31 Days Of CCS, #7: Lillie J. Harris

Wilderness: Prologue is the first entry in what promises to be a longer horror story by Lillie J. Harris. The story follows Jemiah, a teen whose father is a preacher, and his increasing crossover into another realm of awareness. That other realm includes two women who have just adopted a pair of feral boys they dubbed Enoch and Beau. It's the rituals of that latter world and how it interacts with Jemiah's world that form the crux of the mystery. What's clear is that the rift between worlds is a sinister one, and the mysterious world is not a friendly one. 

Harris uses a huge visual bag of tricks to create tension and suspense. Jemiah's character design is so effective because he's so harmless-looking, his face taken up by a huge pair of glasses. Enoch and Beau are all wavy lines, with their hair looking not unlike matted fur, reinforcing their feral nature. The comic is in black and white, but the creepy green spot colors indicate that rift between worlds in a direct manner. The creepiest part of the comic is when the women take the boys out to the forest for a ritual of some kind, one with three rules: walk till you don't see the wall; if you see anyone, then hide; and meet back in the forest, but only in the morning." 

There are no indications as to why they are out there or what purpose it serves, which only makes it more disturbing. When Jemiah later sees something monstrous behind a dead deer on the road, he starts to understand that something deeply unsettling is happening. Harris' use of greyscale shading contributes to the mood of the comic, and they did a lot of narrative heavy lifting to draw in the reader. In particular, I'm interested in seeing how Harris' narrative thus far involves a lot of character types not usually seen in this kind of story, and I'm curious to see how the implications of that plays out. 

31 Days Of CCS, #6: Meg Selkey

Meg Selkey's Mischevious Dog (sic) is her take on the classic CCS Aesop's Fable assignment. With the moral of "Notoriety should not be mistaken for fame," she spun a story about an attention-seeking, selfie-obsessed club kid. While the cover painting is effective, Selkey shines with her line art. Her anatomy and figure drawing are loose and expressive, but rock-solid in terms of fundamentals. Her understanding of expression, gesture, and body language are all impressive. She uses little Wally Wood tricks like rendering a figure on the last panel of a page as a scribbled silhouette. 

The narcissistic lead, Caleb, manages to make everything about him, including when his girlfriend breaks up with him and a friend commits suicide. He uses his Instagram fame to get into a club, but he systematically alienates everyone by hitting on women and trying to insinuate himself into every conversation. When he gets tossed out, a young woman recognizes him from Instagram but delivers the moral to him: just because she knows who he is doesn't make her want to interact with him. His comeuppance is cleverly delivered, as Selkey uses visual storytelling to get her points across. 

31 Days Of CCS, #5: Mac Maclean

Mac Maclean's The Labyrinth is a powerful, personal story about isolation and connection. It's about Maclean's father, a preacher who also spent a lot of time in the community. When he came home, he retreated into his labyrinthian office, a maze of papers and books. Young Mac wanted to spend time with him as a child, and he simply wouldn't do it, so they had to resort to attention-getting antics in order to get any kind of attention. Maclean hints that as an adult, their father did not approve of them in hurtful ways, emphasized in a two-page spread where they say "But eventually I'd do anything not to see him" and their back is turned away from him as he holds a disapproving glare on his face.

Maclean explores their own tendencies to self-isolate and compares it to their father's behaviors, understanding the line between an introvert breathing freely while alone and someone who is walled off from the outside world. The key difference, as Maclean notes, is that they have friends who love them and drag them out from their own self-constructed labyrinth. They remind them that interactions with others are necessary and sustaining, a fact that they lose when isolation leads to self-loathing. Getting to that place allowed them to forgive their father and start to move past that trauma, and it's clear that documenting this as part of a narrative was part of that process. Maclean's line is scribbly and spare, with some lines almost slashing at the page. They also use a spot color wash of a metallic blue to add weight and definition to their pages, and it's highly effective. This comic would be more effective at a larger size, in order to let the images breathe more and make some of the lettering more legible. All told, this is self-assured approach to a difficult topic. 

31 Days Of CCS, #4: Cuyler Keating

A large percentage of CCS grads tend to either specialize in memoir or fantasy comics. In both cases, however, their takes are often revisionist and subvert typical tropes. That's especially true with regard to fantasy, and Cuyler Keating is an exemplar of this approach. In the first issue of her new series, Food For Worms, Keating cleverly builds a world where a society of anthropomorphic frogs is set up with an arbitrary and cruel moral system. It's set against the only human who's part of their society, albeit in a subordinate role that is vicious wage slavery at best and outright slavery at worst.

The human is treated with disdain and abuse, constantly called ugly, lazy, unclean, and "webless." This series of jabs would be too on-the-nose if Keating wasn't careful to make the frogs' world feel so lived-in and desperate. The connections to the global pandemic are there as well, as a plague cutting through their population is something they are constantly aware of--and one merchant pointedly only masks up when the young woman approaches him to do business. Keating builds this world through lively line art backed up by extensive use of grayscale shading. The atmosphere is almost oppressive, even in scenes depicting great beauty.

There's also a lot of Catholic-style imagery in this comic, as the society is clearly a theocracy at least in part. The stained-glass images depicting spiders, foxes, and other creatures are beautiful and alien, giving a glimpse into the psychology of this world. Most of the second half of the book is devoted to the human trying to make her way through the world, internalizing it when people call her lazy or stupid. Like many slaves, she's been forced into devotion of the local religious images and takes it as seriously as anyone, hoping for her own miracle. Keating says a lot by allowing the reader to connect the dots, building on the story's hysteria regarding their plague by following the words and actions of the frog people rather than trying to impose narrative captions on the story. The result is a smart, challenging fantasy story with plenty of moral ambiguity and a lot to chew on. 

31 Days Of CCS, #3: Mercedes Campos Lopez

Mercedes Campos Lopez's entry is a good old-fashioned, 28-page comic book titled Professor Ghost. It's an absolute delight. Lopez's aesthetic sense is fully-formed, as she keeps her line simple and relies on color and her clever layouts to tell her story. The comic has a Dell or Gold Key flavor to it, as a college student named Emily tries to find out more about her mysterious English professor: Professor Ghost. He's an actual ghost in a suit of armor who needs a TA to do things like set out books and turn the pages of things he wants to read or grade. 

The story is a sweet one, as the ghost is reluctant to discuss how he died, yet betrays a tremendous sense of loneliness. Emily can't leave well enough alone but winds up helping him connect to someone in the end. The mystery angle is a funny one with an unexpected twist that makes this a relatable, human story. Lopez pulls out a lot of stops in telling the story, embracing clarity and simplicity above all else. Her line is emotionally expressive despite its simplicity, especially with a character like Professor Ghost whose face remains hidden throughout the comic. The use of body language and gesture allows Lopez to create the book's emotional narrative, which is the whole crux of the story. Lopez's color fills sometimes felt jarring, however, like a dark green on some pages that sucked up the line. The computer colors often felt artificial and even detracted from the story on occasion, as they took me out of the narrative. A bit more detail with regard to the line art to add more weight to each pane might have allowed her to back off on trying to make the colors do much of the heavy lifting narrative as well as provide backgrounds. Her line is definitely strong enough to take a more prominent role in her work. Lopez has a future doing YA comics, if she wants to go that route.

31 Days Of CCS, #2: Natalie Wardlaw

Calling an autobiographical cartoonist "honest" as a virtue tends to be a misnomer, because how can one possibly know just how honest a person is in describing their own life? For that matter, is it even possible for a person to tell their own story objectively? As noted elsewhere, a better descriptor is "open," which gives access to many intimate details and their context, and "closed," which carefully smooths out one's narrative or else simply omits contextual details. Neither is an inherently better or worse approach. "Honest" also tends to be a substitute for words like "intimate," or "bracing," especially when the author is open about sex, trauma, mental illness, and/or substance abuse. In that regard, autobio is a way of working through that process.

That is certainly true for Natalie Wardlaw, who started writing about trauma and abuse in virtually every CCS assignment. The best descriptor of her work is "fearless," or rather, the work of someone willing to confront her fears. Oblivion is a silent, beautiful painted art object. I believe it's appeared on Wardlaw's Instagram account, but that format fails to capture the intensity of the color as well as the downward-scrolling (spiraling!) accordion-fold format. It depicts a young woman (presumably Wardlaw) looking fabulous at the beginning, smoking pot and drinking. Then she literally walks off a cliff, spiraling downward as she encounters a man and later a woman who enable and encourage her substance abuse while trying to take advantage of her. 

She loses everything on the trip down, including her shirt and her dignity, as she vomits and urinates on herself. The final panel is the literal rock bottom, as she hits the ground and is left with a broken bottle, a keen grip on what just happened, and an important decision to make as to what to do next. It's a brief, visceral account of both the thrills and the inescapable price one must pay for addiction. People often cope with trauma and addiction by literally spinning a new narrative for themselves, but that narrative always encompasses exactly how they got there. This seems to be Wardlaw's main project right now in general, and the fact that she's not afraid to share her story in this way in public is both an impressive work of art as well as a way of acknowledging to herself that this happened.

31 Days Of CCS, #1: Leise Hook

Published in The Believer, Leise Hook's The Vine And The Fish is an unusual entry for High-Low in that it's a limited-animation downscrolling comic. This is a fine work of personal journalism that compares so-called "invasive species" like the kudzu vine and the Asian carp to xenophobia and generalized anti-immigration sentiment that was fanned during the Trump administration. Given that Hook is of Asian descent herself, it was easy for her to connect the dots to create this kind of emotional impact. What was interesting is that she let the material and the images speak for themselves, as she even muted the emotional content during the strip. She didn't have to rely on histrionics or polemics, because the whole point of the piece was about how nuance is lost in arguments about immigration. 

Hook's research was impeccable. Her dispassionate yet pointed information-gathering provided historical context as to why both species were initially imported to the U.S., and how events unforeseen by those who upset delicate ecosystems led to both species overrunning their new environments. Hook points out that the language of war is often used when it's decided that it's time to get rid of these species, which she describes as a symptom of "the human desire to create order by imposing clean categories on an untidy world." Hook makes reference to a historian who notes that this kind of language is related to a latent fear of invasion. 

The second half of the story, which focuses on the Asian carp, digs further into linguistics and meaning. The animus against the fish was feared to have created a negative view of Asians in general. While at first this may seem to be an overreaction, the worldwide view of Asians after Donald Trump insisted on referring to COVID-19 as the "Chinese virus" demonstrates why words are important. They have an impact, and falsehoods repeatedly told start to feel like the truth. 

Hook's use of limited animation is graceful and lively. It never felt gratuitous or showy; instead, it enhanced the flow of the strip and its transitions. The downscrolled animations deftly moved the story along and its natural stopping points coincided with breaks in that animation. The muted green wash added to the somber yet earthy tone of the story. It's clear that Hook has found her niche with this kind of journalism, and this article practically begged for more of this kind of research from her.