Youth In Decline Week: Frontier 4-6

Frontier #4 (2014) is by illustrator Ping Zhu. It's perhaps the biggest outlier in the series in terms of theme, though it does fit into publisher Ryan Sand's aesthetic of being interested in pure illustration and allowing the reader to put their own narrative and emotional spin on them. It's more difficult to do that with Ping's drawings because they are simple crayon drawings for the most part of animals and vegetation with the occasional lush, painted figure thrown in for contrast. It has the look and feel of a sketchbook by an artist with a remarkable command of anatomy, bodies in motion and gesture.

Frontier #5 (2014) is by talented young artist Sam Alden and is a companion piece to Hollow, an emotional horror story about a family and the bizarre sinkhole that seems to follow them around. Alden absolutely nails how dread-inducing the hole is, as it's literally the abyss, an absence of anything that threatens to swallow its protagonists whole. At the same time, this issue is very much a coming-of-age story that fits perfectly into Sands' interest in stories of transformation. The story follows two sisters on a beach and shows just how carefully Alden uses color as a powerful emotional and narrative signifier. The issue follows two sisters who are sharing that both of them can see the hollow, and Alden uses a flashback device dependent on color to clue the reader in as to when things were flashing back to the present. There's a clever sequence where the two sisters are talking about whether their mother holds in secrets where a flashback starts in the middle of the modern-day panel as a door starting to open with their mother peering out. The flashback concerns the girl's mother looking in disapprovingly as the girl may have been masturbating under a blanket, and the girl resolutely tries to explain herself to her mother, who is uninterested in talking about it further. Going back to the present on the beach, a sinkhole opens up and nearly swallows up the girl who had been flashing back, with a color pattern on the sinkhole identical to that of the chair her mother had been sitting in when she dismissed her. The sinkhole suggests that it's a physical manifestation of the family's guilt, repression, anxiety, trauma and secrets. The sinkhole appearing was akin to a panic attack nearly swallowing her up. None of this is mentioned, but the girl's reaction to it appearing was "It heard us", a horrific realization that her anger, guilt and fear could swallow her up at any time. With his stripped-down style, Alden continues to be an ace with regard to gesture and figures interacting in space.

Frontier #6 (2014) is by horror cartoonist Emily Carroll. It's based on a true-life Ontario murder/haunting of a woman named Ann Herron. Like all the best horror stories, it has one foot in reality and another foot in possibility. It generates fear by slowly and carefully building up facts and anecdotes, first starting with how to play the children's game "Ann-By-The-Bed", a sort of summoning activity not unlike playing with a Oujia board. Carroll cleverly shifts back and forth from drawing photographs (later showing them stained with blood) to traditional comics panels to a floor plan that acts in much the same way a grid might. The comic shifts between recounting the tragic life of Herron and the way that she apparently appears by the bed of those who summon her, with a number of different accounts given as to what she looked like, what the experience felt like, etc. Carroll recounts her own experience of dreaming about Ann and then waking up and finding her on her chest. This is a common manifestation of sleep paralysis, but it's no less frightening in context. Carroll considers other rumors about her death, that it might have been her brother-in-law killing her. She looks at odd details like Herron's blood apparently being found in every room in the house or the supposition that the family was cursed, and ends with a chilling warning. Carroll's mastery of atmosphere, pacing and keeping the reader off-balance with a barrage of different visual approaches (the switch from black and white to color and back is especially jarring) transforms an ordinary ghostly urban legend into something legitimately frightening.

Catching Up With Sam Alden

Sam Alden has come a long way since I reviewed some of his earlier work, deservedly winning the Promising New Talent award at the Ignatz Awards in 2013. He's since proven to be a restless talent, constantly looking to refine his work in new and interesting ways.

Let's begin with It Never Happened Again, his release from Uncivilized Books. It contains two stories: "Hawaii 1997" (which was nominated for an Ignatz last year and was in many ways his stylistic breakthrough) and "Anime" (a far more ambiguous story that reflects many of his current storytelling concerns). When I first wrote about Alden, he was drawing in the highly naturalistic, detailed style of a Craig Thompson or Nate Powell. An initial breakthrough came in the crazy Brazilian anthology GBGB and his surreal, viscerally erotic story "Fluxo"; this story seemed to find Alden giving himself permission to break a lot of cartooning rules and start to simplify his line. "Hawaii 1997" not only finds Alden stripping his line all the way down to pencils, it's done in the most spontaneous, expressive manner possible. The story really looks like what many artists would consider to be breakdowns for a story they redraw in greater detail later, but the nature of this particular story demanded a different approach.

It's about a ten-year-old Alden on vacation with his family and just beginning to become curious about sex, as the opening sequence with him shyly peeping on an older girl sunbathing reveals. Later, he leaves his beachside room when everyone else was asleep to take in the vista of the ocean at night. Here, we can see how his visual strategy pays off: there are times when one's surroundings take on a visual quality that seems magical, almost hyper-real. In expressing these memories and the various senses involved in the experience, Alden plays with the reader a bit. At one point, young Sam takes off his glasses, turning the nearby hotel into a smudge on the page. With his glasses back on, it's remarkable how clear the pencil drawing is in depicting the setting, even if the drawings are simplified. Of course, this is all prologue to the real meat of the story: meeting a girl about his age who simultaneously harangues and flirts with him. When she suddenly decides to run through the fairly dense palm trees on the beach, he chases after her. At this point, the "camera" points away from Sam and instead we see through his eyes, watching the shadows and bright starlight cascade across her running form. We can almost feel him running, hear his strained breath as he pursues her. When she finally stops, he awkwardly introduces himself. That simply prompts her to run away again, and before she disappears entirely on a golf course, she says "You will spend the rest of your life trying to find me." It's simply the best and worst thing anyone could say to another person; it's a phrase that burns into one's consciousness and is the first of two reasons why the collection is titled the way it is.

"Anime" opens with a girl named Janet planning her escape in the form of a vacation to Tokyo with her boyfriend. She's an outsider who's a huge anime enthusiast, imagining that a trip to the promised land will finally put her in a place and a culture where she finally fits in and is understood. Here, Alden mixes sympathy and derision for his character; he's obviously sympathetic toward her feelings of alienation (especially as she's frequently derided in her tourist-oriented job), but is less forgiving of her attempts at cultural appropriation in lieu of having an actual personality of her own. That's especially true when it comes at the expense of her connections with others, especially her boyfriend. Still, the last panel of the story, where she receives a huge compliment, once again ties into the book's title: a moment that is pure and wonderful but entirely fleeting. This is where the reader is left, even as one senses that things are not going to go well for her. Once again, light and shadow play a huge role in this story, as the passage of time is often aided by their interplay. Alden shows more facial detail in this story, which is both crucial to the story (reading Janet's emotional expressions is a powerful indicator of the story's narrative) and appropriate given that the softer pencil work in the first story befits the fuzzier memories of a child.

Alden's story Household was another big breakthrough that came out a bit after "Hawaii 1997". It's a far darker story, almost a horrible mirror image of "Hawaii 1997" wistful memories being warped into an ugly adulthood where grown-up children have no sense of emotional or physical boundaries because of trauma. Here, Alden's pencil style focuses even further on light and shadow, with a remarkable amount of hatching giving physical form to the seething emotions just under the surface. The simplified drawing style also gives Alden the freedom to go a bit broad when his characters express emotion--especially when those emotions are raw and ugly. The story follows a young man named Tim visiting his older sister Celeste in New Orleans; the aim is to stay with her for an open and extended period of time. Family troubles are alluded to early in the story, with Celeste diminishing them. When the physical and emotional boundaries between the two break down in inappropriate ways, Tim acts out, gets intentionally fired from his job and threatens to leave, even as specific images flash through his head of him and his sister. The story concludes with an extended look back at Tim and Celeste as kids, kidnapped by their father and kept in a seedy hotel room.

The critic Sean T. Collins thought that Alden came down way too hard on Celeste seducing her brother in an interview. That's not how I read the story, though. I saw Celeste as every bit as damaged as Tim, and the role she played in his life was always that of a flawed protector. As a kid, she did what her dad told her to do, which obviously had a traumatic effect quite separate from what Tim experienced. At the same time, she protected her brother and was both a mother and sister figure to him at times. However, her own father issues (and physical & sexual abuse is at the very least implied, especially with regard to the way she acted out sexually in later life) made her exactly the wrong kind of person to be in his life, especially since she wasn't able to set a boundary to stop Tim's obviously unresolved feelings for her. Neither of them had the capacity to function as adults in terms of relationships, which further makes sense in the way that Tim acted out to get fired instead of simply quitting. The one flaw in the story is that Alden felt the need to use the metaphor of a bird building a nest on a ladder and then stacking twigs from the ground up in a vain effort to stabilize an already tenable situation. At the end of the story, we see the ladder and nest are both gone, just as Tim's attempts at creating a stable life have been demolished. While an interesting visual, it felt just a bit too obvious.

Wicked Chicken Queen, a book published by Retrofit, combines Alden's pencils-only approach with the surrealism of Fluxo. Alden is big on using single-panel splash pages and tends to avoid using a grid, giving his comics an open feel that emphasizes each page as a single unit and image. Wicked Chicken Queen has the flavor of being a children's book in terms of its fairy tale qualities along with the way it leads the reader's eye across the page in a deliberate, winding manner. The character design is killer, with the denizens of the story's small island having a single, huge eye in lieu of other facial features. Alden works sloppy and loose with the figures when they're running around but tightens up when it comes to the fairy tale backgrounds, a juxtaposition that works well because it causes the eye to move in different ways. The story itself, which is about a woman finding an egg that eventually hatches into a "slithering monstrosity" but grows into a beautiful and intelligent chicken. She eventually marries the woman who discovers her, and then disappears from public view when her wife dies. The story then jumps ahead, as the island's society grows into a modern one and forgets the Chicken Queen, until she suddenly emerges and starts wreaking havoc before her death. It's a story about faith and foundations that lurk in a society's collective unconscious that emerge in surprising and often disturbing ways. It's also a bit like the Shelley poem Ozymandias in that it's about a powerful cultural force that has been forgotten in the sands of time, though in this case the power of that force is such that it had a lingering influence. The title itself is intentionally deceptive, as the Chicken Queen is quite noble for most of the story and only becomes destructive after she was forgotten, lonely and near death. That loneliness is recapitulated by the narrating character at the end of the story, who feels a lack in herself but can't quite pin it down. This is the comic, and Alden's career, in its essence: trying to find and hold onto moments of connection in an avalanche of loneliness and alienation.

Minicomics: Friedman, Fleener, Gennis, Alden

My Senior Year, by Sarah Friedman. Friedman is a comics newcomer just finishing up college, and this modest but witty minicomic is her first attempt at autobio. I really like her self-caricature: freckles, curvy eyebrows, pointy chin, and a short shock of hair. In this comic, she keeps things short and stays within her limitations without over-rendering her figures. Indeed, she makes nice use of negative space as a way of varying her pages and tries to hit on the highest points of her anecdotes to create a strip with a bit of comedic impact. "Babysitting" is a good example, as the two kids she's taking care of first declare that they're not going to go to college, then express interest because they wonder if one "gets to see people's butts". Friedman's palpable discomfort is nicely captured in the way she draws her mouth screwing up. Other strips see her understanding her future as a cartoonist, like when she turns down a party to finish a drawing. There's nothing revelatory about these strips, but they do indicate someone with a good sense of storytelling and how to get across a gag. Hopefully, she'll keep going and we'll see what else she's capable of.

The Less You Know, The Better You Feel, by Mary Fleener. Fleener is one of my all-time favorite cartoonists, both for her outstanding autobio comics and her occasional forays into filthy fiction. In February of 2012, she started doing a weekly political cartoon for the Encinitas Coast News, in part as a reaction to the rampant greed and opportunism of her city's government. As a native of Miami, I know only too well the ways in which politicians will roll over when given a chance to line their pockets with money from developers. Fleener had never done political cartooning before, and that shows in a number of her early strips. She's overly reliant on labeling her illustrations to represent specific people, ideas or events; while this is a long tradition in political cartooning, it can also be a bit of an easy cop-out. As she went forward, her own natural creativity and style started to take over the page, coming up with narratives like the one above regarding how trees and their owners were suddenly treated. Fleener also goes on tangents regarding the flora and fauna of her beloved small coastal town, giving a reader a true sense of the flavor of Encinitas. The strips also get funnier and meaner as she gets more comfortable with expressing herself in such a compact manner. Visually, they are impeccable, as her character design and visual flourishes add a dimension to the political cartoon that is not usually seen in typical fare If she hasn't already, I hope she joins the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC), because she deserves to be recognized by a new group of peers.

Unfortunate Mishaps In Aviation History and The Unusual Death of Gregory Biggs, by Emi Gennis. Gennis is making an interesting side career out of depicting weird ends "from the Wikipedia list of unusual deaths". What's interesting about these exercises is how they've made her a better artist. Simply put, her character design, backgrounds and sheer drawing ability have improved tremendously over the past few years as she's had to draw machines, people in different eras, and weird situations. Of course, this material strikes a chord in Gennis as well, as evidenced by her editing an anthology's worth of stories about "untimely ends" for Hic & Hoc. Unfortunate Mishaps is a cruel but often funny account of two incidents of sheer hubris, wherein dumb inventors and unprepared explorers thought that their sheer intellect and ingenuity were a match for things like gravity and the Arctic winter. The death of Franz Reichelt is about a man trying to perfect a working parachute who decides to use a live model (himself) and jump off the Eiffel Tower on a windy day. The Arctic expedition went awry because the explorers made no attempt to understand the terrain.  

Gregory Biggs is a far more unsettling comic. The title character was slammed into while walking on the side of a highway, and he went flying into the woman's windshield who hit him. She was all kinds of high, which may have led to her spectacular disconnect from reality. She apologized, drove him, had sex with her boyfriend and woke up the next morning to unsurprisingly find him dead. Her boyfriend helped her cover it up, but she got drunk at a party and bizarrely bragged about the incident. Gennis takes an understated approach here, letting the events speak for themselves with an extensive use of cross-hatching and negative space. Gennis is ready for a major project. 

Patron Saint, by Sam Alden. Published by Space Face, this recent Alden mini is another leap forward. Using this kind of crazy, angular drawing style that emphasizes negative space, Alden tells the story of a young production assistant on a film set and interpolates it with the haunted story of Astro Boy. Seeing Astro Boy, whose ghost (according to a sound man) haunts the earth after he plunged himself into the son, is an ill portent, but the PA instead turns all of her frustration toward her asshole boss (centering around batteries) into a single moment of reality-warping and fantasy-fulfilling violence. It's a remarkable set of panels, made possible by the slightly rubbery quality of his line.