31 Days Of CCS, #32: Tillie Walden

It's fascinating to watch Tillie Walden's progression as an artist, because it's clear that with every project, she's adding some new technical skills to her toolbox. In her first book, it was hard to tell any of the characters apart, because Walden admitted that she didn't really like drawing people. She liked drawing buildings. She addressed that in subsequent work that was more directly character-oriented, while still keeping the key element of her work: a strain of magical realism that seeped onto every page until it became the new defacto reality. Walden mastering other formal elements, like a sophisticated use of color, made each subsequent work even richer, though she never strayed from the romantic fantasy elements in her comics.

Her most recent book, 2019's Are You Listening?, is a lot of things at once. It's a road story. It's a classic quest. It's a romance. It's science-fiction. It's magical realim. It's a highly personal story about paths that were clearly intimately familiar to Walden. At it's core, however, this is a story about trauma and how we deal with it. In particular, it's about how some people are not allowed to have the space to even speak their trauma and what happens because of it. 

It's the story of Bea and Lou, both running away from a small town in Texas for different reasons. For Lou, who's in her late 20s, she's running away from the trauma of her mother's death as well as the expectations put upon her as someone who developed the skills of a prodigy at a young age. Bea is in her late teens and is running away from an abusive situation, one where she has no voice to speak on it. All she can think to do is just run. She happens upon Lou, who takes pity on her, and together they drive through Texas. 

Lou is driving to see her aunt, while Bea lies to her about where she's going. Lou once again takes pity on her and allows her to simply travel with her. For about the first half of the book, Walden builds up both their stories and neuroses, hinting at their deeper roots, while drawing what amounts to a love letter to her Texas home. Walden builds a master class on the use of light, especially at night time. It's not simply dark on the road; it's a kaleidoscope of bruised pinks and purples, harsh oranges, and cheery yellows. The world becomes a little stranger and a little more stark on these back roads. 

When they meet a cat on the road and decide to return it to its owners. They name the cat Diamond, and it has a tendency to run away but lead them to useful places. This is when their journey becomes increasingly strange, as they seek out a town that doesn't exist on maps called West, and they are pursued by sinister agents of the Office of Road Inquiry, who badly want the cat. One of the running subplots in the book is Lou teaching Bea how to drive. It's a useful skill, but it's also a metaphor for the role Lou plays for Bea in this book. She's not a rescuer. She can't solve Bea's problems. She's not her mom or her sister or her lover. But Lou has been through some things and knows that if you can be mobile, you can outpace your problems for a while. 

They both learn lessons from the cat. The most important one that's revealed is that the cat, despite the belief of the Office of Road Inquiry and their own eyes, does not possess magic powers. The magic is in the land, available to anyone who sees it and believes in it. There are some spectacular chase scenes worthy of Carl Barks in the book; they are beautifully cartoony and ridiculous, but also terrifying. The heroes just barely stay a step ahead of their pursuers, we discover, because they want to stay ahead of them.They find West and Bea returns the cat because her will is far stronger than she understands. It's the steely will of a victim who refuses to be victimized again. It's the will of a survivor, and that's what Bea and Lou are.

The question "Are You Listening?" refers to how we listen to the land and ourselves--our own potential. Lou is a fascinating character because there are ways that she's lived a life similar to Walden's. As she depicted in Spinning, Walden spent years as a competitive ice skater, throwing her entire life into it, until she just quit. Walden then threw that intense discipline and work ethic into comics, completing six graphic novels in about five years' time and graduating from CCS. That too, took its toll. Being a prodigy doesn't necessarily just mean displaying great talent at a young age. It's a reflection of the obsessive need to be good at a certain thing and practicing it endlessly. Sometimes, you need a break. Sometimes, you need to visit your aunt, especially when other aspects of life come crashing down on you. Walden shows a great deal of kindness to these characters, allowing them to get what they need from this trip while supporting each other. She feels for both of them, because she understands what both went through, to different degrees. 

The only thing I wanted from this book that I didn't get was for it to be bigger. It needed to be French-album size in order to really stretch out its pages. It needed Texas to feel bigger. It needed the colors to really spread across its pages. The size and scope of its environment needed to swallow up its characters just a bit more, allowing them to grow in stature, emotionally speaking, when the time came. Despite the hundreds of pages Walden has drawn up to this point, featuring bold experiments and resonant characters, it still feels like this is all prologue. This was the first book of hers that started to balance her playful sense of experimentation with more personal storytelling, all while staying within her usual lane of exploring particular kinds of friendship and love. It's exciting seeing her on this journey. 

Thirty Days of CCS #3: Tillie Walden

**It's hard to come at Tillie Walden's fourth book (but the one with the biggest splash) Spinning directly, so I won't. The book is a continuous, repetitious almost, series of images of her on the ice. The same expression, the same actions, again and again for 400 pages. The book is a product of her idea for her senior thesis at the Center for Cartoon Studies, and what she had to draw so much of in this book ran counter to the things she actually likes to draw. She revealed that in an answer to a question I asked her at a panel; the reason why her buildings are so beautiful and detailed and her figures are so often sketchy and barely-drawn looking is that she doesn't like drawing people. She likes drawing places: buildings, castles, cathedrals, palaces, cities. There's almost a compulsive quality to these drawings, of which she's able to do a few of in this book, like a set of doodles without end.

** Getting this out of the way: the book is about the dozen years Walden spent as a competitive ice skater, both in individual competition as well as synchronized skating. Walden acknowledges that that's not what the book is really about, however. It's not a love letter to skating, nor is it a tell-all that reveals how awful skating can be. Skating is almost incidental. Walden said that it's up to the reader to decide what it's about, which makes sense for a number of reasons. She wrote the book just a couple of years after she quit skating. She transitioned almost immediately from skating to drawing, something she had been doing as a hobby. There's a line that almost feels like escapes her mouth, one of many she tosses of casually and doesn't address again, where she says of art "I don't feel this huge passion. It's just...when I start a drawing, I want to finish it." Compulsive behavior once again, which makes me wonder about her relationship with art now.

** Walden's work ethic is renowned. At the age of 21, she's already written five books. She published her first after her first year at CCS. What's the line between work ethic and compulsion? Does it matter? Without saying so, Walden unquestionably would say it does, because work ethic implies at least the possibility of joy while working and compulsion can be pathological.

** So much of the book is about looking perfect, about being ideally synchronized. It's all about surface qualities when one is being judged. That's why the most visually striking panels are those that are askew in some way. Consider the cover, where the identically-coiffed and made up skaters are all blankly and cheerily looking one way, and the bespectacled Walden is looking in the opposite direction, an uncertain grimace on her face. Walden knew exactly what she was doing and when she wanted a facial expression to pop or a pose to grab the reader's attention, it did. The contradiction of drawing perfection and conformity in a sloppy manner was a deliberate strategy.

** Ice is a pretty convenient metaphor for Walden. A shy and reserved girl, she had to deal with moving from New Jersey to Texas and finding new teams and teachers. There was also the matter of dealing with bullies and (eventually) worse. Ice is painful and deadening, and there were points in the book where Walden is emotionally restrained to the point of being almost robotic. Even when she acknowledges pain or love, it was hard for her to do so in an unrestrained way--especially pain. She disconnected herself from the feelings and plugged herself into the routine of skating.

** Chris Ware once wrote, of reading Peanuts as a kid and feeling heartbroken at Charlie Brown's lonely, frequently outcast existence, that he exclaimed, "I'LL BE YOUR FRIEND, CHARLIE BROWN!" There were many points in reading the book where as a reader, I felt the same way about Walden's travails. What's the book about? It's about loneliness. It's about the desperate attempt to connect with someone on a deep level. What made things worse for her is that she knew from a very early age that she was a lesbian but was terrified to come out. That was another level of surface, another kind of pretend, another coat of ice.

** Her twin brother John is a key character, mostly by his absence. It's interesting that someone she describes in the book as "my everything" appears so little in the narrative. To be sure, her life was consumed by skating, but he doesn't really act as a sounding board or someone she even spends a lot of time with at home. There are two exceptions; on pages 122-23, there's a scene where Walden is frustrated with her homework and seeks out her brother, who's watching TV on his laptop. It's an old Nickelodeon show, Zoey 101. There are three magical panels as she lies down with him to watch. Their eyes bulge and eyebrows arch in exactly the same way as they're sucked into the formulaic narrative in the first panel as stars start to appear in the negative space of the panel. They then lie right next to each other, their eyes in total sync with each other as they continue to be enraptured. The third panel is just their heads, as they lie together asleep under a blanket of stars. It's absolutely exquisite and unburdened by any narrative text. Two siblings, their DNA so very close, their minds in lockstep in that moment.

The other exception is when she comes out to her brother after news of her girlfriend starts to spread. His reply, "It's just sorta...wrong, I think" was met in return by her with ice. Pretending it didn't hurt. Walking it off like a tweaked ankle or bruised knee. It's telling that the next scene is with her sympathetic, loving cello teacher. When asked what she did that week, she plainly said, "I came out", and then stammered "like, um..of the closet, like...cuz I'm gay" with the latter three letters in tiny print. Her teacher says all the right things and there is a scene where Walden just starts sobbing in her arms.

** The coming out scenes and everything surrounding her romance with Rae are overwhelmingly difficult scenes to read. The romance inspired Walden's second book, I Love This Part, where when they were together (often looking at a computer screen), the world around them became very small. It's raw and sweet and real, neither overromanticizing nor underrating its importance as an experience. It's all about emotion bursting off of every page, that fictive layer allowing Walden to go all in. It's her best comic with regard to figure work as well, though her innovative layouts and clever eye had a lot to do with how the comic was designed and arranged.

The coming out scenes, cruelly, come after her girlfriend's mom had read her private emails and realized that her daughter was a lesbian, and immediately forced her to cut off all contact with Walden, thanks to religious bias against homosexuality. Walden's mom made a smart-ass comment about wearing suits at her wedding, wondering if it was a phase and bemoaning not knowing what to do, when the answer was obvious: love and support your child. Her goofy dad, who was the one who had been taking her to skating practice at 4am for years, initially tried to make it about him ("I'm so sorry. If I did anything...to make you hate men..."), as though sexual orientation meant hatred of the opposite sex. His follow-up comment about her going to bars to pick up women even though she was underage was a classic dad line; clueless, but attempting to be supportive. Her friends tried to act cool but immediately became defensive, saying they weren't attracted to her when she never gave the slightest inclination that she was. What's the book about? It's about betrayal.

** The fleeting moments when Walden and her girlfriend got to be together are depicted with great tenderness and care. So much in this book finds kids living their lives mediated through a screen, and in the case of their first kiss, it was a youtube video called "How To Kiss A Girl" that they "practiced" together that led to them opening up. Even in that experience, Walden felt euphoria and joy, sure, but she noted that the overwhelming emotion she felt was fear. Rightly fearing judgment that she knew would one day come, she was robbed of the true joy of that moment by hatred. Yet she didn't stop and slowly revealed things to her girlfriend Rae. This part of the book was about taking risks, something she did every day on the ice. The difference is that she didn't have a coach telling her how to do things.

** Walden slowly lets slip to Rae that her bully at school forced her and other girls to act things out sexually. She doesn't depict this, but she does later depict the horrific sexual harassment she was subjected to by her SAT tutor, a guy she had come to like and trust. It's a scene with a level of moment-to-moment detail she usually saved for a skating routine, only she didn't have the training to immediately deal with the threat, and she even blamed herself for wearing a tank top that day. Like many such incidents, after she was able to fight him off, he dismissed it as nothing, asking for her number. In the case of both her tutor and her bully, she depicted both of them with no facial features at all. Just blanks, protecting herself from the trauma even as she drew it out, as she told her truth. She also discussed a near car-accident and an actual car accident that she had while driving that had powerful negative effects on her but that she never shared. What's this book about? Trauma, and naming that trauma. Shining a light on secrets.

** It is odd for a 21 year old to write a memoir about events that ended shortly before she started writing this book. There is something to be said for the passage of time to allow a person a chance to process events and go into greater detail regarding emotions. However, this is a book that's closer in nature to the kind of autobio comics that Ariel Schrag used to do about high school, many of which were written in high school. Walden noted in the afterword that she did no research in the making of this book. She took no notes, interviewed no one and didn't even visit old, familiar rinks and buildings to get a better grip on what they were like. She didn't even look at old photos. Instead, she wanted this book to be about her most visceral memories. Memories of time spent on the ice, taxing her body to the limit. Memories of being alone in hotel rooms--her most treasured times. Memories of practicing at a mall and slowly being accepted by others. Memories about what it felt like when she came out at 14. Despite the icy exterior of her character, this is memory as an affective experience, an almost somatic experience.

** There are two questions a reader might have when reading this book: why did she start skating, and why didn't she stop long before then? She answered the first question in a manner both matter-of-fact and heart-breaking: she was starving for affection as a five-year-old and she found a warm, loving coach who cared about her as a person and not just a medal-winning machine. There's an amazing panel that boldly copies the Studio Ghibli style that informs her work on a general level where she embraces her coach, the visceral sense of love almost overwhelming her more controlled line. She kept skating out of inertia, but also perhaps to keep chasing that feeling. There was also a sense that she felt like she couldn't stop, that she'd let people down. In the end, no one really cared if she quit, least of all her mother. What's this book about? It's about feeling abandoned, which leads to feelings of worthlessness. Being able to compete in something with tangible results, especially when she had to go through tests to go through the amateur ranks, had to temporarily fill that hole. It's telling that her parents almost never went to competitions. Unlike the other girls, she didn't have a "skating mom". Her mother resented the money spent on skating and put Walden in humiliating positions at times when those skating moms confronted her about paying for ice time.

** Walden doesn't spare herself, either. Her best skating friend, Lindsay, was someone she never let in emotionally. She didn't come out to her. Walden admits to using her and being a bad friend. Walden wasn't afraid to depict herself as ruthlessly competitive and indifferent to the other girls, even if it was a defense mechanism. Once she established herself, she wasn't afraid to leave behind her old group and hang out with the older girls. The book is about being responsible for one's own actions. There's a level of self-awareness that no doubt came about in thinking hard about her memories, sorting through them and putting them in context, and sometimes awareness can be painful. Walden doesn't flinch in depicting that pain and the ways in which she herself came up short as a human being.

** This was the right book for the right time. It was a reflection that Walden clearly needed as a person as much as she did an artist. Written from a position of relative freedom and independence as a cartoonist and an adult, she nonetheless used this book as a series of baby steps in telling a story she needed to tell to herself as much as anyone else. The skating serves as a relentless metaphor in so many ways. As a sport demanding body control and image, Walden similarly tried to control her emotions. It's a sport that's highly based in technique, much like drawing is. What Walden never admits to is feeling any sense of joy whatsoever from being on the ice at any time. I don't think she does, and that there's a sense in which staying on the ice is a way of punishing herself on a subconscious level. She's Sisyphus On Ice, with that boulder being back in place at the bottom of the hill every morning at 4am. As she discovered later, to her great dismay, she held the keys to hell all along. In fact, there were no keys. There was no hell. She just had to walk away.

** One can only hope, as a reader of this work, that she never looks at drawing in the same way she does as skating. That it brings her happiness to make marks on paper. What's remarkable about this book is that it isn't perfect. The pacing is erratic. She buries the lede on many of her most important discoveries. Her relationship with her family is underdeveloped relative to their importance to her emotional health. A lot of the day-to-day details of skating begin to get repetitive. None of this matters. A perfect book would have missed the entire point of the experience, that perfection is illusory. This book was the best she could do in terms of remembering horrible events, boring events, silly events and emotionally powerful and positive events. A cartoonist should improve with each work, but every person runs their own race. Walden has always been willing to get better in public and has never been precious about her line. The perfect is the enemy of the good as a cartoonist, and seeing Walden stick to her instincts as a writer and artist in the making of this sprawling, sometimes unwieldy but always engaging book, makes it rings true. She's pretty much decided to abandon autobio and return to the comforting veil of fiction, but I hope she reconsiders down the line. Her voice rang true in a time when it was hard to speak as a child, and her giving voice to that child in this book is perhaps the greatest gift she gave to readers and herself. What's the book about? It's about healing, hope and growing up in spite of everything. It's about learning to forgive and love yourself.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #15: Anna Sellheim, Tillie Walden

Anna Sellheim is an example of a cartoonist whose versatility and willingness to explore different kinds of stylization make allow her to modulate the emotional content of her comics. Her comics are also powerfully intimate, even those that are genre or fiction. For example, Malai is a story about a space explorer writing a letter to a close friend. When Sellheim is drawing the astronaut dictating her letter, it's in crisp black & white. When she talks about the planets that she visited, it's in glorious, melting color. The key sequence is when she visited a planet where one's emotions take physical form when you are on the planet's surface. For some, they felt wonder and joy, and they had a great time. For the explorer, she was gripped by fear, which brought on pain, despair and panic as physical forms that tried to snuff her out. Sellheim then takes a narrative left turn as thinking about that experience made her realize that what she was really feeling hurt about was the friendship she felt disintegrating, and that experienced forced her to speak plainly about her feelings. It's as good a metaphor for anxiety as I've ever read, as well as a prescription for boldly living. It was that contrast of styles that made the metaphor really come to life.

Fractured is a first-person slice-of-life comic about a woman with overwhelming social anxiety who has just left a party. Whether or not this is Sellheim's actual experience is not relevant, because what she captures on the page is so remarkably true-to-life. Essentially, it's about a horrendous anxiety attack that has a painful, somatic component. In the throes of pain and confusion, all she wishes for is her death, the gift of simply not existing. What helps her resist acting on that feeling is a sort of sense of pride and of wanting to control her own narrative. Killing herself would end her narrative in an unsatisfying way, so the only choice she has is to wait for the feeling to pass and hope things get better. In this comic, Sellheim mostly uses a naturalistic style with heavy black and white contrasts on each page after the party, which is intentionally bright and airy. Like Malai, Sellheim sets up a single point related to the possibility of human connection and brings it home hard after a small bit of narrative misdirection.

There For Us was originally a webcomic done in collaboration with Tillie Walden. It's about each of their experiences visiting Planned Parenthood; Sellheim to check out a lump under her breast and Walden to address debilitating menstrual cramps. Using a more naturalistic style, Sellheim uses a very thin line weight and makes extensive use of black & white contrasts to explore her understanding of Planned Parenthood as a child and how friendly and welcoming the experience was for her as an adult. Walden's contribution is in her typical thin, long line that veers from sharply detailed to ghostly and sketchy--especially her character designs. Growing up in Texas, she had been fed negative propaganda regarding PP, and she was delighted to get a doctor who listened to her concerns, felt empathy for her and then worked out a solution. It is astounding how rare that can be sometimes, especially with regard to issues related to women's health. The mini was done in support of Planned Parenthood after Congress was threatening to defund it.

While these were all solid comics, the real meat of Sellheim's work is her highly stylized autobio work, and Everything's Fine: And On And On is a perfect example. Her avatar for these comics is a figure in a red hoodie with a face made of interwoven fibers and no human features. All of her friends get their own brand of stylization as well, but Sellheim's avatar is a shorthand for the defenses she puts up against the world. These comics are all about Sellheim trying to figure herself out and how best to deal with life considering that she struggles with mental illness. Beyond the vivid use of color and unusual character design, what sets these comics apart is Sellheim's pitch-black sense of humor. She also manages to adapt instances of intensely awkward interactions into painfully awkward humor, like one strip where she talks about not wanting to date a particular guy because he's a terrible writer. When pressed, she sticks her foot in mouth and states she doesn't want to date any artists, period because they are "over-sensitive entitled babies". Of course, she said this to a carload full of artists and added a weak "um...no offense". Sellheim ponders her own sexuality and wonders if she may be asexual while being bombarded by love songs on the radio and also relates a couple of examples of dating-related interactions that remind her why she hates it so much. When the prospective guy says "I really like Dilbert, Frank Miller & Frank Cho" and she responds "...I see.", I laughed out loud. The comic closes on a therapeutic technique that actually works, which further demonstrates the flexibility of this approach. Sellheim can veer from the darkly comedic to the sincere, and the stylization allows for both.

Finally, Sellheim's short story "You Were Beautiful" is an interesting departure, as she uses a grey wash and fairly naturalistic drawing in this depiction of a woman talking about her life after a relationship that slowly went south, but it was one she tolerated because she was so attracted to him. Sellheim really gets into anatomy here: noses, lips, torsos, backs, and more. It's a depiction of a kind of romanticized objectification that allowed her to ignore his less pleasant tendencies. It's a bitter little vignette, where the protagonist delivers that bitterness mostly to herself.

Avery Hill Week: A City Inside

Tillie Walden's relationship with Avery Hill reminds me a bit of Michael DeForge's relationship with Koyama Press. In both cases, a fledgling publisher gave a young, talented cartoonist a chance, and the result was both flourishing. Walden, a recent grad of the Center for Cartoon Studies, is the sort of rare talent (like DeForge, Dash Shaw, Sam Alden, Luke Pearson, Sophie Goldstein and a few others) who have a relentless work ethic, considerable ability and a lot to say at a very young age. Walden is a solid draughtsman at this stage of her career, even if her line is a touch on the ragged side. What sets her apart is her dynamic cartooning skill and understanding of composition, combined with her thoughtful stories that give the reader a great deal of space for interpretation without being deliberately opaque.

In A City Inside, Walden explores physical spaces as they relate to identity once again. The metaphor of houses and apartments as parts of one's memories and personality is a clever one, framed by the device of the unnamed protagonist (presumably Walden) narrating her own story in a therapeutic, meditative environment. What's interesting is that the narrative is in second person, as though she was telling her story to herself. Moving from an old house that she lived in with her father to a house in the sky, she only comes down when she meets the love of her life, literally grounding her. There's a page that's a painfully beautiful expression of love, as we see her lover at a dinner table, simply chewing on a piece of bread. It's beautiful because of its mundane nature, as the narrator silently drinks in the beautiful moment captured in time. At the same time, she walks away from it because her lover is the only thing keeping her there, which feels wrong.

When she notes that all the years of loneliness, of connection, of memories, and of emptiness finally crack open, they form a new city--a new identity--for her to inhabit, a stable identity where she's the queen of her own domain. Then, and only then, can she accept her past and allow it to become a fully integrated part of her present and her future. Walden fills the drawings of buildings, forests and stairways (a Walden specialty, as they represent another path leading to an unseen destination) with as much charged emotion and gesture as she does her figure drawings, because in the course of this narrative, they all have the same function. When she walks out of the session and we see her partner, it seems clear that this therapy was at least in part a way for her to address her own fragmentation and make peace with those around her. It's all done subtly, compassionately and with great restraint, allowing the reader to soak up the power of her imagery and narrative without being bludgeoned by it. In the end, Walden tells a story of how to balance our need for individual space with our need for connection.

Thirty Days of CCS #10: Tillie Walden

Tillie Walden is the rare CCS student (she's class of 2016) who went to the school straight out of high school. She's also the even rarer beast: the young comics prodigy. With two books under her belt (both from British publisher Avery Hill) in the span of a year, she's shown the voracious desire to get better in public demonstrated by the likes of Dash Shaw, Michael DeForge, Sam Alden and other recent cartoonists who started publishing serious work as teenagers and rapidly cycled through influences to evolve their styles.

Walden's first book, The End Of Summer, has all the assets and pitfalls of an ambitious first work. It's a book about an insular royal family of some vague Scandinavian descent that is preparing to lock down the palace for a three-year period. It centers around Lars, an eleven year old who is all too aware that the sickness he suffers from will take his life before the end of that period. His relationship with his siblings and parents and the distance between them takes center stage, along with the close relationship he has with his twin sister, Maja. Walden's greatest asset as a cartoonist is her sense of restraint. She only gives vague hints as to what's happening in the palace and why, leaving the reader to connect the dots. That restraint allows the reader to understand that beyond the plot and its machinations, the important thing in the book is the relationship between Lars and Maja, and the ways that relationship is disrupted but ultimately cherished.

Walden's draftsmanship is impeccable, and it's not just to show off, either. The vast ceilings, the precision of the detailed domes and arches, the overwhelming majesty of the palace's construction are all rendered to demonstrate how emotionally empty it is. Filled with small children, it threatens to swallow them up and drive them insane. The problems with the book arise in the last third or so, when there are several key moments that are depicted silently. There's not enough differentiation between her character designs to let the reader know what's happening, and to whom. Her choice of not over-writing and providing extra textual clues as to the action was a sound one in terms of storytelling, but she didn't quite have the chops to pull it off here. Walden wanted a story about twins and wanted it to resonate with mythology (there's a long sequence tying things in with the Norse creation myth) and have an apocalyptic feel, all while maintaining a strong emotional through-line. That she doesn't quite get there speaks more to her ambitions than her weaknesses as an artist.

Her second book, I Love This Part, is different in every way from her first except in that it explores a loving relationship between two people and the obstacles they encounter. If her first book was overstuffed with imagery, then this book is far more spare and lyrical in its approach. We are introduced to two teenage girls who are schoolmates. Early on, in a series of larger-than-life images, the reader learns that they are also soulmates. Those early images depicting them as giants using mountains to rest on as they lay down together, of using skyscrapers to lean on as they kvetch about homework, of embracing in the areas between brownstones. It's an inspired visual metaphor for the energy that flows in the early days of a new relationship, especially one that doesn't quite have an identity yet. Everything feels bigger and more important somehow.

As the book unfolds, it continues to deliver one character moment after another, each one filling up a single page. The anecdotes range from private jokes to body anxiety to daydreams about future recipes. Through these snippets of quotidian dialogue that feel so remarkably authentic, she also slips in their love for each other and the notion that they probably can't tell anyone about it. The book's climax is actually in the middle, when one of the girls breaks up with the other, saying "I'm not like you. This is wrong" as she's weeping on the phone. Walden made this a continuous sequence, breaking up the flow that she had established earlier in the book as a series of perfect moments. There are two extended flashback sequences from the girl who's just been dumped, and they are notably almost entirely in black and why, in contrast to the shades of purple that add to the dreaminess of the earlier section of the book. The ending is heartbreaking, as only here do we even learn their names, and the girl who feared their love and broke up sends the other girl some music. There's weeping on both ends, as the purple is used to depict a blustery sky in the final pages. Walden pulls off their connection and the heartbreak of their breakup with a minimum of melodrama, as the emotion and sentiment depicted here is hard-earned with her careful character development.

It's hard to source Walden's character design style. There are hints, however; the giant cat in The End Of Summer is named Nemo, and that immediately connected the work to Winsor McCay. There's a delicacy and almost fragility in her line that also resembles that of Chris "CF" Forgues, or perhaps more accurately, resembles CF's direct influence Henry Darger. What is certainly true is that her work doesn't resemble that of the peers in her age group, nor really of any contemporary cartoonists working at the moment. Thematically, I'd say that Alden and perhaps Daryl Seitchik are the closest to doing what Walden's doing right now, involving the occasional fantastical element into stories deeply rooted in a young person's attempt to understand the world and their place in it.

Walden was tapped to do the Annual Appeal comic for CCS this year, a plum assignment that she deftly knocked out of the park. Titled Q and A With Tillie Walden, it's done in a manner that's now familiar with her: restraint in the use of text, all in service of both the image as well as the formal layout of the comic. In doing a Q&A about being a cartoonist, she revealed her own passion, her fear in leaving home, and a powerhouse pictorial display of why she loves its location of White River Junction--all done in an ingenious fold-out spread that Dan Zettwoch would approve of. The end of the pamphlet shows that she's one of the rare individuals who understands that they are a comics lifer at a very young age, as she grasps that the form is capable of anything. She's grounded in her tools and the fortunate mindset of still being able to enjoy the sheer act of drawing while being tasked to draw. Walden has a long and promising future ahead of her.