Thirty Days of CCS #11: Josh Rosen

Josh Rosen's two comics that I'm discussing here, Rage Forever and Darcy Cheyne: Werewolf Hunter, are a reflection of the ways in which CCS students effortlessly slip between different storytelling genres and do a credible job in each area. More to the point, they're a reflection of the way CCS cartoonists can use genre tropes as a structure for telling a deeper, more meaningful story while still keeping that genre structure fully intact.

In Darcy Cheyne, Rosen inverts the victim/hero relationship with a classic horror movie twist, as we see a man in a house listening to a radio report about vicious assaults calling for people to stay indoors, and a mysterious hooded figure lurking outside. The pacing and suspense are slow and deliberate, with the muted colors adding to that sensation of dread. However, Rosen pulls the rug out from under the reader by skipping the actual fight between werewolf and traveling werewolf hunter, instead cutting to the hunter calling up her boyfriend. That inverts the story yet again, this time revealing that this isn't really a horror comic; instead, it's the story of a strained romance filtered through horror tropes. The back half of the issue is devoted mostly to her boyfriend Tomas dealing with the loneliness of being left behind at home, fighting off temptation and wishing for a sense of connection. Even the threat at the end conforms to this "things aren't as they appear" approach that Rosen uses, as what appears to be a child is really something else. However, the threat she brings goes to the heart of Darcy's insecurities about having a steady home life. Rosen's rough rendering style is smoothed out by his use of color, giving the simplicity of his figures a sense of solidity.

In Rage Forever, Rosen takes on high school stories. Here, his gritty and slightly grotesque character design well suits the material. This is a comic about outsiders, misfits and those whose rage is bottled up inside. However, these aren't the totally isolated and hopeless teens of a Chuck Forsman comic. Here, we follow a quiet, mumbling student named Wendell as he tries to keep his head down while listening to one outcast friend describe to him in great detail the ways in which he'd like to kill someone tormenting him. Then Rosen perfectly captures the confusion and excitement he feels when two girls from his class befriend him and essentially badger him into coming out with them to a boxing match. The dialogue and character design sell the story above all else, as Wendell's story winds up being a sweet and unlikely romance. Rosen caps the comic off by flipping to two completely new characters, both girls, who are the sort of ragtag females one might see in a Hellen Jo comic. One of those characters rants righteously about being forced to compromise her choices, about the feeling that she's already being prevented from ever trying something "big". These comics reveal that Rosen has slowly begun the process of putting together narratives that have greater complexity and depth than earlier in his career. In that respect, he's very much following the typical trajectory of most CCS students, one in which they are trained to focus on short work at the school rather than try to tackle a longer project. As students, the emphasis is on finishing one's short projects. Rosen abandoned his first project to take on Darcy Cheyne after creating the character for the enjoyable Werewolf! anthology. It's clear that somewhere along the way, he found a way to incorporate complex personal dynamics into a format that not only allowed a reader occasional respite from melodrama, but in fact found ways to heighten those emotions through genre tropes. It's a tactic not unlike what Joss Whedon did in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, only with a much stronger emphasis on the mundane aspects of relationships. I'll be curious to see how far he can take this trope and what Rosen has in mind for the relationship between Darcy and Tomas.

Thirty Days of CCS #10: April Malig

April Malig is one of several recent CCS grads whose work uses fantasy and science fiction tropes as a means to get at deeper, more poetic ideas. Malig has a powerful sense of page design and a decorative sense that balances out a sometimes limited character rendering ability. Questions Of Space Travel is a good example of this. Nestled between two beautiful, eye-catching silk-screened covers, Malig narrates the story of a group of space travelers from earth, going about the story from the point of view of why someone would want to leave the earth on a semi-permanent basis. Malig wraps her characters in loops, ribbons, and psychedelic effects that work on both a literal and figurative basis. This comic is at its heart about loneliness (especially in a crowd) and the unsettled feeling of never feeling at home. Malig is careful not to let the comic's decorative aspects overwhelm the actual narrative and flow of character movements, though it's fair to say that the characters are in the constant embrace of those decorative aspects. In the short, cardstock-printed comic It's Funny To Think, Malig takes eight pages to contemplate the hidden nature of heat and its effects on what one sees. Once again, her design elegance and smart use of two-color printing works in concert with a short, poetic observation, creating a new idea where word and image are interdependent.

Then there's the first issue of her new adventure series Magical Bitches (truly, an irresistible title), in which different cities have different gangs of fairies and several of them are drawn to an abandoned hotel to fulfill some mysterious destiny. Character design and gesture are key to making a comic like this work, and Malig stepped up her game in creating a number of interesting, memorable characters. The fairy gangs feel like a cross between Tinkerbell, the Lalaloopsy characters and the Bad Girls Club, and Malig still finds ways to incorporate her weird decorative tendencies as an artist. She fills in gaps with zip-a-tone effects and finds other ways to add weight to character designs that are simple. One senses that this story could go on indefinitely.

Finally, Bananas: Short, Odd Stories, Full of Potassium, features striking shorts in different styles. "Porcelain" is touted as a "dream comic about feelings". This is a color piece that emphasizes just how strong her sense of design is as well as how delicate is her color palette. The color-driven special effects are the catalyst for the narrative, as they deliver key pieces of information to the reader. "Today I..." exaggerates her character design in a monstrous manner, as she uses a thick line weight for her character and then blows it up to fill an entire page with swirling, lines. It's almost like a David B page. Finally, "That's Not Sugar" is a gag strip that nonetheless still uses Malig's trademark swirly lines to emphasize the punchline. Malig is very much an artist who's still experimenting with how to incorporate her personal aesthetic vision into a more cohesive narrative while at the same time retaining her poetic tendencies. These recent comics show that she's certainly on the right track.

Thirty Days of CCS #9: Ford, Forsman, Coovert, Kim, Martin, Gaskin

Let's take a look at some short comics from the remarkable graduating class of 2008 from CCS, many of whom spent time editing the Sundays anthology.

Simple Routines #18, by J.P. Coovert. Coovert's been honing his craft as an autobio cartoonist for some time now, and his most recent results have been increasingly poignant and poetic. That includes his line, which he has simplified thanks to the choice of using a thin weight (exactly the same as the weight he uses for his lettering), which gives each panel a sense of compositional unity. Considering that he uses a narrative caption for most of his panels, this is the biggest key to their success. His figures are simple and iconic without sacrificing clarity or expressiveness, which is important because Coovert explores the emotions he feels for his wife, friends and parents in many of the anecdotes described here. The final story, where he remembers playing with a sick kid as a child as a formative moment for how he views life, is poignant without being maudlin or too self-important. Through sheer hard work and repetition, Coovert has made the daily diary strip more than just an artist's exercise.

Teen Creeps #1 and Working On The End Of The Fucking World, by Chuck Forsman. Forsman is one of the smartest and most thoughtful cartoonists working today, with an intellectual curiosity about process and themes that reflects his status as cartoonist, editor and publisher. That curiosity has led to Forsman publishing several interview zines through his Oily Comics concern, as well as the Working On... zine that's comprised of commentary, an interview, sketches and thumbnails from his most well-known comic that began as a series of eight-page minis. Forsman notes that it's mainly an excuse to "play with 2 color printing", and he sounds a bit anxious about being pretentious in the interview, but it's clear that this is something he takes seriously, and rightly so. Documenting that process in a manner that's visually interesting and challenging was obviously a puzzle of its own for him. Teen Creeps is his new series of short stories involving "loosely connected" characters over time. The first issue starts a story featuring Hilary and her bad-ass friend Dawn. Hilary is slut-shamed by a jock at a high school when she won't put out after he goes down on her. When Dawn catches wind of this, she kicks the kid spreading a rumor about Hilary in the groin, ignoring the inevitable lecture from school officials. Forsman's specialty is teenage characters, and this comic features him tackling the subject from a different perspective. It's not just that the lead characters are girls (a rarity for Forsman), it's that he's examining a different set of character dynamics than usual. This set of Teen Creeps story seems like it's going to focus in on the friendship between Dawn and Hilary, and the ways in which that friendship blurs and strains. As always, Forsman's character design is cartoony and grotesque in a manner that feels real, from Hilary's pointy nose and long, stringy hair to a kid's flat-top, spiky haircut.

Shadow Hills #1, by Sean Ford. It's a brand new series for Ford after working on Only Skin for several years. This time around, the focus seems to be on a couple of children: a mute boy who collapses near a small forest town, and a girl who fancies herself a would-be detective who discovers him. Told in retrospect by the girl, it hints at ominous, strange events that seem to indicate that the boy was far from ordinary. Ford seems to have varied his line weight a bit here, giving his line a more fragile, tremulous quality. Ford also sets up the stakes of this story more rapidly than in Only Skin, with its narrative structure immediately instilling a sense of menace and foreboding from the very beginning. It was a bit strange to see Ford work this small, after seeing the wide-open vistas of his last book, but he may be going for something more claustrophobic here.

Timber Run 1 and Dumpling King 1, 2 by Alex Kim. If you were to ask me about a particularly underrated cartoonist, Kim would be one of the first names I'd consider. His idiosyncratic and piercingly angular character design, his lush use of backgrounds, and his quirky sense of humor all punctuate his status as an outstanding writer of suspense and horror comics. Dumpling King, published by Oily Comics, promises to be a creepily-paced breakout work that brings him deserved attention. It's remarkable how quickly he's able to establish the premise and setting of this comic, as a prospective dumpling making decides to abandon his tutelage in favor of being the store's delivery man after the former holder of that spot kills himself. He wants to investigate for himself the mysterious Grace Chang and her sinister family despite the protestations of his mentor. Kim quickly sets up steam and fog as recurring visual motifs, painstakingly rendered in a stippled line that gives the vapor a density that looks dangerous. The changing covers are also carefully considered, as we switch from character to character in each issue and the moon slowly sets. This is beautiful and meticulous cartooning that's in total service to the demands of the immediately engrossing story. Kim draws the reader into his world with pointy noses and wrinkled faces. Timber Run is the first part of a horror comic that features one of Kim's favorite motifs: the cabin in the woods. The reader is slowly drawn into a family drama, an abandoned relative and his sister's family attempts to find him. If the horror here is perhaps more conventional, Kim plays around with expectations by putting the family's drama out front until the monster is revealed in gloriously over-the-top style. Kim leaves the reader on a nasty cliffhanger, making it clear that a happy ending is not guaranteed.

Gnomes, by Sam Gaskin. This is a bit of smudgy silliness from a cartoonist who has always used fantasy and pop-culture tropes and images to fuel his humor. The strips here range between quotidian activities to out-and-out gags, like a gnome tricking a troll into falling into a hole and then pissing on him. Many of them are more like "tickle fight", which involves two gnomes tickling each other with the tagline "everybody wins!" This is a deliberately lo-fi, bawdy version of the famous 1977 book of illustrations that set off the gnome craze, one where plot and character are less relevant than world-building. Of course, the world-building here mostly involves gnomes getting drunk on mead and eating pumpkin bread. It's an amusing concept that's as sloppily drawn as the original book was fastidious.

Gagger 1, by Dane Martin. Martin has long been a cartoonist who's mashed together influences from the golden age of cartooning like EZ Segar with more modern influences like Tony Millionaire and Mark Beyer. Martin's comics have a feverish, nightmarish quality, even as they follow the adventures of cartoon birds who happen to be artists, animators and gagsmiths. There's a mix between characters that have a deliberate, energetic crudeness in terms of their rendering and a carefully-crafted set of backgrounds that feature intricate patterns and furiously-dashed marks. The eye doesn't rest on a Dane Martin page; instead, it dashes anxiously from image to image, never being allowed to relax or find comfort in any of the drawings. It's an anxiousness that's not unlike what Michael DeForge does on his pages, only cranked up to a more uncomfortable level. The main character here is a gag writer for "Uncle Saul" who's out of inspiration and ideas who takes a walk, only to reveal how useless and impotent he is a sentient creature, one completely unable and unwilling to help others. Of course, the character is ridden by guilt, because all of his emotions must center around his own negative conception of self no matter what. It's a powerful, bracing little comic that promises some fascinating insights into human interaction.

Thirty Days of CCS #8: Amelia Onorato

Amelia Onorato's comics are explicitly concerned with gender roles using mythological and melodramatic tropes. Her first series, Rockall, concerns a man named Kagan who buys a property on a remote island near Ireland who discovers that a woman and her son are still living there. The woman, Muirinn, is known to be a "selkie", a sort of sea lion that can take human form by temporarily shedding its skin. Hiding her skin allows one to control her, until she can find it again. When Kagan is told about this supposedly demonic creature, he refuses to believe local legend. The series plays out as he slowly gains the trust of Muirinn and her son, and all three negotiate fear and hatred. What's interesting about this series is that Onorato has her cake and eats it too, as the superstition regarding Muirinn is very much that of a town revolting against an independent, husband-less woman who doesn't kowtow to religion or social mores. At the same time, she is also a magical creature who has to confront that the reason she can't find her skin has more to do with her responsibilities as a mother and less to do with her deceased husband. This isn't a cheap cheat; indeed, Onorato plays by her own rules, as the only person in the story who doesn't believe that Muirinn is a selkie is Kagan himself. The point of the story is that all of the reasons why Kagan did not give in to fear were entirely valid; whether or not she was a magical being didn't justify persecution. Overall, this is a fairly simple story, simply told. Onorato seems greatly influenced by the way Jaime Hernandez spots blacks, but her overall character design here is on the primitive side. Some of the character drawings are rough, as though she didn't quite have the chops to pull of drawing a number of different characters. That's especially true when one compares the way that Muirinn looks compared to the other characters.

Her more recent comic, Burn The Bridges of Arta, demonstrates that she's brought her chops up to a higher level. It's more thematically complex and dense than Rockall, but it's the precision of the drawing that is absolutely essential to the success of this first chapter of a longer story. At its heart, it's about the love a younger sister has for her older sister. Her relentless inquisitiveness about why she hasn't returned from her honeymoon fuels the greater plot, which concerns a worker who quit a prior, horrible job to take care of the grounds at the little girl's house. Throughout the story, Onorato's drawings of beautiful buildings are impeccable, and this is no coincidence. Indeed, the sheer beauty of the buildings is a crucial plot point that doesn't get explained until the end of the issue, when we learn what sacrifices must be made in order to ensure that such beauty endures. Onorato's figures have more a Jason Lutes-style polish to them in this story, a stylization that makes sense given the beauty seen in the story. One can see touches of other influences in her figurework and especially gesture, as Onorato's characters tend to be effusive and demonstrative. The effusiveness of the young girl combined with the reluctance of the other characters to openly discuss how the world works forms an effective tension, as her questions are the reader's questions, until such time as the reader is shown how the world really is. This is an excellent opening chapter for what promises to be an interesting series that once again touches on the ways in which women are exploited and stripped of agency, and the steps other women take to claim it.

Thirty Days of CCS #7: Joseph Lambert

Joseph Lambert told me at SPX that after the success of his book Annie Sullivan and the Trials of Helen Keller, he was going to concentrate on short stories for a bit. The four minicomics I got from him at SPX show him to be at peak form as he continues to explore his primary storytelling interest: sibling dynamics. While some of his stories about kids still retain a touch of magical realism, he's starting to lean more on verisimilitude, depicting kids as they actually think and act. Let's take a look at each one.

Layaway deservedly earned an Ignatz award nomination. It is typically beautiful to look at and intricately designed; these things are givens with regard to Lambert. However, there's a new layer of narrative and emotional complexity to be found here. This story is about social awkwardness mediated through the history of two winter coats. Jumping back and forth in time, Lambert's anecdotes regarding the coats are devastatingly awkward and painful, as a coat that was initially beloved because of its puffiness is kept til its in rags and ill-fitting. Flashing back to how he couldn't feel a punch because of the coat's thickness, Lambert relates a story of telling a friend to punch him; when he does, he doubles over in pain and starts crying. It's a hilarious moment, one that reveals the social gap Lambert's stand-in feels as an older brother who feels out of place with his younger siblings and the awkwardness he feels with peers. That's made especially clear when he gets a 49ers jacket knowing absolutely nothing about the football team, instead inanely telling anyone who would listen that it was purchased from layaway.Throw in the awkwardness of trying to impress a girl with that story, and you have a surprisingly rich and textured story in just 16 pages.

New Worlds For Me And For You takes on the odd ways in which children become friends, and how socioeconomic factors can play a role in interpersonal dynamics. Two rough-and-tumble kids (one a gender-ambiguous tomboy) loudly dare each other to seize the moment in daring ways (leading to band-aids and casts) while the girl next door in a much nicer house injects herself into their own world. This comic is especially impressive in terms of pacing and restraint. The other seems like an odd thing to praise in a comic filled with hyperbolic dialogue and plenty of propulsive motion, but Lambert leaves out details in such a manner as to let the reader fill them in, giving the burgeoning friendship between the three kids an extra dimension of rich depth. The comic is also crammed with gags, even as Lambert peppers them with moments of self-actualization that are then popped by a viscerally bracing moment, like one kid breaking his other arm after feeling a rush of adrenaline that overcomes his fear of death.

Supposed To is more along the lines of Lambert's magical-realist works, where a kid is sort of fused to a house as a metaphor for isolation. It's closer in spirit and execution to those silent, crazed comics where kids get angry at the sun or moon, while retaining a strong sense of humanity in the plight of the child. WizZine is a sketchbook featuring drawings of wizards and magicians in various stages of performing spells. His character design is incredibly appealing, making me wish that Lambert was drawing Dr. Strange. There's a strong Ditko influence, but there's also bits of Steve Bissette (designer of John Constantine) and even the whimsy of Winsor McCay. If Lambert can craft a story around these images, it would look incredible.

Thirty Days of CCS #6: Melissa Mendes

Melissa Mendes' Oily comic Lou represents an interesting evolution in her storytelling.She's unquestionably one of the best cartoonists when it comes to telling stories about children that are devoid of nostalgia and sentimentality even as they are affectionate and honest. She's especially adept at telling stories about tomboys, as a former tomboy herself. In Lou, Mendes expands her family dynamic narratives by telling the story of a larger family, as opposed to simply telling stories about her "Freddy" character. The titular preteen is a middle child, looking up to her metalhead artist older brother Eddie and her pain-in-the-ass younger brother John. The story begins as a simple one, as the three kids try to find things to do without killing each other during summer break. Mendes is always at her best when telling these sorts of in-between time stories, narratives about time that has to be filled in imaginatively. Throughout the course of this 17-issue (12 pages per issue) narrative, she does a remarkable job of capturing the voices of not only the three children but also their working-class parents.

Mendes introduces elements of danger into this storyline for the first time in her career. She wisely steers away from having the criminal plot dominate the series, instead serving as a catalyst for each of the three children. When Eddie's boss at the pizza parlor goes missing amid visits from thugs, he and his friend take over the business. Lou and her friends explore an abandoned theater as she deals with the first pangs of puppy love from one of her friends. John is tired of being bossed around (especially by Lou) and runs away from home when their parents are out on a date. Mendes is careful to avoid too much cliche' surrounding this scenario that eventually puts the kids in danger, and I'm curious to see the final issue to see how the plot pans out. I hope she continues her history of restraint regarding her storytelling and avoids sensationalism. I thought she did a reasonably job of ratcheting up the tension at the end of #16 in an organic way, though I would have been just as happy to see that plot turn into an anticlimax instead of a true confrontation.

Mendes' art is simple, influenced as she notes by the wobbly linework of 90s Nickelodeon shows like Doug and Rugrats. Her figures are powerfully expressive with a minimum number of lines, though it's the few details she uses that make her characters what they are. In Lou's case, it's the bangs, the thick eyebrows and the freckles to go with her uniform of t-shirt and Oxford shirt. For Eddie, it's that long, stringy hair and gangly body to go with the fuzzy mustache that's sprouted on his lip. John's shock of hair that makes him look more like his mother is just part of his makeup as Mendes uses a slightly stronger line weight for this forceful, loud character. Like all of Mendes' work, Lou's pleasures are simple but are confidently and authentically expressed. Mendes has developed a style not unlike John Porcellino, in which the events that are most important are those that carry a powerful aesthetic value, one that's stripped down and simplified so as to bring it to life more vividly.

Thirty Days of CCS #5: Aaron Cockle

As Aaron Cockle grows ever more prolific as a cartoonist, his confidence as a storyteller is increasing at a similar rate. In addition to his own one-man anthology Annotated, he's also doing an intriguing series for Oily Comics called Word and Voice. Semiotics has long been a key focus of his work, as Cockle is constantly looking for new ways to explore the relationships between words and their meanings as well as words in connection with images. He frequently merges this preoccupation with a fascination for doomsday and post-apocalyptic scenarios, with the breakdown and manipulation of language being a key to bringing down or irrevocably altering civilization as we know it.

Word and Voice is an expansion on this idea, slowly unraveling life as it is lived in the wake of such a catastrophic meltdown. In each twelve-page issue (I have the first six of seven published), the reader is slowly clued in on that society is in ruins as a lone man scouts the streets until he finally finds a woman and child holed up in their apartment. Silence is finally broken in the form of dialogue that appears to be gibberish. Hints are given of a "word virus" that afflicted humanity, including a couple on the moon. These comics are powerful in terms of getting across emotion, like when the man is able to reunite the family with a larger, hidden subculture that's taken refuge from the apocalypse. It's even more poignant and heartbreaking later in the series when Cockle conflates the deterioration of a relationship with the loss of communication that all of humanity was experiencing with one character's monologue. What's interesting about the series is how languidly-paced it is. Cockle lets images wash over the reader before slowly introducing new narrative elements from issue-to-issue, which is the opposite of how he normally works in Annotated.

Annotated #10 is a classic example of Cockle coming to a story in media res and demanding that the reader keep up. This is perhaps his best-realized story to date, and it promises to be the first part of a longer story. The story is told in flashback, as a man talks about certain kinds of technology he bought and how it changed his life, then jumps ahead to how he first met a particular, remarkable woman that he later became involved with. From there, Cockle has the man discuss the roots of an elaborately plotted "soft coup", tactical missile strikes, a new technocracy and other craziness. All along, however, the story is rooted in the man's relationship to her and he felt ever more distant as she became an important part of this new world order. What's fascinating about the story is the way Cockle has the man become obsessed with what he calls "The Game" (the specifics of how the coup worked), but it's obvious that it becomes a substitute for truly knowing her. By the end, the reader understands that the coup has ultimately failed as he is being interrogated by whatever government is now in charge. It's the perfect Cockle story, as he grounds conspiracy theory and philosophy in the very human preoccupations of love and connection. It's also impeccably designed, as it's read from top left to bottom left and then top right to bottom right, with a cascading panel design that makes this flow quite naturally. There's a simplicity to his drawing that makes the comic all the more effective, as Cockle keeps his images clear and easy to parse, even if their actual meaning is deliberately obscure. I'd hand this comic to anyone who wanted to know what Cockle's work is all about.

Annotated #11 is more of a grab-bag of ideas and images. "The Drones-Eye View" is a fascinating series of interlocking thoughts about how we see art, given distance by certain meta tricks. Cockle uses the phrase "False start stories made up of random images. Titles added to elicit some sense of uneasiness" on page three, and this precisely describes what happens on pages one and two. From there, he launches into "The Review of the Reviewers", about a zine critic and a film critic who are assigned a zine and the movie made out of it, respectively. Again and again, the story is about both this other project but can also be interpreted as self-criticisms ("Too much ill-conceived collage.") From there, Cockle moves on to wonder about how the director Roberto Rossellini decided what material he would use from James Joyce's "The Dead" in his film and what he would change as a way of thinking about how an artist decides what elements an artist takes from life for their work. The other stories in this issue are digitally-produced reactions to certain news stories, like a transcript from a military commission that is a perfect segue into a transcription from Franz Kafka. The issue concludes with fragments from particular readings about various artists being aware of outside influences in terms of inspiration, competition, verisimilitude and necessity. Each anecdote reveals how much a work of art can be influenced by one of these outside forces, like Russian montage filmmakers being constrained by a small supply of actual film and no money to buy more. Fittingly, Cockle ends the issue with a list of recommendations and reviews of comics and other media that are currently of interest to him, coming full circle to this phenomenological exploration of aesthetics.