Allison Bannister’s previous big work was the subversive fairy
tale Wit’s End. She’s one of many cartoonists from CCS who enjoy using fantasy
tropes and deconstructing their sexist and classist aspects without losing the
sense of wonder that surrounds them. Her most recent work has found her going
in some different directions, as she explored a variety of genres and even
methods.
Xiphactinus is a minimalist pencil-and-ink comic with a gray wash.
It’s about the titular fish, or rather the titular fish as fossil. This twenty
foot long creature with sharp teeth ate a six foot fish whole and then quickly
died. What’s amazing is that the fossil find preserved both the Xiphactinus and
the smaller fish within; it’s a fossil that’s a narrative, right before your
eyes. Bannister notes that this is why when it’s on display, it’s so popular
and compelling. It’s like receiving a message from another time.
CinderMecha is another fairy tale rewrite, this time a result of
one of those classic CCS group projects. Working with Tom O’Brien and Ben
Evans, Bannister wrote the script and did the inks for this amusing tale. The
titular character mopes because she wants to enter the royal mecha tournament
but doesn’t have one of her own to pilot. A Fairy Mecha Pilot Godfather shows
up, gives her a solar-powered pumpkin mecha that runs out of power at midnight,
and off she goes. The ending is especially clever, as CinderMecha wins the
tournament but has to abandon the glass and pumpkin mecha. When the king calls
for the true owner to come forth, she is able to activate it and rather than
become a princess, she becomes the king’s loyal pilot. I love this story
because unlike Cinderella dazzling with her beauty, CinderMecha wins because of
her skill. That concept was very much Bannister’s, though Evans really
brought her ideas to life with his designs and O'Briens’ colors were delightful.
Ghost Room is a twenty page mini that delves into a regretful
slice-of-life story. In a story that starts with brown tones for a reason, a
woman in a car named Leigh stops off at her old college on the way to somewhere
else. She’s immediately confronted by a spectral version of her friend Julie as
she was in her undergrad days, and is drawn into the past, which colors
everything blue. Or should I say covers it, as Leigh ignores her ringing cell
phone, the brown of the phone vibrating under the light blue illusory skin of
the past. Reliving old conversations, Leigh slips in and out of brown and blue,
sometimes being in both colors at once when she says “I miss you”. What follows
is a tearful confession of love that she never dared to confess, with her
fantasy past version of Julie expressing it right back at her. The conflict for
Leigh is whether to stay in that fantasy world or else come back and face her
responsibilities as a friend. This is a sensitive, humane story that really
makes the audience feel for Leigh as she deals with impossible and unfair
emotions, and Bannister’s innovative use of color is what makes it work so
well. The last line of the story is a killer, as something that popped up in
Leigh’s fantasy emerges in real life as well. Bannister’s line is functional as
she focuses on body language and gesture above all else, but she’s wise to keep
it simple and let the color do the heavy labor.
Some artists come into CCS with crude drawing skills at best. However,
cartooning and drawing are two related but separate disciplines, and I’ve
noticed that CCS is happy to admit artists who may not be able to draw in a
naturalistic style, but who do know how to tell a story and have a lot to say.
In the case of Whiteley Foster, you have an artist who came to CCS armed to the
teeth with an array of drawing, coloring and storytelling skills. It was also
clear that she needed training to become a great cartoonist.
I’ll briefly run through a few short stories on her website before
focusing on a couple of longer ones. It’s obvious that Foster’s greatly
influenced by animation, including Disney films, anime and other things that
aren’t immediate touchstones for me. Frankly, she could probably get a job
storyboarding fairly easily. She’s clearly more at ease drawing digitally, but
her pen and ink comics are just fine and she shows a strong command over her
line as well as all of the usual techniques like hatching and cross-hatching.
Yet, when I read her comics, I can’t help but feel like I’m reading a
storyboard at times. Take the very well-written story “The Unknown Insane Girl”,
which is about the first undercover journalism story. A young woman named
Nellie Bly deliberately gets herself sent to the insane asylum for women to
check out rumors of poor conditions and winds up with a sensational story. Her
page composition, character expressiveness, etc. are all quite effective.
However, the transitions between panels feel like the transitions between
frames and there are almost no single panels containing interactions between
characters. Even the ones she uses feel like still images rather than depicting
action. It gives the story a static, rather than dynamic, feel.
The same is true of her adaptation of the folk tale “The Cow’s
Head”. While there is walking in the forest, she zaps from face to face,
without having bodies in the same panel interacting in space. Reading her
children’s book, Milo’s Blue Umbrella, this tendency really stands out, because
there’s not much difference in this well-drawn and pleasingly colored illustrated
effort and her comics. When there are multiple characters in a single panel,
they are often rendered quite small, like in the two pages she did in adapting “The
Murders Of The Rue Morgue”. This is not to say that’s incapable of doing this;
indeed, the classic CCS application (where you have to include a robot, a
snowman and a princess, among other elements), saw her use an unusual page
layout but did feature a few shots of the protagonist and antagonist in the
same panel. She’s not averse to using something resembling a grid, like in her
early work Cessus, a funny and violent story involving artifacts and people
wanting them. Indeed, these are the most traditional looking of all her comics
in terms of layout, yet she once again avoids having characters sharing the
same panel and interacting except when she shrinks them greatly.
The exception to this rule is Manifested Destiny, about an ancient
king bringing the Zodiac signs Pisces and Aries to life and then threatening to
destroy them after they give him a bad reading. It’s no accident that the comic
the Foster drew that had the most person-to-person interaction was also her
most dynamic, exciting early comic. Her sharp wit and playfulness lost nothing
in this construction of the page, and she still was able to use multiple panels
to keep characters apart most of the time—just not in climactic moments.
Looking at her more recent work, Hank shows Foster working on both
creating longer narratives and refining her skill as an illustrator even
further. In this sweet tale of a girl running away with the circus in the early
20th century, her facility as a draftsman made each page come to
life with snapshots of beautiful image after beautiful image that were just
rubbery and cartoony enough to “bend” in the reader’s gaze instead of dying on
the page as antiseptic but perfect recreations. There’s no question that Foster
walks on the right side of that divide as a cartoonist. Once again, however,
every panel is still too static. There are no interactions between characters
in each panel; they are separated by panels, as though their gaze and ability
to interact in space is being caged. There are tantalizing moments where we see
hints of this, like when she bumps into someone or a kid is yelling next to
her, but then it’s not followed up with a solid panel-to-panel transition.
This leads us to her second year thesis project, the in-process Vervain
University. It notes that her advisor is Donna Almendrala, who excels at two
things: comedy and conventional storytelling. All her characters do is interact
with each other in panel after panel. It’s what makes her comics work and is
essential to making them funny. In this comic about a vampire who’s managed to
not graduate from college after a hundred years, Foster’s overall presentation
is a little sloppier than usual. It’s certainly looser than the exquisitely
crafted Hank, for example. However, she puts in more character-to-character
interaction in the first two pages than in the entire rest of her output
combined. This seems like Almendrala’s suggestions at work here, as Foster
decided to get out of her comfort zone and take some risks as a cartoonist.
The writing, as always, is sharp. Foster delivers the story’s high
concept, starts it off with a hilarious bang as some frat boys threaten to “sun”
the vampire protagonist Alfie, and then expertly introduces the supporting
cast. Foster uses a simple narrative device where Alfie talks to the camera, as
it were, turning that into something that’s both funny as he monologues and
useful to quickly and efficiently revealing pertinent information. There’s a
simple panel where Alfie is saying goodbye to his housemate Scharlotte (a
vampire permanently stuck in a little girl’s body), and their affection is made
obvious by the way she’s standing in relation to him and his gesture back at
her. Things go awry for Alfie at the school in a carefully planned gag by
Foster.
What I like best about this story is that it’s not a lazy vampire
parody designed to get cheap laughs. Instead, it’s clear that Foster has
thought through her characters and their motivations and builds her humor from
that foundation. While the result thus far may not look as refined as some of
her other work, this is a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good. This
project is precisely why Foster is in graduate school: to give her as large a
range of opportunities and skills as possible as a cartoonist. There’s no doubt
that she will emerge as a better artist overall after this experience and be in
a position to succeed at a high level.
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