CCS Bonus Week: Sage Persing's Searching For Brandon Teena

I somehow managed to overlook the excellent Searching For Brandon Teena when I was reviewing Sage Persing's comics last winter. This mini is perhaps the most heartfelt and focused of Persing's many comics about the trans experience. This is a raw, ugly, honest comic about a young trans person desperately looking for representation in media. Persing comes across Boys Don't Cry, which won Hilary Swank a Best Actress Oscar for portraying trans man Brandon Teena. There were no trans people on the cast or crew of the film, which is typical, but there was something about the simple concept of seeing the representation of a trans person onscreen, living their life. 

Indeed, one thing that Persing alludes to with regard to trans representation, and queer cinema and media in general, is the proliferation of art that represents queer and trans people as vessels of suffering. They are victims who aren't allowed to simply live their lives. They are punished by a narrow-minded, vindictive, brutal, and stupid culture. This is all true, to an extent, of course. But for a young person who is looking for examples of people living their truths instead of simply dying for them, it's enormously discouraging. That these stories are often created and acted out by straight/cis people only makes it more problematic.

At the same time, Persing notes that there were crumbs of details of Teena's life that they found that sustained them. Small details from his childhood, glowing stories from ex-girlfriends, and narratives about what Teena wanted to do with his life drove Persing to seek out more of this information. There is also audio of Teena giving an account of his sexual assault to a brutal, misgendering police officer. Persing notes that it's massively upsetting, even if being able to hear Teena's voice was important. Persing wonders if this grieving is a kind of love as they desperately try to draw some kind of conclusions and establish some kind of through-line. When they admit that they're not sure there is one, it's a devastating but honest evaluation of their own emotions and experiences.

This mini is about Persing trying to place themselves in a narrative continuum. It's also about Persing's slow understanding that there may be no overarching narrative, no feel-good moments that sum everything up. There is pain and frustration, and all Persing can do is record their own feelings as honestly and accurately as they can. That's what they do in this mini, with page after page of densely-rendered, slightly grotesque figures. There is no idealization here, no attempts at providing easy answers. There aren't any. There is the search for representation, and in that search, Persing is helping to establish that representation for others.   

31 Days Of CCS #11: Sage Persing, Ben Merrylees, Issy Manley

Issy Manley's comics at first blush look like memoir and dream comics, but they actually hew closer to Applied Cartooning. They are both personal and political, especially with regard to graphic medicine and graphic advocacy. In Vestibule, Manley takes us on a horrifying journey regarding her gynecological health. She suffers from vestibulitis, a burning pain found in a particular part of the labia. However, because of the country's woeful and byzantine health insurance and health care situation combined with many doctors' utter indifference toward the health of people with vaginas, Manley found herself misdiagnosed, mistreated, and even put on anti-depressants that nearly wrecked her life. It wasn't until she had better insurance that she finally found a physical therapist who understood her problem and helped her. For many such people, their needs have long been ignored and outright disbelieved by the medical industry in a way that isn't true of any other field of medicine. It is astounding, and Manley's righteous fury comes in loud and clear here.

In Product Of The Times, Manley expresses frustration regarding global warming. The frustration is not just aimed at the US government for obfuscating and ignoring the clear evidence over thirty years ago, it's also aimed at her own generation for not opposing it in a more active way. This is all made personal in her spending time in Louisiana when there was a good chance that a hurricane might hit, with all of the aspects of global warming looming around her. Finally, America's Soggy Pancake is a full-color dream comic where the symbology is about anxiety regarding the upcoming US election and a sense of being sold a false bill of goods. Manley's storytelling is clear and functional, although her figure work is a bit stiff at times--especially with regard to the way bodies interact in space. That stiffness interferes a bit with the more personal aspects of the stories she's trying to tell, giving them a sense of distance that I don't think is intentional.

Sage Persing's comics are enigmatic and often poetic. Simon's Bike is a story that follows a kid named Lars who takes the bike and t-shirt from an older kid named Simon as the latter is swimming. The comic is from the point of view of everyone Lars encounters, from anger, to mockery, to puzzlement, to outright homophobia. The theft was a violation, to be sure, but it was also clearly the first time Lars had experienced any agency of self, especially with regard to someone he clearly had feelings for. The multiple viewpoints and intersections with the lives of others point to how one's own narrative can often just be a blip in the life of someone else's. Everyone Is Sorry is a brutal mini wherein any number of individuals and institutions purport to be sorry. The repetition of the phrase and the lack of context renders it meaningless, in much the same way "thoughts and prayers" are meaningless. The naturalism of Persing's line contributes to the weight of its impact.

Ben Merrylees is a first-year student, and the comics here show an interest in the intersection between fantasy interests and the real-world reasons why fantasy is an appealing genre to work in. The Old Man And Death is the traditional Aesop's Fable assignment about a man lamenting his burden, crying out for death, and singing a different tune when Death actually appears. Merrylees goes deep with his use of blacks, as Death appears mostly as a vaguely humanoid void. The pages in general have a gritty, inky quality to them that's very much in the Steve Bissette tradition, but Merrylees has a funny authorial voice. Death looks horrifying, but he's actually friendly and winds up being helpful. That light irreverence is really played up in his adaptation of Hamlet, drawn in the simple Ed Emberley geometric figure style. Without sacrificing any of the actual plot details, Merrylees' interpretation of the story actually highlights how ludicrous and convoluted the story truly is. He also takes the simple method all the way, as it looks he raced to make this comid as quickly as possible. It's rough and raw, but gets the job done. Finally, Fim is a conversation between Merrylees and his childhood creation, a dinosaur warrior named Fim. There are plenty of wisecracks from the warrior, but it's also a gentle exploration of never quite being able to go back to that mental space occupied as a child. There's an unexpected poignancy here, even as Merrylees keeps it light.

Thirty One Days Of CCS #26: Brainworm 1-2

Anthologies have always been the lifeblood of CCS. In addition to work that's assigned to the students, there have often been cartoonists who have chosen to put together work with fellow students and alums. How the work is put together is often up to whichever cartoonist takes it upon themselves to edit the anthology, and in the case of the two recent volumes of Brainworm, that person is Kat Ghastly. She billed this anthology as "a catalog of obsessions for the obsessed" and themed both issues, giving them a nice sense of loose coherence. The table of contents in the first issue contains a sign-up sheet where most artists who said yes agreed at the expense of sleep or possibly quality, which speaks to the work ethic of the average CCS cartoonist.

The theme of the first issue is Endings. Tim Patton's stylish strip is about a couple of friends who visit an out-of-the-way coffee shop on its last day, and it's all about that sense of wistfulness that one feels in moments like that. The use of steam lines speaks to the ephemeral nature of the moment and then the memory. Hachem Reslan's silent strip is clever; it starts from heavily rendered as we see two hands: one holding a knife and other other an orange. As there is a surprise thing that is cut, the rendering and lighting gets lighter and less distinct, as though the cut hand is the one that's drawing the strip. Kristen Shull's cartoonish line is a delight in her story about songs that she can't get out of her head; it's a bit of fun that she braces with the final observation that banishing lingering thoughts is much more difficult. Sage Persing makes use of the dark in talking about their childhood OCD thoughts. Leise Hook's obsession with knowing how stories end was also cleverly drawn, with literalizations of the metaphors she was using. Bailey Johnson's drawing of a camera they took apart spoke to the way that working with its parts was soothing.

Unsurprisingly, CCS fellow Keren Katz's contribution was hilarious, odd and unsettling. It mixes drawings and photos (with a curly mustache drawn on Katz's face!) as the story follows a curator trying to figure out how to display the new heads. Each image is very typical of Katz, in that she's interested in exploring the way images in motion flatten themselves vs the ways in which still images can be arranged so as to create a strange synthesis. Ghastly's own strip is an amusingly cathartic story where she imagines people she hates falling into an open sewer grate, and then she thinks about what that fate may be. Her use of blobby figures reminiscent of Keith Haring drawings gives her story a strong visual charge.

The second issue isn't quite as interesting, in part because the topic ("The Undead") is a bit played out, and thus there was less variety on display. Katz once again takes an eccentric approach to an idea by taking three different documents (instructions for taking care of a cat, an origami instruction book and a book on making bubbles) and challenges people to come up with the first sentence of each book. It's all for reviving a monster. Katz is a walking idea machine, her brain and/or her body in constant motion as part of her relentless project to brighten the world with whimsical, bizarre and thought-provoking art.

There are some nice illustrations provided throughout by CCS instructor and horror master Steve Bissette, but they clashed with the generally lighthearted fare in the rest of the anthology. For example, Kurt Shaffert's "Bioethics and Zombie-care" is a funny take on how the rules of research (autonomy, beneficence, etc) would apply to dealing with zombies. Ghastly's own strip is about her own actual fear of zombies, or rather, that someone she loved would try to destroy her unexpectedly. Reslan and Persing's collaboration follows a sort of mannered, doomed romance, only one half of the couple is a zombie. Andres Catter's zombie gag is a funny one, using an image per page for maximum impact. Leise Hook's comic about a plant she revived and then might have killed again is a clever take on the theme, and its understated visual approach blends nicely with the text.

Thirty One Days Of CCS #11: TS Moss, Gaurav Patil, Sage Persing

The Sun And The Frogs, by TS Moss. This is an elegantly designed mini featuring a die-cut cover and a beautiful sense of design throughout, meant to mimic stained glass storytelling. This feels like a retelling of a fable, only it's one directly related to climate change. The swirling blue of water throughout the story appears placid but holds menace as it rises day after day. On one set of pages, as the story within the story is told, the frogs beg the sun not to give birth to another sun, because they would boil. The narrative continues on the next two pages, only the visuals are of a protest against climate change that is ultimately fruitless. The final image is truly the final image, and the end of the story: “The frogs boiled alive”. This is a beautiful, pointed and straightforward story that makes its point quickly and doesn't overstay its welcome. Moss' aesthetic is sleek and stylish without being overly slick; I believe this story was drawn on a computer but it doesn't have that slightly stilted feel that such comics can have.

Confidential and B.B. By Gaurav Patil. B.B. looks like it was drawn as an Ed Emberley exercise, like several other of the first-year students' assignments. Patil took the opportunity to make the story a children's story of sorts in the Emberley tradition of stripped-down, geometric drawing with basic shapes. Patil uses the format as a sort of shaggy dog joke that doesn't pay off until the final panel. The titular B.B. stands for “big bad”, who comes from a tribe of badasses and seeks out other badasses to confront in the world. Every creature he encounters simply tells him their name, and a dinosaur points out to him that he hasn't made it clear what he is the biggest and baddest of. He realizes he's a wolf at last and can finally make sense of what the other animals are doing, but things go awry when he meets three little pigs. Patil shows nice comedic chops here, as well as a solid sense of how to use negative space effectively.

Confidential [Top Secret] is a variation on a world with mutants and how they affected the world. Someone would experience an “awakening”, which would unlock “their true potential.” Some were recruited by a sinister organization called The Agency, and this comic explores a mission featuring agents code-named XI (super-hearing) and XII (super-strength), as they went on a mission. It's an amiable enough comic, rolling on with a distinct sense of humor without resorting to outright spoof. The characterizations are exaggerated slightly to the point of silliness, but there's a darker core here. Patil's drawing here is serviceable as it's clear he understands his limits as a draftsman. He's careful to make clarity a priority in his storytelling and drawing, even if his actual drawing is wobbly at times.

Sage Persing submitted a whole bunch of comics that fell roughly into comics about family, comics about queer and trans issues, and other stuff. I'll start with the latter. Dead End was done using an unusual twelve panel grid, shoving a lot of story into each page. That pushes the reader through what is otherwise a relatively placid slice of story featuring two teenage girls who are wandering around. Persing's draftsmanship is shaky here, but their storytelling is confident and clear. Moreover, their sense of verisimilitude regarding the dialogue is spot-on, as this feels like a real anecdote that sums up a brief but crucial point in the lives of the two girls. Be Well is a portrait comic featuring various people saying things to them, often related to wellness—and mental health in particular. It's a comic of gratitude—thanking people for being there for them when Persing reached out and needed them. The portrait work is raw and expressive, and it captures something lively about each subject.

Visiting Dad is an excellent series of anecdotal memories of visiting their father in the hospital. The things that Persing remembered and chose to record are precisely the kind of fragments that stick with you during a traumatic and transitional time. In this case, it was hospital socks that Persing drew in great detail, recalling that they were supposed to have finished reading Kafka's The Metamorphosis before the grade started, and details of the restaurant they went to afterward. There's no other narration or information given, because the point of the comic was memory, not narrative. Good Friday sees Persing using watercolors to detail a particularly volatile argument between a daughter and her father; while it's not explicitly autobiographical, there are certainly family dynamics at work here. The argument is with regard to the existence of god, and it upsets him so much, that he stops the car and gets out. The comic is not so much about the substance of the argument as it is about the memory of the event itself. The moodiness of the color scheme is key to the success of the story, as Persing's character design is wobbly.

Things I Know About Nanny is Persing's Emberley assignment, and they made it a doozy. It's a family history of their grandfather (Nanny), including the bizarre events surrounding their great-grandfather (Cactus) and how his wife ran off with another man and took the children with them—until they dumped them. Persing not only expertly uses Emberley-style shapes in an efficient and clear manner, they also add a color scheme that makes the story pop. The narrative goes until the death of their grandfather, who at a certain point was paralyzed after an accident but lived long after that. The story concludes with Persing's birth, which was the anniversary of the day of Nanny's paralysis.

The Beasts, The Birds and the Bat is Persing's take on the Aesop assignment. The story is about the bat refusing to take a side in the war between birds and beasts, claiming to be a beast when asked by the birds to join and vice-versa. When peace arrives, they shun the bat. Persing turns this into a metaphor for being trans, with Aesop's admonition to “be one thing or another” especially brutal here. On Queerness is a single-page comic done in the form of a quilt to honor the work of David Wojnarowicz, who often used “stitches and thread”. It's symbolic of the patchwork but beautiful “chosen and created” families of queer folk, and there's a similar kind of beauty to be found in this representation of Persing's own chosen family. The metaphor of wounds being stitched-up by one's chosen family like a quilt is stitched is a powerful one. Finally, Tranny Joke is a brutal, personal account of the way trans people have long been used as a punchline in comedy—dehumanized, reduced, slurred. Persing relates how especially hard this is because comedy is so important to them, and shows that are otherwise incredibly important to them are instead attacks on people they love. Persing's potential bursts off of each and every page: as a memoirist, as a political cartoonist, as a slice-of-life storyteller and more. Persing's got the goods, and at this point it's just going to be a matter of refinement for them.