Thirty Days of CCS #21: Romey Petite, Laurel Holden

Spiderella is an unusual CCS-related project, as it’s an illustrated children’s book, not an actual comic. Of course, while CCS is known to focus on storytelling in comics form above all else, there have been a number of cartoonists who have focused on illustration or illustrated text. (Katherine Roy comes to mind.) While at CCS, the two kicked around this story, which combined aspects of Cinderella and the myth of Arachne but turned out to be something closer to modern YA adventure comics in many respects. It was decided that Petite would write the actual text and Holden would do the illustrations and their accompanying watercolors. The 200 page book is at once a rapid read but also surprisingly dense. It winds up being the first part of an indeterminately long saga, yet it’s also a satisfying read on its own. Petite and Holden create a beautiful storytelling rhythm, where the slightly poetic and slightly silly language that Petite chooses is a perfect match for Holden’s bright colors, exaggerated facial expressions and pointed use of gestural drawing.

The latter is especially important in an illustrated book that’s not a comic. The understanding of the way bodies interact in space that Holden possesses gives each of her pages life, rather than feeling static, and it’s because of the way she poses her characters and has them express body language in the form of pointing, hunching their shoulders, or slyly staring off in a direction counter to all the other action on the page. Holden also totally leans into the fashion aspect of the story, with her creations more than rising to the occasion of silliness (yet still fashionable) that Petite writes. For his part, Petite’s omniscient narrator is funny without being too wacky, informative without spelling everything out, and on top of the narrative while still allowing a digression or two.

The story is about a young girl named Eleanor who has the fantastic ability to sew very quickly and imaginatively for her boss, Minerva. So much so that Minerva keeps her locked in an attic, where Eleanor is happy because she can at least talk to her friends, the spiders. That mix of sweet and creepy (it’s rare that spiders living in someone’s hair is considered to be a nice thing in literature) also serves to make this book distinctive. While much in the narrative is made to be deliberately familiar, Petite clearly is interested in subverting typical fairy tale narratives in other ways. When the King and Queen of the kingdom decree that their son, the Prince, must get married, they declare a Royal Ball so that a proper bride can be chosen. That all sounds pretty boilerplate, but Petite greatly deflects expectations at the ball and especially with regard to the Prince. The ending of the story in particular is a happy one, but in a manner that’s not common for typical fairy tales, although Petite had been hinting at it throughout the book. What Spiderella wanted more than anything was a chance at adventure (and being reunited with her father, also an adventurer), and she earned that chance. And when the Prince runs after her in this book, it’s not to guarantee her a life of luxury like in Cinderella, but rather to beg to get away. I read the first twenty pages of the book to my daughter, a sometimes squirmy listener, and she demanded more. I read the first seventy pages out loud and she was rapt with every page and made all sorts of predictions as the story proceeded.

(This drawing is by K.M. Claude.)

Also reviewed is a sketchbook rough in Petite’s My Biblical Daydreams series, entitled “Clear As Day”. The story is about a writer who’s apparently had a drunken encounter with a woman named Theda who expects him to show up somewhere. The fact that he can’t quite recall everything the way it was precisely recorded bothers him as a writer. He wanted perfect, clear memories. So Theda talked to him about this and gave him water from the River Lethe, the Greek underworld river of forgetfulness. (Its name means “oblivion”.) It was good ol’ Death playing a little prank, as the water put his memories where they could never be touched again, and she promised to come back later for the rest. (Petite didn’t specify that this was death, but the anagram and other clues made it obvious.) This was a clever short story with great character design, and the modern touches were effective in deflecting the story’s true aim until just the right moment.

Thirty Days of CCS #20: Allison Bannister, Whiteley Foster

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 20^th 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. 

Thirty Days of CCS #19: Nomi Kane & Donna Almendrala

Donna Almendrala & Nomi Kane submitted their most recent work together, which makes sense since they are both staff artists at Schulz Studios. Yep, they get to work with the Peanuts properties as they are currently still being published.

Kane came into CCS with an incredibly beautiful, fine line and a hard-won skill as both illustrator and cartoonist. What I think CCS did for her was enhance her narrative skills, as it’s clear that her ability as a draftsman is even more refined now than when she was in school. If Kane has a weakness as a storyteller, it’s a lack of subtlety. Things are spelled out very clearly, all of the time. That’s even true in some of her minicomics that range from the very silly to the political. The Alt-Left, for instance, takes the absurdity of that very concept and spells out its joke (essentially, oh no! The Alt-Left will destroy the country with health care for all!) on page after beautifully drawn page.  Shut Up, Donnie! uses quotes from the president with silly pictures to go along with them, which R.Sikoryak did to a more absurd extent and Warren Craghead continues to do in a far more grotesque manner. The result here is more silly than satirical.

On the other hand, Artsy Fartsies and I Don’t Want To Know How This Happened make great use of her playful style. The former is exactly what it sounds like: hilariously cartoony drawings of people farting with pithy descriptions, and the latter is Kane imagining new crossbreeds of dogs. The former comic works because it is designed to be funny, not disgusting. The latter works because of Kane’s incredible skill in drawing dogs, especially mashing up breeds in funny ways with amusing new names. The “Dachsador” (Labrador + Dachsund) was especially cute in a simple way, while Kane really went to town in drawing the Chihuapei (Chijuahua + Sha Pei), with all of the folds adding to the cuteness of the tiny dog. Anyone who loves dogs will enjoy this mini.

Almandrala, unlike Kane’s vivid use of color, sticks to pen and ink. Pick Your Poison is an Inktober challenge, where an artist receives a prompt to work from every day and tries to link each up in a way that makes some degree of narrative sense. Almandrala seems to enjoy drawing monkeys (based on her past work), and so it’s no surprise that a monkey should be the star of this densely inky of a monkey tossing pies and tomatoes at his friend, a one-horned demon. It’s really just an excuse for her to draw fun things, like giant spiders and space suits. Birbwatching takes the internet meme and squeezes it til the point of asphyxiation in search of laughs. Essentially a slang name for any kind of cute or odd bird on the internet, Almandrala mixes her skill as a draftsman with the tendencies of a stand-up comedian. Captions like “Heading to Birbcon”, with a bird carrying a pile of sticks and in flight, are an example of the amusing but not explicitly funny. On the other hand, a bird scratching its beak in the ground with the caption “Calling Ubirb” made me laugh out loud. Almendrala picked on a number of hipster or young people’s activities and used “birb” somewhere in there to poke fun at them, but it was also clear that she was poking fun at herself as well.

The Wanderer’s Guide To The Wilds is another illustration zine, this time taking creatures encountered as part of Jason Lutes’ own fantasy role playing game. Without the pressure that a drawing challenge presented, Almendrala clearly took her time with these drawings, and the result was beautiful. By using RPG style descriptions (example: “Hostile, Large, Group”), the reader gets a sense of what the encounter with each creature must have been like. Creatures like the Heavily-Armored Ravens are perfectly conceived and illustrated, with just the right amount of minimalist background. My favorite were the Miklos (“Clamfolk, At War, Lawful, Medium”), fantastic drawing of a creature that’s both vaguely cute and definitely strange, which I think sums up much of Almendrala’s work.

Lone Rock Falls is an anthology featuring both cartoonists as well as Kat Efird, with each doing their own chapter that takes place in the same town at around the same time. Kane’s piece is one of her best to date. The usual strongly-developed character design is there, but she uses odd angles at times to vary the way the characters interact with each other in space. In this cowboy story from an indeterminate era, the protagonist is a pigtailed young woman who has a few tricks up her sleeve. With a for page grid maximizing the sheer size of her characters, we soon learn that she’s in town to be an apprentice to the greatest magical mastermind around. Along the way, she fixes her horse’s hoof, pacifies a group of bounty hunters who are after her, guns in hand, and charms the local barmaid. It’s the queer western magic show story I didn’t know I needed, as Kane twists any number of clichés into a satisfying, funny narrative.

Almendrala’s story once again involves a monkey and sorcery, this time as a monkey revenant digs its way out of a grave and crosses a desert for some unseen act of vengeance. Its story is being narrated by an owl, who first sees the monkey bury her child, and then set off on her quest. The owl can’t stop asking questions both occasionally profound but mostly banal, finally stopping when she reaches what she believes may be her own clutch of eggs. She leaves the fearsome warrior to her quest, concluding, “Vengeance is tiring”. Almendrala’s line is scratchy and relies blacks being heavily spotted as well as huge swaths of negative space in the form of the desert. She also turns any number of clichés on their heads in this surprisingly cute story, when one considers the subject matter.

Efird is not a CCS grad, but she certainly fit right in with this take on vampires and gothic romances set in that same old west town. Half of the story is a shaggy dog story as we await what possibly could be the source of the scratching in a widowed woman’s old house, and the other half goes down that roller coaster into a hilarious rush of a monster-hunting story. Her style has some of Almendrala’s scratchy tendencies combined with the detail that Kane uses in her faces. Overall, this is a nicely cohesive anthology that flatters the talents of each of its creators. 

Thirty Days Of CCS #18: Kane Lynch

Kane Lynch’s four mini comics that he sent (My Grandpa’s Secret Son, Smooth As Glass, Behold The Man, & Answers) form the gist of a slightly longer story about his family. The first mini discusses his father’s father, an abusive alcoholic who had a son (Denis) with one wife and was thrown out. Later, he remarried and had another son (Joe, Lynch’s father) whom he also managed to alienate. There are details about his grandfather contacting Denis years later and essentially demanding a Father’s Day meeting in Disneyland, but Denis had no interest. In fact, they eventually learned that Denis changed his name to Alex Hanes and denied being related to Joe when he contacted him.

The second chapter details an unusual family reunion, as a number of people in the family pieced together that Denis had had a highly “colorful” (to use his term) life in that he changed jobs constantly and had six children in six years by four different women. He often used a fake sob story about a wife and child dying as a way of going for the closing move in seducing the various women he was with. Working with a reporter who was recording the story and planning out the comic he eventually made, they were able to gather together a number of the children and exes of Denis in one place. They were planning to confront him at the dock where he was going to take a ferry to preach (he had become a born-again Christian), but they just missed him. A year later, they tried again, in one of the most fascinating, painfully awkward comics I’ve ever read.

Joe had been in seminary but later became a philosophy professor instead, and the whole group went to his service—where Denis recognized none of them. Joe brought up the story of Nathan the prophet calling out King David for his sins (“Thou art the man!”) and when Joe gave Denis his card, he recognized his name and everyone, one by one, revealed their true identities. What’s most remarkable about this scene is despite being taken completely unawares, the family was just friendly enough not to panic Denis, but his relative calm spoke to his con man instincts—even though he was “saved”.

Lynch expertly captures the swirl of emotions surrounding Denis, from the shock of knowing that he has an extended family to the feeling of being ambushed after abandoning them for years. When they went to lunch after the service, Denis tries to deflect the emotion of the moment with jokes, but he’s also generally cagey. He doesn’t tell his wife on the phone about the various children of his who are there, for example. He hits on the reporter with goofy phrases. He worries about his children going to hell. He first denies talking to his father, then says that his father asked for money. Lynch draws him as friendly to the point of ingratiating, but it’s strongly implied that this is his strategy for dealing with questions that he’s uncomfortable with. Knowing that he’s been caught, he doesn’t opt to double-down on his lies, but he’s not exactly either forthcoming or remorseful for any of his actions. He’s a cipher, albeit an entertaining one.

Lynch noted that he’s working on an epilogue to tie all of this together as well as smooth out some other rough edges, but there’s a remarkable amount of clarity considering how complicated all of these relationships are. The second chapter had some moments where it was easy to lose track of who was who, and I wish Lynch had been able to flesh out the nearly-forming relationships of cousins and step-siblings a bit more, if only to bring some background characters briefly to the forefront. Lynch is a solid cartoonist who does a lot of labor in using gesture and facial expressions to express complicated series of emotions. While the dialogue is obviously very important, Lynch is careful to use his subtle drawing techniques to show emotions rather than describe them. His use of color is subtle but adds a lot to the story, giving a real feel for the story's environment. I’ll be eager to see how Lynch finishes this off, including to see how his grandfather feels about all of this, along with the other members of the family.

Thirty Days of CCS #17: Rainer Kannenstine, Anna Sellheim

An upcoming grad (Class of 2018), Rainer Kannenstine’s work is sort of gleefully nihilistic. This Sucks is a story that demonstrates his pitch-black sense of humor, as an extremely hung over young woman is chosen by Death to work out an old philosophical problem with a creature who’s the representative of another world/universe. Our planet and their planet were on a collision course that would destroy both of them…but if one person chose to destroy the other planet, it would save their own. The alien talked about the over-the-top idyllic circumstances in its universe, and when asked about her universe, she could only muster “It kinda sucks.” Of course, one reason why it sucks is you just can’t trust people, which leads to the eventual, darkly hilarious outcome. To say that this is not a polished comic is an understatement. It’s a whole lot of expressive scribbling that works pretty well, though the many spelling errors were a distraction. Still, the so-over-it facial expressions of the protagonist and black void of death’s form brightened only by a permanent, cheesy grin helped give this comic a great deal of energy.

Lasers is a far stranger little comic with the following admonition: “Don’t go to the playground. The pelicans are made of lasers.” That statement is repeated, each word filling up part of a panel. The pelicans do indeed to strange things on the playground, and when repeated, we zero in on a molecular level so as to see just what’s going on in that bill of theirs. This is a sort of children’s nursery rhyme comic, only far more unsettling. Far more polished is He Comes To The Club At 6:00 AM, which shows us fragments of the handsomest bear to ever grace a dance club, and how if you’re lucky, you might go home with him. It’s image after image flashed at the reader, like they were fever dream memories from hours later. There’s a beautiful crispness in the use of grayscaling here, as Rainer is careful to let each image wash over the reader and also use great care and precision with the all-lower case lettering. 

Anna Sellheim submitted a couple of short stories for 30 Days of CCS this year, one of which appeared in Comics 4 Choice, the pro-choice comics anthology. That was "My Mother's Story", a comic in the form of an interview about her mother's experiences with not just abortion, but also childbirth. Sellheim here uses her more naturalistic line (as opposed to the slightly more abstract figurework she uses for much of her own autobio material) and plays it straight with a nine panel grid. The comic is text-heavy, yet Sellheim is able to apply a few visual flourishes here and there. The narrative is one of the best I've read with regard to abortions, because it demonstrates that the decision to have the procedure can vary with age, circumstances or any number of other choices. There were points where she was adamant about having a baby the next time she got pregnant, and other circumstances where she was apart from her partner and knew it wasn't the right time to bring a child into the world. The point of the story is that in every instance, it was her choice, and the state had no business interfering with it. 

"Safe" is a story about a gay couple named Carl and Kamon, the latter of whom was from Thailand and had a history of abuse at the hands of his father. It’s a sweet story that gauges the concept of safety for a gay couple in the wake of Trump’s election. There’s a scene where Kamon gets a dirty look for speaking in Thai in public from a guy in a MAGA hat. The story is as much about negotiating the unwritten rules of relationships as it is coping with a frightening new reality, as Carl bristles somewhat at being told that he has a bad singing voice. Later, Kamon reveals that Carl may have a bad voice, but he loves to hear him singing, because it makes him feel safe to know that Carl is happy in that moment. There’s more of Sellheim’s slightly cartoony naturalism here, which is a nice match with the impressive verisimilitude she shows in the story’s dialogue and relationship dynamic.

Thirty Days of CCS #16: Ian Richardson

Wendigo, by Ian R ichardson. There have been a few CCS cartoonists who have chosen horror as their means of expression, which makes sense considering that Steve Bissette is on the faculty there. Bissette is one of the greatest horror cartoonists of all time, not just for his time drawing and co-writing the classic Swamp Thing run with Alan Moore, but most especially for his role in editing and contributing to perhaps the greatest horror anthology of all time in Taboo. Though Bissette can draw can gore with the best of them to be sure, it was his cerebral approach that left readers to fill in crucial details of the story that made his comics especially unsettling. I don’t know how much Ian Richardson trained under Bissette in particular, but the professor’s legendary movie nights were often designed to test the limits and endurance of his audience.

Richardson understands one of the most important rules of a horror narrative: never give the audience more of an explanation as to what’s going on than the characters themselves get. The corollary to that rule is: try to give the characters as little information as possible. The trick is showing enough to make the story coherent but not so much that the mystery, the source of the terror, is hand-waved away by a trope like a Native burial ground, a demonic totem, etc. What makes Wendigo such an effective comic is that Richardson takes a familiar horror story and still manages to shock the reader. The wendigo is a legend surrounding a party out in the woods in the deep of winter that resorted to cannibalism to survive, causing an evil spirit to create a monster out of the party whose hunger for flesh was unending. It’s an especially nasty story because while it tugs against our willingness to do anything to survive against the harsh odds that nature presents us, it also represents this horrible betrayal against humanity. In this book, a family of five is out in a cabin during the winter, and the father is finding it hard to trap food. Indeed, it seems like some of his traps have been tampered with. Richardson quietly and elegantly portrays the evil spirit in the forest as a series of twigs and leaves bound together, with the skull of an animal atop it. It touches one of his sons and he falls ill. When the man encounters a neighbor who was tracking a fox, they team up to try to kill it, an event that winds up having horrible repercussions.

Richardson’s manipulation of plot details is masterful, especially in the way that it becomes clear that his family is starting to become increasingly ravenous no matter how much meat he feeds them. He hides the reason why for reasons that make sense, but the eventual reveal is both horrifying and triggers the eventual climax of the book. Thanks to his horrible, inhuman decision, the man’s family starts to engage in vicious, murderous behavior that is magnified in its horror by the innocence of some of the characters. The ending is ambiguous in the sense of whether the spirit is thwarted or just heightened. There’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter, that nothing good is going to emerge from this situation no matter what. Richardson’s art is a revelation. Earlier in his career, he had a tendency to over-render in an effort to create atmosphere. In this book, he used spot watercolors and a clean, thin line that didn’t skimp on detail but made sure to focus on the characters over anything else. The snowbound setting allowed for some strong use of negative space without sacrificing the reader’s sense of place. Faces and facial expressions, especially across an entire narrative, are still a bit of a weakness in terms of consistency, but Richardson was careful to focus on faces at crucial times.

What Happened To John Crowley?, by Ian Richardson. This isn’t so much a comic as it is a multimedia narrative told in the form of documents, images, letters, and newspaper clippings. The titular character is a man who sliced a woman open in broad daylight, shouting at something to make its presence known. The bulk of the book takes place as a series of letters between a psychiatrist at the local hospital in Vermont and his mentor living in Philadelphia. Ken Harker is the Vermont doctor charged to help the patient, found not guilty by reason of insanity. He writes to his mentor because he is genuinely as how to proceed. Richardson’s drawings are stand-ins for photos. The book is set in the early fifties, a time when shock therapy was still very common and the Polaroid One-Step camera had been invented. The shock therapy briefly helps the patient, who begs for more, that he “almost made it”.

Once again, the reader is ahead of the therapists in understanding that something horrible is happening here, but there are no easy answers to be found. That’s especially true after he manages to lure his brother and ex-wife to the hospital, and the tops of their heads explode and rain out blood that strangely does not stick to him. This is a particularly graphic and gory story in that regard, but far more unsettling is his claim to not be a demon but to be the wrath of god himself. To answer the titular question—no one knows, even 25 years after the fact, when Harker’s mentor tries to make sense of it all. Crowley killed a very specific set of people, then died, and then his corpse disappeared. Richardson leaves it up to the reader to guess at what happened, but it’s a slippery question. Was he possessed by a demon? Did he receive powers that were magnified by electricity? Why did he kill a very specific and small list of people? Did he go on to live in some other form? There are no answers, which is why this story lingers. That tension, once again, between knowledge and being kept in the dark with regard to the unknown, is something that Richardson has mastered. The next step for him as a writer is creating characters who are more than ciphers, something he’s able to do a little of in this story. He’s still more concerned with mastering plot and atmosphere than characterization at this point, but his progress in both of those areas makes me think he’s going to make a leap in other areas as well.

Thirty Days of CCS #15: Rio Aubry Taylor, Melissa Mendes & Michelle Ollie

Jetty # 5-9, by Rio Aubry Taylor. Taylor’s transfuturist sci-fi fantasy epic continues in short bursts, but by issue #9 it seems like Taylor is almost ready to move on from this particular storyline. Though this comic is science fiction, it’s also quite obviously intensely personal. The general plotline, that it’s the future, the sun has disappeared, and a girl named Mina is trying to escape capture thanks to some friendly monks who have vowed to protect her, is straightforward enough. It’s an a to b to c story, going from place to place and trying to find safety. At the same time, there are a number of other ancillary characters whizzing around, sometimes interacting with the main plot and sometimes off on their own. This is a story about transformation and loss, and how the two are navigated. It’s about demons and personal demons; one character is a recovering alcoholic who picks up a stray bottle of whiskey, and his self-loathing as a result allows a thousand-eyed demon to track them. It’s transfuturist with regard to trans issues, to be sure, but it also meditates upon the predatory future of capitalism that is far more efficient in eliminating those that don’t contribute to the bottom line. Issue six features a righteous barbarian witch who helps Mina by first clubbing the demon and then casting it into hell. Meanwhile, Taylor’s abstract comics background is used in the service of the narrative, as background characters continue to melt, transform and face incredible pressures.

Issue 7 features a cat creature named Leel’ Riot (a quasi-anagram of Taylor’s name) and zir friend Fill, the constantly and painfully transforming cyborg receiving an epiphany about the location of a missing friend, and Mina’s group gets some info from the witch. The eighth issue is the best of the group, starting with a hilarious flashback to giant underground worms (who seemed to be named after the alter egos of three of the original X-Men) who accidentally unleashed a horrific evil on the world. Taylor gets into some real eschatological stuff here, with demons feeding on pain and Mina’s anger and heretofore unknown powers playing a big part in everything. The sequence with the worms is a compact marvel of great cartooning and funny writing, as the melodramatic worms seem ridiculous until horrible things to start to happen. On top of all this, they are being observed by a sort of techno-Hindu deity up above. The very brief ninth issue is a big stop sign, as Taylor reflects upon zir nature as a sorcerer/cartoonist, conjuring up zir own worlds and creating zir own descendants. Dragging the story through abstract muck must be an incredible amount of labor on an issue to issue basis, and the story might be better served finished all at once. There’s no question that Taylor is creating a stirring, whimsical, queer, frightening and heroic narrative; it just simply needs to breathe a little.

The Weight, #1-2, by Melissa Mendes. I’ve read this in dribs and drabs for a while now, and I look forward to the collection of the original minicomics. That said, Mendes’ sense of design and willingness to delve into behind-the-scenes material makes each mini a valuable read on its own. Mendes’ comics have always been about families, but this is the first time she’s gone deep and to some dark places with a family that is not happy and supportive. Indeed, Edie (the latest in a series of characters who  gender is vague according to appearances, favoring the aesthetic and lifestyle of a tomboy) has an abusive father who took her mother away from her own parents. What makes it worse is that he seemed to have done it out of spite as much as anything else. As portrayed in the first two issues, her father Ray is a ball of resentment and cruelty, hating himself almost as much as he hates everything else in the world.

Her mom, Marian, is helpless against his rage and determined will. The first issue depicts Edie’s birth and Ray’s subsequent revenge on Marian’s family (especially her father) by taking away their daughter from them. The second issue is Edie at about age six or so, a portrait of both extreme toughness and tender empathy. When some local boys trap a rabbit in a snare, Edie takes it away from them, daring them to stop her, as she gives the coney a proper burial. Mendes truly stepped up what was already one of her greatest skills as a cartoonist, which is her use of gesture. With just a few facial expressions and with her body language, Mendes gets across the ways in which she is similar to each of her parents. The fact that none of the boys in this story would dare step to her speaks volumes as to what happened the last time they might have tried to do such a thing. Yet she clearly is nurturing, loving and kind. Seeing her tenderly comfort her mother after another beating at the hands of her father quickly established the lengths to which she would go to help her mother, as well as her rage against her father. It’s a remarkable exploration of some dark territory for Mendes, but she nailed the emotional content of the story not because she’s used to writing highly dysfunctional families, but because the way she’s portrayed loving families comes through so brightly with regard to Edie and her mother. I am eager to read the whole thing, as Mendes continues to become one of the best cartoonists with regard to portraying small but crucial moments.

From The Desk Of The President, by Michelle Ollie. This is the annual CCS pitch comic, and what was interesting is that rather than have a guest or an alumnus make it, the President of CCS, Michelle Ollie, took it upon herself to do so. While not generally a practicing artist, Ollie reveals in this comic a lifelong love of the form. In doing so, she subtly gets across the CCS message of both Applied Cartooning (using your skills in a career that’s not necessarily publishing typical graphic novels) and also the expressive power of comics that anyone can have access to. In the story, she discussed her difficulty reading growing up and going to a rigidly-run Catholic school. It wasn’t until her father noticed that Ollie could read the words in comics just fine that he realized that there was a new avenue to pursue here. Soon, Ollie was not only reading comics, but also writing & drawing her own material. With the comic in a landscape format, Ollie juxtaposed her own childhood drawings of Snoopy in black with blue-line Charles Schulz originals underneath. Comics, she suggests, are simply another means of self-expression. That combination of word and image has a transformative effect on many, including children and veterans returning from war. For those struggling to put things into words alone, the alchemy of words and pictures together unlocks something in the brain, especially when one gives oneself permission to do “bad” drawings. In other words, to simply enjoy the experience of putting pen to paper without worrying what others might think about it. Ollie’s own line is charming and expressive; it more than does the job, especially since she clearly thought out the composition of her comic.