Thirty Days of CCS #14: Penina Gal, Betsey Swardlick, Moody

Penina Gal continues to move along her teen fantasy world-building exercise, The Fire Messenger, in slow increments. Chapter 3 was an especially eventful one, as Nik and Aiden have somehow escaped from their world of people with superhuman/magical abilities and come to our Earth. They are seemingly rescued by their old keepers/testers, until firestarter Aiden resents being treated like a lab rat and escapes from the menacing Mr Zacchariah. The aesthetic of this book is part comic book, part young adult novel, and that's heightened by the simple figures and the extensive use of what looks like watercolors to create mood and texture. The series reminds me a little of the His Dark Materials trilogy in the sense that children are being used as lab rats and have powerful abilities, but the general concept is fresh and original. This comic will look especially great when it's collected at a larger size.

Gal also engaged in a bit of silliness with a couple of collaborative comics done with fellow CCS grad Betsey Swardlick. Swardlick's comics mix humor, genre imagery and pointed political commentary in a manner that's snappy and light-hearted, and her fast, sketchy style reflects the nature of her writing. Glamera #1, as one might imagine, is two artists taking the pun of its title as far as it will go and beyond. A cross between a gender-bending David Bowie and the giant turtle creature of monster-movie fame, the titular character is a friend to all children but may well kill you when you grow up. When Glamera happens upon a bar filled with unfabulous sailors, the mission becomes one of glamming it up, until a match is met with a particularly fashionable sailor. That battle ends with the sailor being turned into a disco ball and an ensuing dance party. This is a comic that is quite aware of its own ridiculousness, one that revels in its gender-bending and queer-oriented humor. With this concept, it's pretty much impossible to take seriously, and the exaggerated artwork reflects this sensibility on the part of its artists.

Also on the silly scale is Thank You Professor Thorkelson, a Monkees tribute zine. Incorporating jams between Gal and Swardlick as well as clip art, they get to the essence of why they get so obsessed with the Monkees' TV show and music: its unapologetic stupidity. There's a great page where they write "Dear x, I love your stupid face" and then draw a strip where the Monkees are performing "I'm A Believer" (one of their many insanely catchy songs). Replacing Peter Tork on keyboards with a cat is one of many inspired, bizarre approaches in this comic. Another strip about how frequently the Monkees wound up in drag was hilarious, especially when Mike Nesmith lords it over everyone else as to just how pretty he looks. I could have read many, many more pages about this subject, as the Gal-Swardlick duo's comedic chops are top notch, especially with regard to caricature, body language and character interaction. Like Glamera, this is a deceptively silly comic; it's one where the artists obviously thought for a long time just how they were going to pull off their dumb jokes.

Speaking of silly, Katie Moody (alias Miz Moody or just Moody) has a variety of good-looking and light comics to her name after graduating from CCS. The four minis reviewed here are either all larks or obviously student work, as this former Dark Horse is clearly trying to find her voice. First up is Zee Leetle Prince, an affectionate send-up of the Antoine Saint-Exupery classic by way of using the simplified symbol set of illustrator Ed Emberley. Moody tacks on an exaggerated French "accent" to the story that's a bit much after twelve straight pages, but her mastery of Emberley's style is aces and it matches up quite well to the actual story. AAAAARGH #1 is an eight-page mini-comic about Moody's frustration regarding making an eight-page mini-comic. That meta level of a story about an artist who's stuck is a hoary one at this point, but this one isn't about not having any ideas. Indeed, it's about being too ambitious while having too little time. Moody's self-caricature here is my favorite part of the comic, as she switches from naturalistic to cartoony in short order.

For Your Consideration was her version of the famous CCS application, which requires the artist to do a story involving themselves, a robot, a snowman and a piece of fruit. Moody went all-out in this story, mixing in naturalistic drawing and classic cartooning styles from Herriman and Schulz to tell a story about how the lifestyle of being an adult stuck in an adult job was no longer working for her, how she felt trapped, lost and broken. That eventually led toward crawling in the dark toward the goal of becoming an artist and regaining her childhood appreciation of what is beautiful. This is an excellent comic, one that reflects her obsessiveness with regard to design and composition. The Mouse, The Bird and the Sausage is Moody's version of the lesser-known story by the Brothers Grimm. Printed in green ink, it's an interesting looking comic that hews closely to the original narrative, which seems to be about division of labor, predestination and being grateful for one's place in a closed system. The titular characters go about their roles every day; some of their jobs are easy, while others are more difficult. All three jobs contribute to the characters staying fed and happy, but when the Bird is told by another bird that it was being taken advantage of, it naturally leads to jealousy and a shifting of roles. Disturbing the equilibrium of their arrangement leads to doom and disaster for all. Moody concentrates on the visceral and kinetic aspects of the story without dwelling too long on its moral implications, as the characters are drawn in a particularly angular manner that accents their traits.  Everything I've seen from Moody so far indicates a cartoonist still in the warm-up phase of her career. It's clear that she's as talented as any of the CCS grads in terms of her inventiveness, drawing skill and other fundamentals. Right now, she still seems to be chasing the right kind of story to truly invest her time in.

Thirty Days of CCS #13: Cole Closser

Cole Closser designs strips such that they're not just pastiches or homages to classic comic strips, but rather as a strip that could be transplanted back into the past with the authenticity, skill and authority of one of the masters. Little Tommy Lost is not a parody; while it has jokes, it's very much a straightforward adventure strip. It's designed to look like Annie Koyama had somehow found a drawer full of original tear sheets from a 1930s comic strip and shot a book directly from those old, slightly yellowed and even stained originals. While Harold Gray and his Little Orphan Annie is an obvious inspiration for the book, there are also nods to Winsor McCay and Frank King in terms of the way Closser designed the color Sunday comics to act as an explosively clever, dream-oriented strip separate from the daily continuity. Gray's white-pupils are in effect here as far as character design goes, but there are also bits of Chester Gould to be found in terms of the grotesques who pop up. I'm no scholar of comic strip art, so I'm sure there any number of other allusions to be found here, down to the way Closser signs his name on each strip, emulating Ernie Bushmiller's handwriting.

That said, the strip owes as much to the serialized writing of Charles Dickens as it does Gray. Tommy is separated from his parents in the big city and soon winds up homeless and on the streets. A corrupt cop takes him to work at a children's slave labor factory, where he makes friends with some of the boys but winds up making enemies out of several huge and scary older boys. Tommy is no victim, though; he's a tough kid who's good in a fight, eventually winning over the brutish Clarence Pigg to his side. He also schemes to find a way to escape and gets involved in the mysterious plans of the factory's owner. The poor lost boy who's at the mercy of unscrupulous adults is a Dickens staple, and Closser brings that story to life.

Closser has the rhythms of a daily strip down cold, keeping things moving while re-emphasizing certain key plot points. Indeed, Little Tommy Lost unfortunately reproduces one of the more annoying aspects of daily adventure strips: a day-to-day repetitiveness originally designed to help keep casual readers up to speed. The result is that it sometimes takes three or four strips to propel the story when it could have been done in one or two strips. Information is repeated every few strips as Closser goes to great lengths to spell out what's going on, just as strip cartoonists had to make everything plain to keep the attention of their readers. Reading all of the strips at once, it makes processing some of the strips a grind to get through. Still, Closser's art is a genuine pleasure to stare at, with his confident cross-hatching and memorable character design. Characters like Pigg and Oliver "Skullface" Duggery are frightening to behold, and factory owner Mr Greaves' hunchbacked posture and balding head make him a figure of genuine menace. Closser's dialogue is street-tough rough but is always crystal-clear in meaning; it adds a great deal of texture to the book.

Ultimately, the first volume of Little Tommy Lost is somewhere between an astounding achievement in terms of the skill and care devoted to creating this kind of object and a storytelling curiosity. While the first volume had its moments, the storytelling padding reduced its overall impact. I liked that Closser had his strip adhere to the seasons he depicted with his daily, arbitrary dating that he created, but I wish we had gotten to the high seas adventure promised in volume two much earlier. The daily grind of the strip sometimes allowed Closser to delve into the pathos of his characters, but again that repetitiveness made even that attempt at storytelling depth feel like going to the same well a few too many times. To make this more than a simple triumph of conceptual design, Closser needs to up the narrative ante while still staying true to the comic strip roots that are so important to him. Breaking the rules wouldn't be such a bad thing, as so many classic strips became classics precisely because they broke the established rules of the day.

Thirty Days of CCS #12: Joyana McDiarmid

Joyana McDiarmid's first two chapters of her serial Long Division start off in a mental institution and work backward from there, as we follow Elena's first days at the hospital and find out how she wound up there. The comic notes up front that "while based on real events, this is a work of fiction". This makes sense, as the narrative is too fluid to be precisely autobiographical, but the specific details of life in a mental hospital feel well understood and experienced. Whether that's from McDiarmid's own experiences or visiting someone in such an institution is irrelevant, of course.What the book does demonstrate is the insidious, destructive power of depression, one whose effect is that one's house is built on sand. In other words, for a depressive, any kind of sudden trauma or distress has the effect of sending them into a tailspin. What's worse, depression has a way of destroying friendships and relationships because the depressed person doesn't know how to seek help, or worse, doesn't feel like they deserve help. McDiarmid covers all of this ground in this comic, but it's her visual approach that makes the comic particularly interesting.

This is a story of a young woman who is struggling, but McDiarmid has the important understanding that this mental illness is one related to neurochemistry. One's brain and brain chemicals simply aren't working right, and the result is a profound effect on mood and behavior. McDiarmid gets at a problem intrinsic to treating mental illness: some perceive it as a sign of being weak, that one should simply "get over" bad feelings and move on. Others fear the stigma of being "crazy" and never coming back from that label. McDiarmid portrays that illness as a series of nerve endings, emphasizing the somatic nature of people as being made up of bones, nerves and flesh. There's a drawing early in the first issue where a pill Elena swallows dissolves in her stomach, gets transferred to her blood stream and then starts acting on her synapses. Drawing the nervous system winds up being an easy and clever way to draw depression as a series of roots, of tangled lines, as a maze that one gets lost in.

Elena's backstory reveals the ways in which depression can prevent one from emotional self-care. That's especially true since Elena appears to be bi-polar when she suddenly has a burst of energy and announces that she and her friends can make things with an Etsy store. At the same time, she wasn't able to communicate her needs to her boyfriend, a sometimes demanding and emotionally distant person. That clouded her judgment when another man showed interest in her and she wasn't honest with herself regarding her feelings and the boundary necessary in such a situation. When she confessed to her boyfriend that she had kissed him, that sent him into a self-righteous frenzy. Going home, McDiarmid illustrates the depressive mindset perfectly by drawing everyone on the bus out of self-destructive words. The present-day scenes in the hospital are bracing and awful, as they reveal the purpose of most such hospitals is to make sure you don't kill yourself and take your medication. One is lucky if one finds oneself in a hospital with truly compassionate caregivers, especially in a situation where Elena technically checked herself in. The frequently open-framed pages give the narrative a certain fluidity that's akin to the ways in which days can run into each other when experiencing depression, and how those days and details can blur. This is a bracing but humane and forgiving look at a powerfully difficult state of being, one that requires an enormous amount of work to dig out of. I'm especially interested to see in future chapters just how committed Elena becomes to the idea of getting better, the very possibility of such a thing.

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.