CCS Extra: Reilly Hadden

Somehow, I missed that Reilly Hadden had sent me the final issue of his Astral Birth Canal series when I was covering his work last December. Issue #13 wrapped up some storylines and left some questions open as well, which will be picked up in his follow-up series, Astral Forest. This has been one of my favorite-ever CCS-related series, packing fantasy, horror, slice-of-life intimacy and even women's professional wrestling into a single and often bewildering package.

This issue is subtitled "Ghosts Stories," and it is a self-contained story that also acts as a framing device for last issue's cliffhanger ending. It all sort of hooks together a number of elements present in the series without quite explaining them all the way. For example, it follows the story of Bork, the god-warrior and his lover Valentina, a human pro wrestler. Bork was on earth to capture a "disgraced god-king" but was decapitated by him in the previous issue. This issue follows Bork's rebirth and Val's apparent death. The framing device is a series of stories told by a bird-creature and his apprentice on a boat, sailing the titular Astral Birth Canal. This is the first time that the series' title has been addressed since the 0 issue that brought humans to another realm by way of a video game. The bird-creature is similar to the sort we've seen in the other main storyline of the series, and it's clear that he has some sort of influence over life and death.

What makes this issue so effective is that Hadden doesn't burden the reader much with details and continuity. Instead, the focus is on the bird-creature's storytelling, which is almost folksy in tone. In many respects, this issue recapitulates the running theme for the series: the thin veil between life and death. The Canal actually being real and accessible for travel is a manifestation of the series' many deaths, resurrections, and reincarnations. It's an incubator for myths and legends, but what makes the series fascinating is that Hadden depicts these stories as being terrifying rather than heroic. People are thrown into the middle of a horrifying and inexplicable magical world and forced to attempt to survive. The reader is thrown into the middle of an epic storyline with no backstory, meaning that one simply has to accept the absurdity of the situation when reading it. This issue brought a small amount of clarity while creating any number of new mysteries. Throughout the series, Hadden kept the reader guessing and constantly entertained as he pursued his storytelling whims, and I'm curious to see what the tone of the new series will be like.

Minis: Aatmaja Pandya's Phantom

Aatmaja Pandya's Phantom is a fascinating, autobiographical look at the immigrant experience and gentrification. Pandya's family emigrated to Queens from India, and she was born and raised in that borough, "the most diverse city in the world." Returning to live in her old neighborhood as an adult, Pandya explores her feelings regarding gentrification and young white hipsters moving in. Her anger and frustration are palpable, in part because Queens made her (and other people of color) feel rooted. The young people moving in aren't looking to put down roots, in her mind; they're there for the experience and will move on after a couple of years. She explains that she understands why they're moving in and can't fault them, but she still feels frustrated.

That frustration is related to being a daughter of immigrants and a person of color in America. She noted that being in Queens allowed her to feel "invisible, in the right way." She didn't stick out, nor was she made to feel different by others, because she was one person of color among many. In turn, that helped her feel rooted to this area. It was where she grew up and learned how to ride a bike like any other American kid, but it's also where her mother taught her Gujarati. It's a place that belonged to her and people like her.

The fear is that as Queens continues to change, she won't have a place that roots her anymore. At a certain point, she may be forced to concede that "it doesn't belong to me anymore, either." This is a measured but emotional howl at forces beyond her control and the ways in which spaces that once were claimed by marginalized people can be taken away from them. It's about how colonialism is intrinsically bound with gentrification in ways that are often invisible to those moving into neighborhoods that are suddenly considered to be desirable. Pandya's use of colored pencils (the comic is printed solely in blue) is subtle and expressive, like in depicting the bemused smile on her face when she tells a friend "I like Queens, too." The sequence that ends the book is a memory of learning the alphabet of Gujarati. There's a lovely drawing of young Pandya on a single page, her form taking up the lower right-hand corner of the page. On the final page, she says, "Then we left, and I forgot it all." The same image is repeated, only it's now smudged and partly erased. It's a lovely but bittersweet encapsulation of someone who is trying to come to terms with the ways in which rootedness is often a luxury that immigrants and people of color in the US do not enjoy.

Uncivilized: Dash Shaw's Structures 57-66

The Structures series of minicomics from Uncivilized speak to publisher Tom Kaczynski's professional interests as an architect. Of course, the nature of structures--especially man-made ones--has also always been a part of Kaczynski's personal, aesthetic project. In particular, the ways in which we interact with structures and how they explicitly and implicitly represent aspects of the wider culture and interests of capitalism is at the center of his work. The relationship between evolution and civilization vs. humanity's basest instincts also informs everything he does. As such, it's clear that when he assigned an artist an issue of Structures to do, he was interested in seeing how they would interpret the concept. In a sense, it's a kind of anthology series, riffing on a single theme in radically different ways.

Dash Shaw did Structures 57-66, and his take on the concept was surprisingly clear and linear. Earlier in his career, Shaw went heavy on coded symbolism and metaphor in his comics. In more recent years, his storytelling has become more straightforward in some ways, especially his use of line and narrative. His use of color is what's become the interesting wild card for him, using a wildly expressionistic style to convey emotion and meaning. It's interesting to see him return purely to line and not color in this comic, especially since it's so straightforward and even whimsical. Each drawing is a sort of fantasy of a building project outside his house. The first is a "Monument To Jane," his partner. The monuments utilize a thick but simple version of his line, laid out as a kind of sculptural montage. For Jane, we see her from various angles engaged in various activities with an assortment of instruments.

There's a warm and loving monument to his parents, engaged in a hug that merges their faces. There's a soaring monument to Tezuka, a funny and solid monument to Gertrude Stein, a monument to Francis Picabia that mimics that artist's drawings and even a monument to "the kicker of the monument." Shaw's sense of humor can be dry at times because he's so committed to the reality of whatever scenario he creates, but the reality is that a lot of his work is whimsical and sometimes emphatically funny. This comic is a nice workout for him that allows him to explore a number of different shapes and align them with concepts that gently tweak the art world.

Minis: Jason Bradshaw's Things Go Wrong

Robyn Chapman continues to release interesting minicomics as part of her Paper Rocket Minicomics publishing concern, and Jason Bradshaw's Things Go Wrong is one of the most recent. Visually, it's in the same kind of rubbery, bigfoot style favored by artists like Sean Knickerbocker and Rusty Jordan. The characters are exaggerated and have odd dimensions; and the main character, James, takes up a lot of space on the page. This is by design: he fills up panels, bleeds over into other panels and essentially forces the reader to really examine him carefully from top to bottom. Though much of the story is done in a naturalistic fashion, Bradshaw's aim is to make the reader aware of the composition of each page. He wants them to see not just a character but also the process of what makes up the character: lines and shapes. The idea is to feel the way the character takes up space so that when he gets sick, the reader's reaction is a visceral one.

All of this is in a story about disease and depression. James is a sign painter and artist suffering from a debilitating parasite. This is a comic about how mental and physical illness can form a devastating synergy, with each affecting the other in turn. James is in pain, a feeling that initially inspires him to do paintings about this experience. However, given a chance at a cure, he opts not to take his medicine and stops doing anything but his work murals. He becomes suicidal by way of self-neglect, wanting to die but not being willing to actually kill himself. He's content to simply stop taking of himself in the hope that he'll be gone at some point. The blue wash for this comic speaks to that melancholy, as the reader is forced to watch him experience intense, unsettling pain along with losing control of his bowels. It's a resignation that's not just lacking a will to live, but rather it's almost a kind of self-punishment. James feels like he doesn't deserve to live because he has nothing to offer as an artist (and by extension, as a person).

The first issue ends with James at a low point, waiting for his death as he does nothing to take care of himself. That said, a future issue is mentioned, which means that this story is not yet over. I'll be curious to see how Bradshaw resolves this story and if James can find a way out. Notably, James has no friends or family to help him; that solitude is glaringly clear as he struggles through life. It's also a commentary on how the lack of human connection can accelerate depression and how our worst self-images and self-talk can bring us down. The slight touch of the grotesque in the drawings served to emphasize the ugliness that James felt.

Minis: Suzy & Cecil

Gabriella Tito and Sally Ingraham's mini Suzy & Cecil is a cute, sincere and low-key series of vignettes about a girl and her dog. Produced by Frank Santoro's Comic Workbook program in Pittsburgh, one can definitely see evidence of Santoro's influence. There's a strict four-panel grid that Ingraham never deviates from. There's also a highly expressive use of color throughout the comic, using colored pencil.  That includes color being extended to the actual line, giving the entire comic a larger-than-life feel that contrasts with the low-key stories and stripped-down pencils. The comic follows the adventures of Suzy and her dog Cecil, as they poke around the city and hang around the diner where her mom works. Cecil is a floor-cleaner, going after scraps when they fall on the floor. The pigtailed Suzy is an adventurer, going on boat rides, long walks, car rides and sojourns through back alleys with her dog. 

The results are pleasantly meandering and remind me a bit of Melissa Mendes' Freddy Stories. That's a comic about a tomboy and her dog, negotiating the world on her own terms thanks to a number of understanding adults in her life. This is similar and despite the expansive use of color, the essence of each strip is rooted in rock-solid cartooning fundamentals. There's an emphasis on the relationship between figures in space, even when the figures themselves are quickly sketched out. For example, drawings of hands and feet are basic--even crude at times. However, the emotional relationship between characters is made clear thanks to body language and gesture. Indeed, Ingraham probably could have stripped things down even further for the sake of clarity, as some lines looked overly fussy. 

Of course, the use of color is the most eye-catching aspect of these comics. In a comic that aggressively sticks to fundamentals in every other aspect of page design, the use of color is strikingly expressionistic. One page is colored all in lavender. Another features a yellow-orange ground and a purplish night sky. Other pages mix pink, blue and yellow. It's fun to look at and provides a great deal of variety. The enliven the small moments of the story, like Cecil encountering squirrels and birds, Cecil or Suzy snoring loudly and ruminations on youth and mortality. This is very much a comic that's about celebrating the smallest of moments of youth and preserving them. It builds a balance between being totally unaware of time, like Cecil, and feeling like you have all the time in the world, like Suzy. In the case of both, there's an awareness passed on to the reader that time's march is inexorable, and so we should particularly enjoy the smallest of moments. 

Koyama: Chris Kuzma's Lunch Quest

Chris Kuzma's book Lunch Quest is sort of like Paper Rad decided to do a children's comic. The color scheme is toned down from "visual assault" to "vivid," but the big, black eyes and roundness of the character design are very similar to that aesthetic. The page layout is also quite simple, with a base 2 x 3 panel grid that is collapsed into fewer panels as well as splash pages. It feels like the book is a mash-up of several different ideas, cleverly linked by a framing device that sets up what is non-stop motion.

It's about a hungry rabbit character dressed in a business suit who comes home looking for his lettuce. Kuzma quickly establishes a premise and then exhausts it as he leads the reader around the page, then quickly adds an absurdist premise that turns the story upside down. In this case, it's finding a portal to another world inside of the lettuce bin, which shows him a couple of skateboarding kids getting into a series of escalating challenges with a rabbit master. Kuzma slips between standard panel-to-panel transitions and flattened, full-page open layouts that twist and turn through a variety of distinctive visual cues. The same pattern is repeated in the second half of the book, where the suited rabbit happens to witness an epic dance battle.

Kuzma does a version of Keren Katz's approach to comics here, which is strongly related to her own dance background. Kuzma thinks a lot about bodies in motion and the ways in which they flatten and become distorted. Kuzma seizes on that distortion and freezes it, creating a tension between the relentless motion and that momentary pose that's a slice of that motion. The use of color and the pleasing, friendly character design make that distortion friendly and cool for a young reader, as they lead up to fun resolutions for the frenetic action on the pages. The final part of the book is a recapitulation of the first two sections, as the rabbit frantically searches for lettuce and discovers a half-dozen new worlds that get just a panel each. The final reveal is funny and sweet, but Kuzma also adds a gag on top of it. This comic is a great way of introducing non-naturalistic storytelling to young readers, reconnecting them to basic concepts of shape and showing them how it can tell a story. It's also funny, good-natured and very slightly scatological, making it a perfect read for kids between seven and ten years old.

Minis: Brandon Lehmann's Womp Womp

Brandon Lehmann's Womp Womp is a magazine-size mini that shows off his solid gag chops on page after page. He's at his best when he digs into a subject and then comes at its concept from a variety of different angles. The funniest strip in the book is "Double Dragon," which posits the existential question of what video game flunkies do to pass the time when they're waiting for the heroes to come fight them. In this particular case, I spent a lot of hours playing that game years ago, and so I was familiar with the flunkies in question. There's one guy holding a knife, yearning for someone to throw it at. There's another guy perpetually holding a barrel over his head, who would put it down if he wasn't known as "the barrel guy," where "the pain in my muscles lets me know that I'm truly alive." Lehmann nails the awkwardness of their poses while strip-mining the concept for every laugh he can.

"Bad Veterinarian" takes that titular premise and runs with it. It's not just that the vet, in this case, is bad; but his relentless and clueless cheerfulness is also maddening. After mistaking a cat for a dog, he goes on to ask the customer if he should do some shots and then suggests putting the cat to sleep. The contrast of the increasingly angry and baffled customer and the blissfully clueless vet drives the humor. Lehmann deliberately uses a static character design and layout style in order to create this particular comedic rhythm, with eight panels per page. When the customer's eyes start to bulge in rage and disbelief, the vet's dull eyes heighten the gag.

"True Cat Confessions" is an extended riff on a cat's shame and eventual acceptance in using a litterbox, complete with a desert dream sequence. "Some Random Guy Falls Into An Abstract Nihilistic Misery Hole" is exactly as advertised, complete with a being telling the guy that everything is meaningless. It winds up being a commercial for Subway sandwiches. There's a comic about a cool cop trying to peddle the notion of going back to using flip phones in what winds up being an ad. There's an exaggerated, lengthy story of a stereotypical rich dandy being forced to wash dishes and then recalling the incident. Lehmann's comics border on being shaggy-dog stories at times, which works better in some instances than others. That said, the cumulative effect of those strips makes the comic greater than the sum of its parts, with that relentless but dry conceptual absurdity creating expectations for greater silliness on every page. There's a deliberate stiffness to the art that's off-putting at times, but Lehmann varies his approach enough that it's not a distraction. Lehmann definitely shows the potential to be an excellent humorist in the vein of Michael Kupperman or Martha Keavney.