Thirty-One Days of CCS #19: Andy Warner

Andy Warner isn't shy about calling out his influences. In the case of Warner's clever, frequently funny book Brief Histories Of Everyday Objects, it's Larry Gonick's smart-ass The Cartoon History of the Universe. There are a number of differences, however. The most obvious is the visual approach. Gonick described historical events using a cartoony, exaggerated style that was somewhere between Robert Crumb and Milt Gross. Warner uses a steady, detailed naturalism that has a great deal of clarity thanks to his steady use of a thick line weight, a sparse use of spotting blacks, eschewing hatching and cross-hatching and a strategic use of grayscaling. Unlike Gonick, whose drawings are purposefully funny, even when drawing serious events, Warner draws humor from his writing. He might then exaggerate his drawings to emphasize a joke or a running gag, but the humor there is mostly that something absurd is happening in an otherwise normal scene. The humor is always conceptual.

For the purposes of this book, that approach works just fine. Unlike Gonick, who took on sweeping historical events and reduced them to vignettes, Warner examines a number of common inventions and tells the reader not just how they were made, but the social and historical context in which they arose. In other words, he makes small events big. Limiting himself to four pages per invention, Warner created a formula that makes each entry a perfect length for a quick read. As such, the book can be read straight through or an entry at a time, and Warner has rewards for each reader. For the reader who finishes the book in a single sitting, Warner provides a number of callback gags that accrue throughout the book. One of them is a running list of unfortunate inventors who didn't patent their work and had it stolen out from under them. Another is a character exhortation not to cheat at whatever games were being invented at the time ("I'll bash your head in!"). Then there's the general oddness with regard to Norway and inventions. The strips are still quite intelligible if you're reading out of order or over a long period of time, but they slyly play into one of Warner's themes in the way that exploitation is something that repeats itself.

Warner usually draws political cartoons in the form of comics journalism, and they are rarely about cheerful subjects. As such, it was a little jarring to see him crack wise for a book's worth of interesting trivia subjects. That said, he often turned that sense of humor on racism, sexism, and the exploitation of workers with regard to a number of inventions. For example, there's "Shampoo", which was the story of Sarah Breedlove, who was born just a couple of years after the abolition of slavery. Warner drew on the many tragedies in her life and racism that she encountered as she eventually became the first self-made female millionaire in American history. Warner relates a story of her being asked to pay a higher price at a movie theater because of her race, and she responded by building a huge entertainment complex that catered to African-Americans.

A number of the entries related stories where someone forced into a menial job found better and safer ways to do it. In "Shoes", for example, Afro-Dutch machinist/engineer wound up having to work as an apprentice shoemaker in Philadelphia in the 1870s because of the color of his skin. Shoes were still a luxury item that were made by hand, and he literally gave up his life to find a way of automating the lasting process of shoe construction (attaching the top to the sole), which was the last barrier to mass production and affordability. Years of neglecting his health led to him dying young, just after he finished his invention. Other stories discussed how certain inventions that benefited women (as described in "Sports Bras") had to be invented by women because men had no interest in doing so.

There are stories about inventors selling their patents for a pittance to companies that went on to make millions from their products. While there's a focus on how many of the inventions made life better, the ordinary quality of the most of the inventions allowed Warner to focus on topics like market forces. For some of the women and people of color, it was only their ability to generate money through the marketplace through their sheer ingenuity that lifted them out of poverty and put them on more equal ground. A large number of those inventors tended to put their money back into their community and fight for social causes. Other inventors had to grapple with their inventions being used to put people out of work; Walter Hunt invented the sewing machine but did not patent it once he realized its potential repercussions, but Elias Howe had no such compunctions. Lizzie Magie invented "The Landlord's Game" as a way of demonstrating the negative impact that land monopolies had on rent; it was later twisted around and sold as Monopoly in a way that celebrated monopolies! Warner's humorous approach to all of this is frequently grim and sardonic, as characters break the fourth wall and essentially say "What did you expect?".

While Warner's aim is to educate and inform, he makes sure to pack each four-page story with jokes. Essentially, there's a joke in nearly every other panel, and he jams each page with anywhere between four to eight panels. Another aim of the book is to get the reader to think about how much we take for granted in modern society and to consider what everyday life was like before and after particular inventions. While some inventions, like the paper clip, have a fairly small but relatively positive impact on everyday life, other goods have far darker legacies. Tea is the most prominent example and is an object lesson regarding trade imbalances. When tea made its way from China to England, the English took to it like no one else. The demand for tea was insatiable, so much so that England started to suffer from a perilous trade imbalance, because the Chinese had no interest in any products the English had. They wanted to be paid in silver, which soon put the country in trouble. So the English introduced opium to China and soon got the country hooked. This eventually led to a war, which China lost, leaving that empire a shell of itself for many years and wound up having enormous repercussions down the line. While this is an extreme example, it was one of many ways of Warner getting the audience to consider the consequences that the grinding gears of trade can have, both on everyday life and on history itself. That he is able to do this with a nod, a wink and a grin is what makes this such a satisfying and enjoyable read.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #18: Laura Terry

I remain amazed at how far Laura Terry has come as an artist from her earliest work at CCS. Her wit and storytelling chops were always there, as was her knack for dialogue, but everything else was rough and unpolished. She has gone from that to among the very best in terms of pure craft that CCS has to offer, and she hasn't lost a bit of her edge. Indeed, her two most recent minis are studiously cute on every single page, and she took such pains to subvert that cuteness in as dark a way as possible.

Take Adorable Empire, for example. It's not just the infestation of cute creatures that are absolutely lovable. Her design of the protagonist, dour as she is, is at once cartoony and realistic in terms of body type and the way she moves. The design is so appealing that I would read that character in any kind of story and know that I would be entertained by it. The plot of this short story is that cute creatures are infesting the city and that she can't escape them. She manages to resist them by ignoring them as much as possible, but when a coworker squeals with glee over their adorable qualities, she is soon overwhelmed and presumably consumed by them. Even when one of them eats a small dog, the creature remains huggable. Terry shows the main character trying to find a way to coexist, though after a disastrous trip to a grocery store, they try to make amends by stealing food. There is no resolution to this story; we began in media res and conclude with the main character walking down the street, trying to shake the creatures off of her umbrella. It's tempting to make some kind of metaphorical comparison for these creatures, but I think ultimately Terry had a funny idea and wanted to exploit it as directly and succinctly as possible.

Kitsune And The Land Of The Immortals has a similarly dark tone, as it subverts the idea of a magical being making a young protagonist's life a wonderful adventure and turns into a more traditional mythological structure: that of a bored god screwing around with mortals. Whereas Terry used color to break up what was an otherwise black-and-grey hued story in Adorable Empire, color here is a kind of poisonous serving of cotton candy. Everything is bright and colorful, but the titular goddess Kitsune is bored by the splendor and the reality of immortality as one of where she ran out of stuff to do. The mortal world is drably colored by way of comparison, and young Francie is performing a ceremony with a friend to summon her patron goddess. Kitsune appears behind the person doing the ceremony as a way of messing with Francie, and it wasn't the last time. The reader is reminded that no matter how cute things might appear to be, something horrible will inevitably happen. Kitsune has to attend an interspecies wedding between a spider goddess and a troll goddess, and after the beautiful ceremony, the inevitable of what happens with certain spiders and their mates occurs on the altar. What's hilarious is that another spider goddess finds the whole thing incredibly romantic, even as horror unfolds in front of everyone. The issue ends with Kitsune hearing Francie say that if she had powers, she could crush her enemies with them, so she took this as an invitation to whisk her away to the land of the immortals to find some enemies to crush. I'm curious to see how much darker Terry is willing to get with regard to this story, and if she's even interested in something like a redemption storyline for Kitsune. Regardless, this was a highly amusing first salvo in this promising story. 

Thirty-One Days of CCS #17: Jacob Bussiere & Steve Thueson

Quest Mania, by Steve Thueson. Thueson, like Bussiere (and Robyn Smith, whom I reviewed earlier), are all members of the the upcoming class of 2017. The conceit of this full-color comic is that there's a world where hipster-punk types go on Dungeons & Dragons-style quests. Adventurers Susie and Matt carry huge swords, wear Chucks, have nose rings and two-toned hair and make references to The Little Mermaid and Ren & Stimpy. I'm pretty sure this was drawn on a computer, but Thueson still manages to give the comic a gritty, ragged edge. What's most remarkable about the comic is that Thueson is able to simultaneously tell a slice-of-life relationship story as well as a perfectly credible sword-and-sorcery yarn. There's an especially funny sequence where Matt chides Susie for trying to kill a vicious giant spider because it wasn't vegan to do so. There's angst about being an adventurer because it's affecting Susie's relationship with her partner Kris, there are money woes solved by going on a quest for an idol, treasure rooms guarded by reptilian rock bands, etc. The bright, occasionally lurid colors work well, especially the creepy purples. I could actually Theuson making this a continuing feature by adding characters, giving the series a bit more complexity as subplots form on both sides of the genre divide.

Bubblegum Comix, by Jacob Bussiere. This is very much in the Chuck Forsman style of stories about disturbed teens, only Bussiere adds several meta-levels to the narrative. It starts out with a boy getting bullied who later kills a classmate after one insult too many. In this case, it was when the boy dressed up like the androgynous pop singer Sylvester, a bizarre and funny detail that made the actual murder no less horrifying. The scene pulls back to reveal that the kid was the subject of a murder-exploitation show and a teenage girl & her much older boyfriend were watching it. In a clever panel-to-panel sweep of her room, Bussiere reveals a lot of details about her: she loves death metal, stuffed animals, Sailor Moon and follows a "trucrime-boyz" tumblr. Using the same 2x3 grid and the same series of head shots in profile, Bussiere essentially recreates the same conditions of bullying and abuse for the girl (whom they refer to as "skunk"), only she reacts to her surroundings by just wanting to escape forever. There's a remarkable two-page sequence toward the end of the story where every panel has a crude or awful image: a wrist slit by a razor, a pentagram, a child's drawing of a crying figure, etc. What follows are two densely cross-hatched pages where it seems the previous images are each thoughts flickering through her mind. She's driving her car with her boyfriend asleep next to her, death metal blaring and the road ahead of her. One gets the impression that while she's not exactly, the tight, slight smile on her face reveals that this is happy as she's going to get. Bussiere's sense of design and composition really carry the story, as he tries to exercise as much restraint as possible with regard to dialogue. He packed a lot of power into a very short story, and it seems clear that he has a future with regard to these sorts of intense character studies.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #16: Amelia Onorato

It was driving me bonkers for a bit, but I finally figured out whose work Amelia Onorato reminds me of: Caitlin Skaalrud. I doubt that they were aware of each other's presence until perhaps recently, but it's clear that they processed a similar set of influences with regard to character design as well as an impeccable ability to draw complex but engaging backgrounds. Throw in a mutual interest in subverting sexist fantasy tropes, and you have two artists who, in different ways, have tapped into an ever-growing zeitgeist that's absorbed fairy tales, manga and fantasy stories and is responding to them in very personal but also political ways.

The third issue of Onorato's breakthrough series, Burn The Bridges Of Arta, speaks to a number of issues: male privilege, the exploitation of children, and the ways in which class stratification hardens into cultural institutions of injustice. Young Apollonia Ford began the series wondering what had happened to her sister when she got married. Eventually, a lower-class artisan who worked for her father, a highly esteemed architect, the awful secret of their beautiful city: as a matter of ritual sacrifice, the cornerstones of all new buildings contain one of the family members of the architect who built it. In a society meant to mimic Victorian England (with a touch of Charles Dickens with regard to some of the colorful side characters), women are meant to either serve, be wives, or simply to look pretty--and nothing else. The intelligent and willful Apollonia is well aware of her eventual fate and knows that she can't avoid it, which is why her father taking her for a "drive" to see the other buildings he designed is so genuinely disturbing. His cheerful and almost nostalgic affect shows more genuine affection shown toward his buildings than the children he sacrificed. He's also well aware that this will be his fate at some point in the future, and this helps perpetuate the cycle.

The second main plot running through the story has involved laborer Orie Foster and his clever, vivacious wife Mercy. Artisanal laborers know only too well what's involved in the construction of new buildings, and Foster couldn't bear to let "Polly" not know. As grim as the main storyline is, Onorato allows for increasing rays of hope and humor in the way that Orie and Mercy relate to one another, especially after Orie tells Mercy. This issue sees a long, mostly comedic sequence that also lays a bit of narrative pipe where Mercy goes back to her old job to obtain certain papers. It looks like Onorato has particular fun drawing Mercy, who's loud, big and bold. In a book filled with delicate buildings and delicately-designed upper-class characters, it's Mercy's lack of such delicacy that makes her so distinctive. The end of this chapter looks like it's winding the story down a bit, and I'll be curious to see if Onorato salvages a happy ending for the main character and what form that might take, given the narrative rules she's established for herself.

Sorgin is a one-shot that's an immaculately-constructed and heartbreaking story about genocide. Onorato exercises remarkable restraint with regard to the specifics of the ethnic cleansing that occur in the story, focusing instead on the story's central plot point of their supposedly being a witch near the mountains who could make children disappear. The story revolved around a teenage girl named Rochelle who finds said "witch", who happens to be a man, and she brings him three children to "disappear", i.e, to lead them over a mountain pass to safe territory. Everything about this story is subtle, as Onorato uses misdirection (are there witches involved?) while adding small touches like ethnicity-identifying armbands that Rochelle and the younger children must wear. From there, each subsequent journey brings about more dangerous repercussions, as she's shot on one mission and he has to deal with soldiers. Ultimately, this is a story about refuge and paying back kindnesses out of a sense of duty and compassion, centered around that central idea of magic. As the man and later Rochelle understand, what they do is a form of magic, one centered around the idea of empathy. Onorato's visual approach is different here than in Arta, as she adds a lot of greyscale to add weight to a lot of panels that are filled with blank space. It's different from her other project's crisp black and white and painstaking attention to background detail, but it also goes to show how that detail served a narrative presence: an omnipresent reminder to the reader that the city was all around them, it could not be escaped, and it was built through horrific means. In Sorgin, the open country and freer composition underscored the possibility of freedom. The latter comic probably would have been more effective in color, but she more than gets her ideas across as her character design and use of body language filled the reader in on a lot of what was unsaid.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #15: Anna Sellheim, Tillie Walden

Anna Sellheim is an example of a cartoonist whose versatility and willingness to explore different kinds of stylization make allow her to modulate the emotional content of her comics. Her comics are also powerfully intimate, even those that are genre or fiction. For example, Malai is a story about a space explorer writing a letter to a close friend. When Sellheim is drawing the astronaut dictating her letter, it's in crisp black & white. When she talks about the planets that she visited, it's in glorious, melting color. The key sequence is when she visited a planet where one's emotions take physical form when you are on the planet's surface. For some, they felt wonder and joy, and they had a great time. For the explorer, she was gripped by fear, which brought on pain, despair and panic as physical forms that tried to snuff her out. Sellheim then takes a narrative left turn as thinking about that experience made her realize that what she was really feeling hurt about was the friendship she felt disintegrating, and that experienced forced her to speak plainly about her feelings. It's as good a metaphor for anxiety as I've ever read, as well as a prescription for boldly living. It was that contrast of styles that made the metaphor really come to life.

Fractured is a first-person slice-of-life comic about a woman with overwhelming social anxiety who has just left a party. Whether or not this is Sellheim's actual experience is not relevant, because what she captures on the page is so remarkably true-to-life. Essentially, it's about a horrendous anxiety attack that has a painful, somatic component. In the throes of pain and confusion, all she wishes for is her death, the gift of simply not existing. What helps her resist acting on that feeling is a sort of sense of pride and of wanting to control her own narrative. Killing herself would end her narrative in an unsatisfying way, so the only choice she has is to wait for the feeling to pass and hope things get better. In this comic, Sellheim mostly uses a naturalistic style with heavy black and white contrasts on each page after the party, which is intentionally bright and airy. Like Malai, Sellheim sets up a single point related to the possibility of human connection and brings it home hard after a small bit of narrative misdirection.

There For Us was originally a webcomic done in collaboration with Tillie Walden. It's about each of their experiences visiting Planned Parenthood; Sellheim to check out a lump under her breast and Walden to address debilitating menstrual cramps. Using a more naturalistic style, Sellheim uses a very thin line weight and makes extensive use of black & white contrasts to explore her understanding of Planned Parenthood as a child and how friendly and welcoming the experience was for her as an adult. Walden's contribution is in her typical thin, long line that veers from sharply detailed to ghostly and sketchy--especially her character designs. Growing up in Texas, she had been fed negative propaganda regarding PP, and she was delighted to get a doctor who listened to her concerns, felt empathy for her and then worked out a solution. It is astounding how rare that can be sometimes, especially with regard to issues related to women's health. The mini was done in support of Planned Parenthood after Congress was threatening to defund it.

While these were all solid comics, the real meat of Sellheim's work is her highly stylized autobio work, and Everything's Fine: And On And On is a perfect example. Her avatar for these comics is a figure in a red hoodie with a face made of interwoven fibers and no human features. All of her friends get their own brand of stylization as well, but Sellheim's avatar is a shorthand for the defenses she puts up against the world. These comics are all about Sellheim trying to figure herself out and how best to deal with life considering that she struggles with mental illness. Beyond the vivid use of color and unusual character design, what sets these comics apart is Sellheim's pitch-black sense of humor. She also manages to adapt instances of intensely awkward interactions into painfully awkward humor, like one strip where she talks about not wanting to date a particular guy because he's a terrible writer. When pressed, she sticks her foot in mouth and states she doesn't want to date any artists, period because they are "over-sensitive entitled babies". Of course, she said this to a carload full of artists and added a weak "um...no offense". Sellheim ponders her own sexuality and wonders if she may be asexual while being bombarded by love songs on the radio and also relates a couple of examples of dating-related interactions that remind her why she hates it so much. When the prospective guy says "I really like Dilbert, Frank Miller & Frank Cho" and she responds "...I see.", I laughed out loud. The comic closes on a therapeutic technique that actually works, which further demonstrates the flexibility of this approach. Sellheim can veer from the darkly comedic to the sincere, and the stylization allows for both.

Finally, Sellheim's short story "You Were Beautiful" is an interesting departure, as she uses a grey wash and fairly naturalistic drawing in this depiction of a woman talking about her life after a relationship that slowly went south, but it was one she tolerated because she was so attracted to him. Sellheim really gets into anatomy here: noses, lips, torsos, backs, and more. It's a depiction of a kind of romanticized objectification that allowed her to ignore his less pleasant tendencies. It's a bitter little vignette, where the protagonist delivers that bitterness mostly to herself.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #14: Mathew New

Mathew New accomplishes a neat trick in his second and third issues of Billy Johnson And His Duck Are Explorers: he actually manages to successfully attach an interesting back-story and develops sub-plots to this bit of total nonsense. New's storytelling remains as clear and simple as ever, and he makes judicious use of color in these stories that are part Tintin, part Indiana Jones. The titular character is a janitor who also goes off on adventures, only he's terrible at it, relying on a Let's Go... style guide to give him advice on how to navigate deadly traps and tombs. The titular talking duck, Professor Barrace Wilcox, is a teacher at the university. That he is a duck is rarely remarked upon, a bit of absurdity that is in itself a running gag.

New also has a Lara Croft-type character whom the duo encounter at the beginning of issue #2, which begins with an elegant heist that is later loudly interrupted by the bumbling Billy. This is a classic tomb raider type of adventure that not only involves a cursed ring, it involves Barrace having to deal with the fact that he put on the cursed ring when he and Billy were there before. They were only returning in an effort to perhaps get the curse removed. There's a lich-like creature waiting to be freed, the desperate gambit of Barrace using Billy's sword (apparently a magical blade that he has named Mr. Jabbers), and a handy bus running over a haunted suit of armor. Underneath all of the silliness is a rock-solid plot and an internal logic that runs flawlessly. At the end of the story, we are introduced to a mysterious, shadowy figure who has a special interest in Billy and Barrace. New's use of color is not merely functional; the way he switches from red to grey in one sequence creates a beautiful contrast that makes the story more exciting. Jon Chad and Caitlin Rose Boyle both contribute backups which are amusing, but Chad's greater use of detail and Boyle's greater stylization are both jarring in their own way. It points to how perfect New's approach is with regard to this particular story as he balances the expected action-adventure tropes as well as the story's comedic elements.

Issue three is a classic desert adventure that's not quite as wacky as issue two, but it actually does a bit to add depth to the characters--especially Barrace the duck. On a search for a supposedly extinct bear, the duo have to deal with their own incompetence in preparing for the desert, famous explorer Hal Hardwick and his mummy assistant, sand storms and what might be magical intervention. This issue isn't as crisply paced as the previous one and goes on just a bit too long, but I enjoyed the fact that there were no pointless fights and everyone involved parted on good terms. Once again, his palette is tasteful and assists the narrative. New seems intent on portraying action without indulging in actual violence, which makes this unusual for an action-adventure comic, even one aimed at a YA audience. While we got indications of this in past issues, this seems to have been the first one where New firmly decided that he wasn't going to double down on absurdity at all times, but would rather start to flesh out his characters and their world. That's both from a narrative perspective as well as an emotional one. That focus on feelings isn't just tacked-on; it's earned through the narrative and the interactions between the main characters. At this point, and to my surprise, New has found himself with a potential book on his hands, as he's managed to organically open up some surprising narrative avenues as well as have his cake and eat it to with regard to silly but still fully-formed protagonists.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #13: Robyn Smith

Robyn Smith's The saddest angriest black girl in town is a fascinating expression of self and a nuanced understanding of context with regard to race. It deals with a number of related issues: the concept of being othered, how anxiety and mental illness are further exacerbated by these issues, and the paradoxical idea of having her identity both erased and highlighted at the same time. Living in mostly-white Vermont amplified what Smith would feel anywhere as a person of color in the US, especially as a non-native (she's from Jamaica). Smith's expression of her feelings is raw and powerful, just as her skill with a pencil is delicate and expressive. The comic is also exceptionally well-written; it is a howl against forces both external and internal, but it's her tremendous sense of restraint on each page that leads to so much tension.

The comic is divided into three sections: "sad", "angry" and "black". The first section is about her acute awareness of how being black in a white space is uniquely discomforting for many of the white people she encounters. At the same time, that constant level of what ranges from open hostility to negation caused her to doubt her own personal narrative. Consensus societal opinion and behavior is powerful, even when it's turned against you. There's a brutal sequence where a co-worker sees a supply sign that says "Black matting" and adds the word "lives" after "black" in front of Smith, and then he cheerily addresses it by saying "Sorry! I just couldn't help myself.!" Her drawings in this section practically leap off the page with regard to the emotion she puts on the page--especially when she's smiling and being friendly to a white customer who literally walks away without a word. Once again, it's a total negation of her as a person.

"angry" is all about the resentment she feels because she's never had a choice but to be constantly made aware that she's black. She even cops to the idea that even if she's making it all up, "it's the potential that's killing me. It's me not knowing how uncomfortable my blackness is making you." Smith then rattles off a series of incidents that seemed innocent at first but that started to build as even well-meaning people were still in the practice of othering her on a regular basis. There's a remarkable sequence where she talks about hearing the n-word in several different contexts in White River Junction, feeling angry and incapable of expressing that anger. Each instance is different: academic, quoting music, in a meta way, and in a joking way. Each time, it doesn't matter, because the white people who said the word didn't know or care what effect saying that word might have. Words are weapons, and racial slurs historically have been stand-ins for a threat of violence so as to put a person of color in their place.

"black" is a statement about her role in the lives of white people, simply asking to exist as a person, not a symbol or metaphor. Smith emphasizes that while she may make other people uncomfortable by the mere fact of her existence, it's not her job to make people feel comfortable. The comic has an existential quality to it in that Smith addresses the concern not just that white people are othering her, but that at a fundamental level she may never be able to know if white people aren't othering her. That essential doubt is what leads her to want the space not just to exist freely in a space, but to demand that her feelings should be respected with regard to her experiences. Smith is remarkably adept at aligning words and images in unusual ways. She uses the grid for mini-narratives, uses open-page layouts and dissolves panel borders on other pages as a reflection of an anxiety attack. The cover uses translucent vellum, cleverly finding ways to express that feeling of erasure. On the back cover, for example, there's a nicely-drawn image of a street in White River Junction. If you turn the page, you can see Smith's own image on the page underneath it, barely visible. This comic is succinct, visually striking and powerful on a number of different levels. It's an excellent early work for a promising artist.