work within a genre sharpens the humor within the piece while providing a credible, enjoyable story.

Minicomics: Taylor, Jordan/Smith, Cass, Keeper Steinke

Tabe #11, by Rio Aubry Taylor. Labeled "an abstract comic about community", Taylor's latest is a fascinating series of drawings that packs a surprising emotional punch. There are varying types of abstract shapes: squiggles, straight line patterns, hair-like tangles of lines, blotches, grey shapes that look like torn pieces of paper glued to the page, and things that operate as captions that contain "text" that looks like an alien language. There are moments where the page explodes like a supernova against a night sky, and then it fades back into what looks like a drawing of the circulatory system. There are pages where the drawings seem to be in harmony and others where the drawings look to be in opposition. What makes the comic work so well is Taylor's sense of rhythm and balance on the page, creating a sense of independent intelligence in each drawing while never creating anything that's directly figurative.

History In Ruins #1-2, by Rusty Jordan and Andrew Smith.Both of these comics are just twelve pages long, but they pack a truly bizarre punch in each installment.The main character, Duane Fields, is the sort of greasy loser that is not unfamiliar to alt-comics fans, a Clowesian character who works part time at a drug store and shoplifts on the way out. I'm not sure what the division of labor is here in terms of story and art, but the figure work has a sweaty, rubbery quality to it. There's an almost clownish, Skip Williamson quality to these odd-looking characters that makes this feel like it could have been published forty years ago in an issue of Arcade. That's especially true because the second issue takes us away from the more alt-comics narrative of the deluded loser and brings us to far weirder territory. Living in the basement of his mother's house with a near-sentient mouse and assorted "experiments", he spies upon his mother (wearing inappropriately sexy clothes around her son, though she still treats him like he's a toddler) being threatened by a gang of thugs. When she is later kidnapped, the story is transformed into a wacky revenge narrative. I have no idea where things are headed next (I get the sense that much of this comic is improvised), but each page is a visual treat and full of surprises.

Mr Wolf #2, by Aron Nels Steinke. In Steinke's autobio series, Big Plans, his Mr Wolf character is usually an expression of his range. It's interesting that he's chosen to rework it as an uncertain authority figure to reflect his status as a first and second grade teacher, transforming all of the characters into anthropomorphic animals. These fictionalized strips obviously draw heavily from his real life experiences and encounters, and I'd imagine that many of the characters are composites rather than outright fictions. These strips are the best comics of Steinke's career in my opinion, because it balances his need to constantly scrutinize and microanalyze his decision-making and emotions with actually having to deal with the emotions and minds of dozens of children. His observations about the kids are warm and knowing without descending into saccharine sweetness or sentimentality. Indeed, there's something raw and real about his observations and how in many ways he's more like one of them than he is like many of the adults, even if he is an authority figure whom many of the children respect and admire. It also helps that this strip is very funny, with Steinke no doubt curating the funniest things he's experienced or heard other teachers relate to him. His drawing is simple, cute and powerfully expressive, getting across the emotions and mental states of the kids with greater facility than if he had used a more realistic approach. Comics about teaching are still fairly rare, and I hope Steinke continues to develop his observations and witty, humane approach to discussing the children under his tutelage.

The Drowning Ring and Uh Oh Dojo, by Mike Keeper. I couldn't find any website info for these idiosyncratic zine/comics fusions. The Drowning Ring is a small booklet that is absolutely jam-packed with trivia, comics, ephemera and a narrative about being a lifeguard in a particular beach community. There's something remarkably knowing about the gags, the language and the weirdness of being part of lifeguard culture that Keeper brings to life. His actual comics have a surprising level of careful detail when he chooses to illustrate something in a naturalistic style, but he mostly prefers quicker, cruder renderings and iconic drawings. I have no idea how many of the details he throws at the reader are actually true, and I prefer to keep it that way. It's like reading a Leon Beyond comic, where one knows that Leon is mostly feeding you lies, but they are so enjoyable that one wants more and more. The whole thing is a very appealing mess, as the layout is frequently sloppy and slapped together, but it's an obvious labor of love. Uh Oh Dojo is a short and magazine-sized comic that's just eight pages long, but packed with comics and repurposed photos. It's about Keeper hearing about the death of his former karate sensei (teacher) and the likelihood that he had killed himself. It spurs Keeper to think about suicide in general, while circling back to the history of karate, to his own life and the things he learned in karate. It's a comic with no pat answers or lessons, just many questions solemnly asked in an unusual package. It's Keeper's attention to fine details while making sure to get across the essential emotions of a situation that make these comics worth reading.

The Index #4, by Caitlin Cass. Cass's deeply introspective series about insignificance, meaning and knowledge has now taken a firm turn into the realm of fantasy. After raising the specter of indexer Paul Otlet and zipping everyone to a fairly intact library of Alexandria, Diogenes wanders into the proceedings of this issue. He's the antithesis of Otlet, who spends his time with words and writings; Diogenes viewed anything less than a total lifestyle commitment to one's ideas as a kind of inauthentic living. As the cast of this comic has expanded, Cass has juggled a new character into every issue to likewise expand the nature of the ideas at work. One of the leads, Susan, kept blank cards because their potentiality and nothingness comforted her equally, balancing her own sense of nothingness.  When the other lead, John, started writing ideas on them willy-nilly it was as a way of rejecting his former career as a graduate student trying to get words to do his bidding. Otlet's index of ideas was the impossible task of trying to categorize all universal knowledge using a finite and clumsy set-up. Cass is careful to keep the non-apparitions in the story close to their somatic roots, giving them hunger and restlessness as they drift away from the performative spaces of the ghosts. This was a fascinating issue that betrays no particular allegiance to any of these points of view, which is what makes it so interesting. Her drawings are functional if unremarkable, sloppily but accurately getting across her points of view quickly and directly.

Taking a Voyage with Rio Aubry Taylor

There's no question that Rio Aubry Taylor is the trippiest of the CCS cartoonists, and his most recent work certainly proves it. It's not so much that he's intentionally going for psychedelia in his art, but rather that comics for him serve as a sort of healing and creative ritual. The simple act of drawing serves as a magical and therapeutic act, and not only for himself but for others as well. That's the point of his brief mini Werefore Teach Comics?, which is a love letter to his teachers at CCS. In thanking comics enthusiasts like Alec Longstreth for his role in his education, he refers to him as a wizard who gave him a magic wand in the form of a pencil. For Taylor, this is only a metaphor in the thinnest of senses, because drawing for him boosts imagination, improves communication and provides an antidote to attention deficit-disorder. Taylor's total immersion in drawing not only as a vocation but as a total way of life reminds me a bit of Theo Ellsworth's approach, though Taylor doesn't have the same degree of control over his line at this point.

There's no question Taylor's dedication or productivity, however. His "abstract comics" zine, Tabe, was collected in an attractive package after ten issues. Each issue is brief--essentially two sheets of 8.5" x 11" paper--but is intriguing. Some issues are purely visual, drifting to Aztec imagery, shadowy beasts or shape-changing robots that also look a bit like Aztecs. A couple of issues are folded in such a way as to make the reader unfold and transform them into comics-delivery systems. Some issues rely more on text, like his thoughts on Carlos Castaneda and his influence on him or an "interview" wherein Taylor talks about wanting his comics to help others remain in the present (a goal of many cognitive behavioral therapy systems, interestingly enough). Other comics focus on the ways he thinks about the ways in which he perceives darkness within himself and how it impacts others, and how he hopes to deal with it. Other issues are invocations of love. Every issue is at least interesting to look at, as his imagination and line is totally unfettered without the standard structure of a comics page. Indeed, his art is much more fluid on these pages than in his more typical narratives, which are still a bit stiff.

Taylor combats that stiffness in the pages of his one-man anthology, Jetty, by writing stories that defy normal narrative conventions. In "King", for example, a child is taken from a car crash by giant bug-like aliens and winds up dominating them with the expected emotional maturity of a three-year-old. "Outer Space" and "Reincarnated Solvent Abuse" both use white on black images of squid-like creature in space. The wordless first story seems to be an imagination piece that posits that the connections we see between stars are in fact sentient creature. The latter story is a retelling of the story of Moses, except that instead of a burning bush, Yahweh happens to be a bug-eyed space creature. The second issue starts with a cyberpunk story with a character who looks not unlike Uncle Duke from Doonesbury trying to gain a piece of crucial knowledge by entering cyberspace, only to fall prey to a sentient virus and fall prey to the "dark internet". The latter story is about a Taylor stand-in who gets in a car accident with his sister, with both having their souls plucked by the Grim Reaper. Both of these stories are as over-the-top as they sound but both utterly heartfelt, with no happy ending in either case. The protagonists are laid low with no warning and no opportunity to even say goodbye. The first story is slickly illustrated while the latter is quite crude, with the stiffest character work in the batch. Taylor explains in the issue's notes that these stories were a way of purging something within him, another indication that art clearly acts as a kind of therapy for him. That's quite apparent in the last story of #1, "I Left You A Note", which sees the main character slowly disappear, reappear and then say "it's for good this time" before disappearing again. This is obviously about suicide, and is Taylor's way of exploring what it means to not exist. Taylor is very much the working definition of an artist who's in the process of discovering his own voice. These short works aren't false starts, but rather stepping stones for an artist who has the potential to do some very exciting work.

CCS Minis: Cockle, Frakes, Taylor

Annotated #7, by Aaron Cockle. This is Cockle's best work to date, a comic where the artist found a way to match his rendering ability with his deliciously enigmatic and bold storytelling choices. Cockle is very much interested in telling genre stories, but it's hard to pin his work down to a particular genre. I suppose "science-fiction" is as good a descriptor as any, especially given that aliens are a major presence in this story, "S.O.S." It concerns an author living on an elaborately-equipped ship at sea, visited by alien luminaries and reporters while dealing with foreign dignitaries and traitors in his midst. Cockle has a way of unraveling a high concept out of sequence, but does so in a way that intrigues rather than confuses. He also loves playing with text and information; for example, the author's name is redacted throughout the story. The story centers around the author's unique discovery: the ability to change around human consciousness and memory through an elaborate series of Edits and Revisions--a sort of MLA guide applied to the mind. Cockle is careful to keep the author's motivations a mystery but hints that he may not be exercising as much free will as he thinks. The author is depicted with a delightful bulbousness--all jowls and nose and receding hairline. This is the latest in a loosely-related series of stories (at least thematically) dealing with Cockle's fascination with eschatology, each one dealing with a different way in which secret deals and knowledge might cause the end of the world. Cockle's work grows more exciting with each passing issue, and he's on his way into developing into a major talent.




Tragic Relief #10, by Colleen Frakes. This is a typically strong entry for Frakes in her oeuvre of dark fantasy/fairy tales. The way she spots blacks in particular is quite striking, as the trees in the forest are just jagged lines of white standing in relief against an oppressively pitch-black night sky. This issue is the the third part of her unsettling but humorous adaptation of the Basket Ogress myth, and it builds to what seems to be an exciting climax. The Ogress took one girl away from a sleepover for telling stories about her, leaving the other to track her down, with the help of a series of animals whose speech she is suddenly able to understand. In a clever sequence, the captured girl entertains the Ogress (waiting for the rocks to heat up so she can eat the girl) with the story that details her demise as the other girl finds a way to defeat her (in an amusingly gross and fantastic fashion--she slid down the giant Ogress' throat and tossed lit matches into her stomach). Frakes' brush captures the simplicity of shadowy figures as though they had been scrawled in the dirt or on a cave wall, rendering them in a more cartoonish fashion on other pages. All told, this seems like a much more all-ages story than her usual, more visceral fare, but there are genuine scares to be found in this story, like in all good fairy tales. I'll be eager to see this story in its eventual collected form, because it will really pop off the page given the right format.


Light Riot: Departure, by Rio Aubry Taylor. Taylor labels this truly strange comic "Fantastical Autobiography", and I've certainly never read anything quite like it. The comic opens with a psychedelic, anthropomorphic pterodactyl creature who lives in the moon ordering her servant to bring him a special soul from Earth for testing. That soul turns out to be that of the author, drawn in a manga-influenced (almost superdeformed) style, pondering whether or not his girlfriend is a junkie. From there, his soul gets separated from his body, which goes on to live and act without him. The soul goes through a series of trials with the insectoid servant of "Mother" on its way to the moon, while the body is retrieved by friends, where he learns that his girlfriend killed herself. "Mother" tells Rio that she's going to help him learn how to control his pain as he learns his "spiritual capacity". Taylor doesn't skimp on sci-fi spectacle in the action sequences of the book, with all sorts of eyeball-melting pyrotechnics, flying death's head marauders and a trippy light show on the way to enlightenment. The autobio elements are raw and almost uncomfortably intimate, assuming that those aspects of the story are based on Taylor's actual experiences. Even if they aren't, it's a heavy counterpoint to the fanciful sci-fi story. Taylor isn't quite in control of his line just yet; his gestures and body language is a bit stiff at times, and there's an awkwardness to the way his characters interact in the space of a panel. At times, his intense stylization is ahead of his basic storytelling ability and character rendering skill. Taylor is an artist who is clearly thinking about deeply spiritual issues, which are further explored in his four-page mini "Masks That Grown-Ups Sell Me And The Lies They Tell We". The point of this comic is to approach the world by seeking hopeful spaces and trying to remain as child-like as possible in the sense of not hardening our masks of identity, fear and pain. Taylor is treading on territory similar to that of Theo Ellsworth, another artist who lives in a different headspace at times, but he's clearly willing to go pretty deep into the well of his own personal pain. That's powerful stuff, even if he's not all the way there yet as a storyteller.