Thirty One Days Of CCS #5: John Carvajal, Beth Hetland, Sophie Goldstein

Today's reviews feature comics drawn, but not (solely) written by, CCS cartoonists.

Anterran Day 0: 1-3, by John Carvajal and Simon Mesnard. Carvajal drew this post-apocalyptic fantasy set on an alien world where smart phone-like objects wound up causing the end of the world. With only a few survivors left on earth, there was a war between the President and his soldiers and the mutants whose addiction to the devices known as Sok'as caused them to turn. The story follows a scientist, a teen that he rescued and a mysterious woman that they save from mutants. It's a solid story with some good twists and turns, but Carjaval's grotesque, funny art is what really sells it. Big bulbous noses, beady eyes, sharp teeth and backgrounds that vary from ramshackle to high tech make this series fun to look at on every page. What really sells it are the watercolors (or watercolor effects) that Carvajal uses, especially the way he uses them to create a particular facial design for each character. The red noses and flushed cheeks stand out, making the whole project look like something that resembles E.C. Segar's Popeye more than Mad Max. 

Half Asleep Volume 8, by Beth Hetland and Kyle O'Connell. This is the final chapter of this epic story about a scientist and her daughter Ivy at odds over their exploration of dream space. The cover flap is a marvel of design, neatly summarizing and explaining a few of the comic's central ideas in a spectacular manner. In terms of the story (which is way too convoluted to go into at this point with regard to the last chapter), one of the things I liked best about it was the central ambiguity of its characters, especially Dr. Lassette, Ivy's mother. She lied and kept secrets from her daughter for years and treated her like a research subject. However, she also clearly loved her daughter and saw her potential as a dream explorer who could make a better life for everyone with her discoveries. As previous issues revealed, something went horribly wrong when Ivy was off in the dream world, and this issue revealed the reason why: the scientists found it easier to enter through nightmares than dreams. Hetland went all-out in this issue, using several different line weights and drawing styles to get across the way in which Ivy was starting to find herself seeing things from the dream world in the real world, and how objects were disappearing around her. The climactic battle with a horrifying nightmare creature sees Hetland's art at its sharpest, as the inky jet black creature really fills up every panel. This is going to be a story well worth revisiting and chewing over.

An Embarrassment of Witches, by Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan. This was the team responsible for the sometimes rambling, frequently entertaining webseries Darwin Carmichael Is Going To Hell. That series saw both writer and artist trying to figure things out on the page, and it's obvious that their second project together is going to be much more self-assured. For one thing, Goldstein has become one of the best artists in comics. Her science-fiction work is brilliantly pointed and challenging, if downbeat. Jordan's tone is much more lighthearted, allowing Goldstein to stretch a different set of creative muscles. This mini is an ashcan featuring some of their work to date, with the final results set to be published by Top Shelf. Whereas Darwin Carmichael was a slice-of-life comic revolving around a set of apartment-mates and their friends, Witches has a tighter focus. It's a post-breakup comic about a recent college grad named Rory whose boyfriend tells her that he wanted to see other people right before they were going to get on an airplane together and head to Australia for several months.

All of this is the foreground information. The background is that this is a world where magic is real and part of everyday life, much like the background of Darwin Carmichael is that every religion and mythology was real and its gods and creatures lived on earth. Magic here is used in storytelling terms as a way of bringing metaphors to life in extreme ways or expressing strong emotions. It's also very much cringe comedy, as we follow Rory make a series of bad decisions, starting with lying to her controlling Mother about not going to Australia. The mini sets up that like and her decision to live in a closet in her sister's place. Goldstein has a talent for instantly communicating a character's qualities through her design. The boyfriend, Holden, has permanently arched eyebrows that are a tell of his know-it-all tendencies. Her wiry mother has a taut quality that reveals her tendency to crowd her daughter. Rory herself has somewhat blank eyes (indicating her journey ahead) but also an edgy quality that displays her thorniness. Her sister Angela is all gentle curves and straight black hair, but even that mild-mannered quality has some darkness to it. This has the potential to be a big hit, if Top Shelf markets it right.

Thirty Days of CCS #1: Sophie Goldstein, Colleen Frakes, Amelia Onorato

Anniversary/Food Chain, by Sophie Goldstein. This is a pair of horror stories from Goldstein, who really knows how to spin true drama out of genre fiction. "Anniversary" is particularly grim, as it begins with a bit of misdirection but it soon becomes quite apparent that a monstrous, spidery woman is slowly stalking a man who is courting another woman. When he walks her home and the spider woman crawls down the wall, her body bent at an impossible angle, Goldstein's use of negative space is especially startling. The contrast between the gray creature in the upper left hand corner of the page, the alabaster white skin of the woman sitting happily in the tub, and the jet-dark void in between them inspired true dread. However, the most disturbing thing Goldstein does is invert the trope of true love winning out, as she manages to trap him in her embrace (warping his appearance as he is strung up from the ceiling) forever. In just eight pages, she conjures up disturbing images and then continually manages to up the ante until the end.

"Food Chain" is even shorter, and it indulges her interest in presenting the hypocrisy of the thin veneer of civilization. The reader is presented with a scene of two quasi-humanoid creatures (part human, part sort of a spidery horse) having sex. Indeed, the female here bears a resemblance to the main character of "Anniversary", only slightly less bent. The story is a series of reveals: we first see that they are standing atop a pile of scrap; then we see her get shot for food by a group of "primitives" who are comically cartoonish; then we see that they are living in the shadow of a clearly technologically advanced city; and then we see a modern human taking notes. The pull-back is to him narrating his encounters to applause before a fancy audience, before he and his partner are served the same male beast from before, with his erect penis no longer serving its original purpose of pleasure and procreation, but rather as a sort of authentic delicacy for the upper class to devour. She manages to pack a lot into just six pages, with almost no dialogue. Goldstein makes a point of having the rich explorer/journalist and his partner look as much like the creatures as possible, demonstrating how little actually separates each of these groups except the establishment and use of force to maintain status. The starkness of the black & white contrasts here resemble her book House Of Women more than the first story does, which goes in for a lot of grays and shadows. 

The Eternal Rocks, by Amelia Onorato. Incredibly, Onorato drew this ambitious comic while recovering from wrist surgery. She spoils the premise of the comic on the back cover: "What if the movie 50 First Dates took place in the Edwardian Era between a proper English Lady and a shape-shifting, gender-fluid Sea-Monster?" What if indeed, as this comic is an excuse to draw the rolling English countryside that a sickly woman named Maude haunts. When we meet her, she's at last grown tired of being housebound with tuberculosis as she sees a rider on a horse signal to her. The rider is a monstrous centaur, its skin flayed off to reveal nothing but muscles, tendons and cartilage. This is a sly allusion to her own wrist injury, I would imagine, as the structure of the muscular system was something that was no doubt on Onorato's mind.

The comic is also Onorato's demented take on a "meet cute" romance, done as a genre mash-up. Maude is a character straight out of a Bronte novel who essentially cannot stop shrieking until she and the centaur stop riding and she discovers her long-decayed corpse. The creature, born of the ocean, has encountered Maude's ghost hundreds of times, but she can't remember any of them. With a great deal of tenderness and a bit of humor, Onorato explores the ramifications of this situation, as fear turns to sadness, which then turns to a sweet sense of affection and fulfillment. Onorato has explored interspecies romance before in her Rockall comic, which was about a man and a Selkie. Onorato's take on fantasy is always with a modern eye, especially with regard to issues of gender and gender roles, yet she never sells the original inspiration short. In this comic, one can see just how much command she has over each and every page, with an ingenious design for the creature and a series of funny, emotional expressions for the wispy Maude. Every detail works toward the story's premise, including things like lettering (upper and lower case for Maude, all caps for the creature) and the lush backgrounds in the establishing shots. One gets the sense that once Onorato had the story's premise in mind, she then attacked the story with a great deal of confidence. Every page is brimming with great drawing, fluid storytelling and an essential combination of send-up and sincerity.

Iron Scars Vol 4, by Colleen Frakes. One of the members of CCS's pioneering first class, Frakes has been extremely productive in the decade since she's graduated. Her current series may be her best work, combining autobiographical details with fantasy. Frakes' fantasy work has often been much darker and had considerably less dialogue; working with kids as the main characters has allowed her to interject much more whimsy and laughs into the story without taking away from its ultimate stakes. The central character is a girl named Tyee, the daughter and granddaughter of witches who avidly rejects her magical destiny. She lives on an island that mirrors Frakes' own experiences growing up on a prison island off the coast of Washington. With kids starting to disappear on the island, Tyee decides to try to catch another magical wishing fish, which she had thrown back in the previous issue because of her distaste for magical destinies. When she finally meets the Sea Witch, her great-grandmother (a design marvel, as she's made of seaweed and fish), she learns that the fish were meant for her as gifts and would be dangerous for anyone else. Horrified, she runs to try to catch her friend that she gave the fish to.

The next chapter finds her friend in peril, as well as her sister, as they've been captured by another witch underground. When one of the girls disappears in a puff of smoke while playing with friends, it's a moment that's both horrifying and yet strangely funny. The humor is aided by Frakes' usual dense brushwork and cartoony character design; Tyee in particular is short and all curls. Her mom is frazzled and frumpy, with unkempt hair. These chapters are essentially the establishment of the series' conflict after time spent establishing character and laying some narrative pipe in earlier chapters. It really does feel that Frakes' shorter works have paved the way for this narrative, as there are elements of her previous works as well as new directions to be found in this series. The use of humor is the most important way she's stretched herself, because she's rarely used humor unless it's autobio where she's the butt of the joke. She transferred that experience to various stand-in characters on the island, and the result is something that feels emotionally authentic. That authenticity is what allows the fantastical elements of the story to feel natural but also resonate as terrifying to characters that feel real.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #5: Sophie Goldstein, Laurel Lynn Leake

Sophie Goldstein's House of Women is her best work to date, and the third of three issues does not disappoint. This sci-fi story about four women from a colonial & religious entity called The Empire comes to a violent and tragic end as the meddling the women do on the planet comes back to haunt them. Throughout the series, Goldstein explored ideas related to gender (the women were trying to civilize the female, "primitive" species on the planet because the men were too warlike), class, colonialism and empathy. Each of the women had specific missions on the planet but wound up personifying their roles so much that they were incapable of acting in other ways. The scientist had no empathy and hid a crucial secret (that one of the female natives in their midst was actually a male who hadn't sexually matured yet) as a way of manipulating the others. The nurturer who loved the natives as her children also had a paternalistic attitude toward them. The wise woman was judgmental and offered her wisdom too late. The leader was a romantic, both in terms of how she viewed her mission and her fellow explorers as family, as well as succumbing to the charms of a male operative on the planet.

In the end, the scientist became deranged from a lack of human contact and mistook obsessive longing for real interaction. The nurturer lacked any sense of pragmatism and she paid dearly for her mistake. The wise woman acted too late to do anything, and the idealist, romantic leader had her head in the clouds for too long to make any kind of decisive actions. Ironically, the only character with real agency in this chapter was the native male, who killed one person out of fear and killed another to protect a friend. The behavior of that character spoke to the ways in which the paternalistic understanding of the Empire showed how limited it was and just how much potential the people of the planet had as empathic beings, but by that point it was far too late. It wasn't the natives that were the undoing of the mission, it was the flaws of those carrying it out.

Stylistically, Goldstein continued to channel the crisp precision of Jaime Hernandez with the wild expressiveness of Gilbert Hernandez. The opening pages, when the scientist Rhivka is carefully washing her hair in front of religious iconography found on the planet, is a triumph of design in lockstep with content. Her deranged expression is not unlike a Gilbert character, but the boldness of the black and white contrasts reminds me of Jaime. The structure of these pages is also a clever recapitulation of the story, as that iconographic image portends a demonic presence on the planet that will bring disaster. Others have noted the influence of German Expressionist filmmaking, and that's certainly in evidence, especially in terms of the baroque character of the decorative aspects of the comic. The formal structure of the images is what allowed Goldstein to get away with the more melodramatic, larger-than-life elements of the story, as it allows them to become allegory instead of more sensationalism. Goldstein also throws in flourishes like a double-diecut cover that reveals new aspects to its images over a three page span. As I've noted before, it will take a special designer to do justice to what she's done on her own when this book is inevitably snapped up by a publisher.

Laurel Lynn Leake's Poly Morphous series is much a case of an artist prescribing good advice to herself and others, hoping that both might take it. Issue #4, subtitled "Adrift", proclaims that its contents are "sensitive, scribbly comics about mental illness, isolation and longing". Leake is an interesting artist in that she's always had tremendous insight into both the analytical and personal/emotional aspects of mental illness. Her self-described scribbly drawings are expressive and nuanced, as they manage to depict the war that goes on inside the head of someone struggling with mental illness. In particular, the ways in which one's rationality can be used as a weapon against oneself is something that Leake nails when she states that her illness "lends me iron logic to determine my badness". In other words, one can get trapped in a recursive loop that doesn't allow the possibility of outside perspectives and instead encourages extrapolation and catastrophization at all times. Leake talks about how accepting one's own limits is the only way to snap that particular Gordian knot.

Issue #5 discusses the frustration with the constant feeling of being sick, of not feeling like a person who can interact with others, of feeling like a person comfortable in their own skin. Here, the drawings of Poly are especially expressive, tumbling down and getting blurry in the same way the text talks about feeling out of focus. There's an essential playfulness that the Poly character possesses, even when the character is a reflection of Leake's own particular issues. Poly is a best self in many ways, a self that struggles but always manages to retain a certain lightness. That's true even in issue #6, when Leake discusses intensely violent negative emotions that are aimed at herself; Poly looks like they're about to snap in two due to the pain. Leake gets at another crucial point in this issue, as the extremes of mental illness often seem eternal and infinite in the moment, but they inevitably pass with time. As long as one practices forgiveness for oneself and accept not being perfect or "well" as part of one's being instead of personal failures, then one can negotiate these moments of despair. One can practically see Poly practicing deep breathing and grounding at the end, with their eyes closed as they sit on the ground. Leake also gets at a concept called "wise mind", where one is able to take two contradictory thoughts about oneself and finds ways to accept the truth of both in the middle.

Thirty Days of CCS #24: Sophie Goldstein

In the span of just a few publications, Sophie Goldstein has distinguished herself as one of the top cartoonists to ever graduate from CCS. What's interesting is that the work that garnered her so many accolades, The Oven, isn't nearly as accomplished or complex as her other ongoing work, House of Women. Let's look at each in turn.

Originally serialized in the Maple Key Comics anthology, Chris Pitzer's AdHouse picked it up for publication, giving it a sort of 70s sci-fi image with the spare cover and choice of font. The Oven starts off with a mild sci-fi twist: a couple travel to a remote commune on a planet with two brutal suns in order to have the opportunity to have a child, something denied them in mainstream society because of increasingly-stringent and absurd laws. What they find is either utopia in the form of a pathetic, glorified garbage dump or something of pure and noble intent inevitably corrupted by outside influences.

In terms of theme, her sense of storytelling restraint and general subject matter, the closest thematic comparison to Goldstein is Megan Kelso. Both are interested in the personal and political implications of motherhood, both in terms of raising children and having them. Goldstein has become a more accomplished writer as she's let the characters act as flawed humans instead of mouthpieces, allowing the reader to make their own interpretation of the work. There's also a spare and beautiful quality to Goldstein's line (not unlike Kelso's) that's bold, confident and crisp.

Goldstein's themes also dovetail a bit with Eleanor Davis in terms of using science fiction tropes as a way of dramatizing certain themes, but only as a way of setting the stage. While Goldstein has an eye for detail and the reader gets a strong feel for the character of each fantasy setting, she's not so much interested in world-building as she is figuring out how her characters will react to the restraints and possibilities each environment provides.  In terms of the quality of the line itself, The Oven's characters were clearly influenced by the Archie artists in terms of cartoony simplicity. A sleazy, lazy drug dealer looks like Jughead Jones if he grew his hair out, for example.

The book's title refers to the deadly environment the couple comes to live in, as it's unprotected from the double sun's deadly rays. It's also a double-entendre, as "oven" also refers to a woman's uterus, especially when she is pregnant. There is a lot of push and pull here in terms of the choices characters make and the kind of life they think they are leading. Some are dirtbags simply there to live outside the law. Some are idealists there to raise families in natural environments, though the way the politics work out seem regressive. Life in the Oven is hard, farming work; this raises the question of whether it's worth it.

The key piece of information that Goldstein gives the reader is that Eric was the reason why he and his partner, Syd, weren't allowed to have children. When he found out about the Oven, he suggested moving there to realize their dream (or was it his dream?) of having children. In the end, he chooses a life of disconnection as he gets high and misses the technology that made life so easy, but he simply can't stand the nature of the community he has found. She chooses to stay and create a community on her own terms. One gets the sense that she's not going to become "one of them", as he fears, but rather has figured out a slightly different path.

The Oven is nuanced and well-executed but ultimately a relatively simple story. It is no knock to say that it's not as complex as House Of Women, because the latter story is remarkably intricate and even more ethically ambiguous. The second issue continues the story of four women sent from The Empire (which combines both church and state in the manner in which it colonizes other worlds). Goldstein's skill as a designer and providing intricate, decorative flourishes that don't interfere with her actual storytelling is remarkable. With a double die-cut cover that features three separate images as the reader turns the cover and the first page, Goldstein imparts the reader with both the sense of warmth the Empire's emissaries feel and the lingering sense of menace on the planet.

Once again, Goldstein is quick to establish that the protagonists are not necessarily heroes. The book thoughtfully but subtly examines the dynamics produced by colonialism, paternalism, science without empathy, religious dogmatism and the way that sex throws a monkey wrench into everything. Above all else, the book is about the nature of gender and motherhood. Once again, the science-fiction tropes of having four-eyed, feathered humanoid aliens as stand-ins for any number of oppressed and exploited people during history allows Goldstein to go to extremes in exploring the logical outcomes of certain experiments in creating a new society.

Goldstein creates easily-understandable, almost archetypical characters for this story, ranging from mother figure to crone to seductress to the main character, who is something in-between. The only male-identified character first appears as a sort of fantasy figure for the main protagonist but also becomes an object of obsession for the scientist character who is cold with regard to their subjects but almost sociopathically obsessed with the male character. The second issue rudely brings reality crashing down on the all-female environment the Empire has created, as the aliens they're working with are all women--because the men are warlike. Goldstein layers conflict on conflict here, with the smaller interpersonal conflicts being every bit as important as the larger plot.

Goldstein's stunningly crisp, clean line is elegant but also functional. Her use of black and white contrasts, especially in depicting long shots of environments, is used to often dizzying or menacing effect. Despite these visual pyrotechnics, her use of gesture and expression is what's most remarkable about her art. Harkening back once again to the Archie influence, the art here has the precision of Jaime Hernandez with the wild expressiveness of Gilbert. When this book is inevitably sold to a publisher, I hope that they're able to retain Goldstein's DIY flourishes and print it on paper that best shows off the sharpness of her images.

QUICK UPDATE, 3/24: Goldstein is selling the original art from The Oven on her website.

Thirty Days of CCS, Day 19: Sophie Goldstein

Sophie Goldstein, in her time at CCS, evolved to become one of the more promising cartoonists to ever come out of the school. Her skill as a draftsman is obvious, but what's developed is her ability to couch sophisticated, sensitive commentary in science-fiction tropes. If the minis that emerged from CCS represent her graduate work, then her webcomic with writer Jenn Jordan, Darwin Carmichael Is Going To Hell, represents a sort of undergrad honors thesis. Spanning four years and 350+ pages, it manages to keep a single through line for the duration of the strip, with some wobbly tangents here and there. It's a little flabby and unfocused to be considered a single, coherent story but the strip's conceit practically demanded some kind of resolution.

The story is set in a world where every mythological being and god of every religion is quite real, and they are mostly hanging around earth looking for jobs. Ganesh is a waiter. Muses hire themselves out. The minotaur is a hard-drinking building super. Karma is real and determines one's afterlife. In the case of the titular character, he picked up a huge slab of bad karma when he didn't pay attention to a baby that he was sitting, right at the moment the baby became the newest incarnation of the Dalai Lama. The kid hit his head and became (in the unfortunate phrasingof the book) "retarded", resulting in poor Darwin's fate. No amount of good deeds done seems to be helping with his balance sheet, either. His best friend (and one-time girlfriend) Ella is the daughter of saintly missionaries, so she inherited their good karma despite having done little with her life. That kind of bureaucratic, almost arbitrary assignation of one's fate is one of my favorite things about this book, especially as it implies that both characters would need a significant shake-up to change their fates.

The way the strip was done was Goldstein & Jordan collaborated on ideas, Jordan wrote it and Goldstein drew it. It's a bit slicker and more cartoony than her current style and seemed to have drawn a lot of influence from similar strips. The strip is at its strongest when focusing on specific relationships in the context of mythology, as Jordan clearly did an extensive amount of research for each strip. It's at its weakest when the strip devolves into slacker humor or satirizing the hipsters of New York and Brooklyn. That's when the strip feels generic and loses the unique genre elements that make it funny and often disturbing. The way that myths and religious figures are brought into the modern world is frequently hilarious and on-point; while this isn't necessarily a new idea, Jordan & Goldstein manage to stay true to the original ideas without beating the reader over the head with backstory but still providing enough information to make it intelligible.

Ultimately, this is a story about relationships: the one between Darwin and Ella and the one between Darwin and his talking pet manticore, Skittles. Jordan and Goldstein are able to wring pathos out of both relationships, even though Skittles is mostly used for comic relief. There are a lot of smart jokes about relationships and the way they're writ large in this particular world of every myth being real, but there are also quite a few self-indulgent tangents that take the narrative off-track for pages at a time. I see this as a natural function of serialized web comic publishing, as both writer and artist try to find ways to stay motivated and focused over time. For example, a silly tangent about being "bike pirates" stemmed from Goldstein wanting to draw bikes. The jokes surrounding this bit were low-hanging fruit to be sure, but Jordan and Goldstein turned around and used it to reveal the intensity of the emotional relationship between Darwin and Ella. For every halting wrong turn the strip took, the authors always managed to find a way to turn it around and remain true to its overall emotional narrative. The apocalyptic climax of the strip manages to combine the character work, the mythological work and the snarky modern take on same together into a beautifully satisfying and cohesive package. There's a temptation as a critic who was once an editor to suggest cutting this or that parts of the book to make it a tidier and tighter read, but I see Darwin Carmichael Is Going To Hell as a glorious mess--and the glory can't really be separated from the mess.

Thirty Days of CCS #2: Sophie Goldstein

Sophie Goldstein is an artist who immediately hit her stride after graduating from CCS. While her stories have science fiction and fantasy trappings, they serve as a way of exploring her real interests: gender, relationships, the environment and motherhood. Goldstein varies her style from project to project, though her line is always clear. She also tends to make use of varying types of grids, but her comics are always tightly structured, even when she uses a lot of decorative elements.

House of Women has an elaborate cover with two separate cutaways that cleverly introduce the reader to the protagonist, the supporting cast and their environment -- in that order. It's the story of four colonizers from "The Empire" who have come to a primitive world to teach its inhabitants their language, do experiments and research. Goldstein cleverly collapses state and religion into a single entity, as the four women on the team frequently say things like "Empire is family". Goldstein leans a little on the Garden of Eden parable here, but she leaves it vague as to exactly who is the serpent. Many of Goldstein's characters tend to be cogs in a machine, some of whom are questioning their role but cogs nonetheless. This leads to the overall tone of moral ambiguity for some of the characters, even as others are sure of themselves. The four women all fill archetypical roles, like the Nurturer, the Wise Woman, the Innocent, and the Seductress. The ways in which their roles play out is unusual and take some unexpected twists. Jaime Hernandez seems like he was an inspiration for the line weight and character design in this comic, though the way Goldstein has with making alien children absolutely adorable and heartbreaking is a quality that's unique to her. The way she spots blacks leads to some breathtaking sequences and page-to-page contrasts, creating the same sense of wonder in the reader that it does for her characters.

Eleanor Davis seems to be another clear inspiration for Goldstein, and that plays out a bit more in Edna II and The Good Wife. The latter is a full-color parable about a woman who becomes a wife to a primitive man and literally gives up her arms, legs and head to him when he needs her strength. Even when she's just a torso, the woman's limbs and head (now attached to the man) guide him when he wants to have sex with her. The way the pink woman with blank eyes contrasts with the green, hulking man with blank eyes and an orange nose charges every panel with tension, even as the images become stranger and even disturbing. The images are presented without further commentary, allowing the reader to interpret them freely. I saw a mixture of ideas here: it's about power and hierarchy, to be sure, but it's clear that the wife has subverted that hierarchy while literally giving up every aspect of herself. In every real sense, the wife is now the impetus of action, drawing pleasure while having sex with herself through the medium of her husband.

Edna II is about lost love, a shattered and despoiled environment and the possibility of redemption. Again, Goldstein is deliberately vague, providing a few clues here and there. We meet a scientist working on a great project in an environment that's sealed off from the rest of the world. His trusty companion is an aging robot named Edna II. The original Edna was his lost love, with whom he apparently had a son. His project seemed to be part robot, part idol, calling forth a new kind of deity. Like in many of Goldstein's stories, there's a sense of great sadness that I felt reading it, even as it seemed the scientist neared his goal. In Goldstein's comics, bonds are broken, friendships are abandoned and betrayed and children & innocents seem to get the worst of it. This sadness is carried out with great precision and restraint, allowing the reader to draw those feelings out of the story rather than have them dumped upon them clumsily. There's no question that Goldstein is in the top tier of CCS grads.

Recent CCS Work: Sophie Goldstein, Beth Hetland, Max Mose

Let's look at some recent work by grads and students from the Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS):

Fugue #3, by Beth Hetland. This is the third and final chapter of "a family in three parts" and the ways in which creativity and performance intersect in the lives of many of them. The first chapter focused on Hetland's mother, an aspiring concert pianist who freezes up before a big show and abandons performance. The second chapter focuses on her having children and how each of them related to music. Beth and her older sister never quite had the skill, but the youngest daughter, Rachel, was every bit as talented as her mother. She unfortunately suffered the same fate: freezing up before a big show and abandoning the piano. Both comics were heartbreaking in their own way, and the third chapter is both epilogue and a chance for healing. This chapter circles around to Hetland herself and her younger sister's graduation, dancing around her recent reticence to play. One thing I love about these comics is how saturated they are in music; for this family, it is very much a second language, a way of communicating. Even non-experts like Beth can't help but know and truly appreciate so many complex pieces, something that she cleverly weaves in and out of the comic by using a sort of erasure technique on musical notes. Gershwin's "Rhapsody In Blue" is the piece most often always in the background like this, which is fitting considering its highs and lows. There are two killer pages in this comic. The first is a 3 x 3 grid where each row sees each child at the piano in the left panel, an empty piano in the middle panel and each child as an adult sitting upright doing what it is they really have grown to love as adults. It's a beautiful, succinct way of summing up the family's relationship to music and the ways in which their individual passions were nurtured and encouraged. That's recapitulated on the last page, when watching the film Little Women with her mother, and transforms the line "Now it [a piano] will make music again" into "you will make your own music." What is life but finding one's own rhythm? Hetland's character designs are simple, which helps make her occasionally complicated page designs all the more easy to immediately apprehend. Her anatomy is a bit wonky at times (a number of drawings needed to be tightened up), but never to the detriment of the story's flow. This is a fine first major solo work for a talented and emotionally perceptive artist.

Betsy and Mothership Blues, by Sophie Goldstein. Despite using sci-fi trappings, these comics by Goldstein are really about deep and abiding loneliness and alienation. Mothership Blues is about a couple of glorified space janitors aboard a sort of living slug spaceship, going about their day. One of them is in love with the captain, while another makes friends with these ghostly mold creatures. Goldstein uses a clear, bold and cartoony line to propel this story of an unrequited crush and an unfulfilled desire to create family. She even uses a seemingly throwaway plot element to good use in the book's final act, adding a sense of doomed poignancy for one of the two janitors who realizes the other is his only friend.

Betsy packs an even stronger punch. Skimping on details, Goldstein slowly reveals a young woman living in a futuristic society where she has to wear an atmosphere-tight suit just to go outside who works at something called "Future Inc." She cheerfully greats a lumpen creature (one of many) called Betsy. It's clear that this is a child and the woman is trying to train her. Goldstein's understanding of body language carries this story powerfully, Details like the way little Betsy reaches up to the woman to be picked up, the way she clings to her, the way she smiles when praised and the way she ambles along indicate an artist who has a real understanding of what children are like. These scenes of tenderness make the end of the story all the more gut-wrenching, as the real purpose of the creature-children is made clear. In just twelve pages, Goldstein gets at the heart of an ethical debate that rages today, regarding bio-engineering our children and what we would do if we knew a special-needs child was going to be the result. The story just makes that debate all the more pointed. Goldstein's work reminds me a bit of Eleanor Davis or Dash Shaw in terms of the way they use sci-fi trappings to express complex emotional truths.

Terror Terror Terror, by Max Mose. Channeling his inner Rory Hayes (not to mention Al Feldstein), Mose does off-kilter horror stories with a touch of the ridiculous.His balance of genuinely scary ideas with grotesque art and a touch of parody reminds me a great deal of Rob Jackson's genre work. The opening story features death being pissed off at a bunch of people permanently on life-preserving machines, musing that he was going to reincarnate one of them as a scorpion. Like a Lewis Trondheim story, there's a lot of ridiculous dialogue surrounding a very sound idea. The same goes for "Welcome to Castle Gorgon", a Gothic potboiler about a marriage doomed to a snake-bitten end. "The Cap of the Wolf" is a fantasy story about a top-notch archer who kills a tribe of marauding wolf-skin clad men, including its lyncanthropic leader. When he kills the leader and takes the titular wolfskin cap, he naturally goes crazy and unleashes a greater evil -- only to be exploited in an ironic fashion at the end of the story. Finally, "Space Terror Maggots" is exactly what it sounds like: a grotesque story with wooden leads and stilted dialogue (not unlike a 50s sci-fi flick) who discover a series of asteroids inhabited by brain-eating maggots. The revelation in this comic is the way Mose is using color to create a sort of queasy, over-the-top and non-intuitive series of effects that really drive the emotional core of the action.