31 Days Of CCS, #33: Fantology Issue 2

The second issue of Kristen Shull and Emily Zea's Fantology arrived just under the gun for inclusion in this feature. Unsurprisingly, this issue was generally superior to the first, often in surprising ways. For editors figuring out how best to assemble an anthology, the second issue is the one where all the kinks are generally hammered out in terms of process and production. In an anthology where very little is at stake in terms of money but a lot is at stake in terms of editorial credibility, young editors have to take risks on the kind of work they accept. There were a few newcomers in this issue and the returns were fairly positive on them; indeed, some of these stories were the best in the whole volume. 

One of the more surprising and delightful aspects of this volume is that the shared-world conceit of the first volume not only carried over here, but that some artists used the creations of other artists from the first volume to strong effect. This is another similarity to the Cartozia Tales series edited by Isaac Cates, only without the OuBaPo-style rigidity with regard to rules and switching every issue. This felt like a relaxed and fun one for artists to play together in the same world. Speaking of relaxed, the issue's theme of "Flora & Fauna" struck a nice balance between having no theme and having one that produced too much of the same thing. Each artist was simply compelled to come up with a new animal or plant during the course of their story. Some of them were incidental, and some of them drove the plot. 

While fantasy stories often devolve into world-building exercises, it was clear that Fantology's artists were generally far more interested in character-building. The characters drove the plots, and in the cases where they were returning characters, the stories served to expand on their histories and personalities. All of this is also tightened up by the anthology's narrator and gimmick Bartlebee the Bard, who not only informed the readers as to the anthology's theme, but also introduced each story and served as a natural piece of interstitial material. Unfortunately, one thing that got by the editors was matching up page numbers and the table of contents, which only had a passing resemblance to each other for many entries. 

The continuing adventures of several characters were certainly highlights. Shull's own saga of Sabi and Kata (the elf and the wizard) once again had an episode that was not only entirely satisfying on its own merits but also moved along the larger plot. It even hooked in a character from a group introduced by Leise Hook in the first issue. Given that the main characteristic of the character was his lusciousness, this was right up Shull's alley. Catalina Rufin's continuing adventures of Brono and Satu, the barbarian and his child, continued to be pitch-perfect. While retaining a rough fantasy aesthetic, the gentle quality of the story belied its concept. Filipa Estrela's gentle saga of Frill and Frond, the mushroom person and goblin who became partners in the first issue, is expanded here as the parameters and boundaries of their relationship are tested. Indeed, this is less a fantasy comic than it is a comic about relationships with fantasy trappings, although Estrela made those trappings delightful. Emily Zea's "Troubled Waters" continues the adventures of Princess Trudy and pirate captain Troub. It's a funny and compelling story, as it's made clear that Troub is more closely connected to Trudy than she first let on. Zea's linework here seems considerably more rushed in this issue than the first, however. Alex Washburn's story about a group of dysfunctional explorers maintained its humor thanks to Washburn's thick line and irreverent storytelling. 

The most interesting artists that were new to me were Tao Tao Jones and Chelsi Fiore. The former wrote a compelling story about the Pea from the "Princess and the Pea" becoming a cherished heirloom to a family of servants, until one of them broke away and created her own country based around the pea's growth. Jones' line is thin and scribbly, which suits the material, although I found myself wishing her script was a bit larger. Fiore's story about a desert traveler encountering a fuzzy little potato-like animal was imaginatively drawn and worked well with its short length. It was not just a story about reuniting a child with their family but also about an explorer who respected the environment they traveled in. 

This anthology was filled with pleasant interactions in this particular world, proving that not every fantasy story has to be about conflict. Eddie O'Neill and Kay Brand told a story about a couple going hunting for eggs and herbs so they could have brunch together; the plot was thin, but it was all about fleshing out their dynamic as a couple. Emily Bradfield's story had a little more action, but it was about a witch and a new witch wishing to be her friend and work comrade and how routine can often prevent us from making connections. Rainer Kannenstine's story is a send-up of boastful fantasy tropes. Kat Ghastly offered up more of a psychedelic bit of lore than a story, but it worked as a visually impactful opener. 

There were three stories that particularly stood out. Keren Katz's detailing of how the coin-people introduced in the first issue reversed their process and undid everything that was purchased with them was both conceptually fascinating and heart-rending. In terms of style, there's no one who draws with her level of detail and conceptual power. Kevin Fitzpatrick's meaty story about a potions-master and his imprisonment was full of fascinating character details, ethically thorny dilemmas, and extensive mastery of light and dark contacts. Emil Wilson's story about hunters discovering a bear with an orange tree growing on it not only had an exciting blend of naturalism and weirdness, it also was emotionally complex and touching. 

At 252 pages, the volume felt a little bloated. There were several stories that were had to parse or process visually that could have been eliminated. While the slighter stories were enjoyable, this issue felt unbalanced in that direction. The more complex stories really stood out in this volume, but their tone was subdued by the lighter fare in some of the other stories. Creating a balance in an open-call anthology is extremely difficult, but it's a credit to Shull and Zea that they were able to sequence things in such a way that they were nearly able to pull it off. 

31 Days Of CCS, #32: Tillie Walden

It's fascinating to watch Tillie Walden's progression as an artist, because it's clear that with every project, she's adding some new technical skills to her toolbox. In her first book, it was hard to tell any of the characters apart, because Walden admitted that she didn't really like drawing people. She liked drawing buildings. She addressed that in subsequent work that was more directly character-oriented, while still keeping the key element of her work: a strain of magical realism that seeped onto every page until it became the new defacto reality. Walden mastering other formal elements, like a sophisticated use of color, made each subsequent work even richer, though she never strayed from the romantic fantasy elements in her comics.

Her most recent book, 2019's Are You Listening?, is a lot of things at once. It's a road story. It's a classic quest. It's a romance. It's science-fiction. It's magical realim. It's a highly personal story about paths that were clearly intimately familiar to Walden. At it's core, however, this is a story about trauma and how we deal with it. In particular, it's about how some people are not allowed to have the space to even speak their trauma and what happens because of it. 

It's the story of Bea and Lou, both running away from a small town in Texas for different reasons. For Lou, who's in her late 20s, she's running away from the trauma of her mother's death as well as the expectations put upon her as someone who developed the skills of a prodigy at a young age. Bea is in her late teens and is running away from an abusive situation, one where she has no voice to speak on it. All she can think to do is just run. She happens upon Lou, who takes pity on her, and together they drive through Texas. 

Lou is driving to see her aunt, while Bea lies to her about where she's going. Lou once again takes pity on her and allows her to simply travel with her. For about the first half of the book, Walden builds up both their stories and neuroses, hinting at their deeper roots, while drawing what amounts to a love letter to her Texas home. Walden builds a master class on the use of light, especially at night time. It's not simply dark on the road; it's a kaleidoscope of bruised pinks and purples, harsh oranges, and cheery yellows. The world becomes a little stranger and a little more stark on these back roads. 

When they meet a cat on the road and decide to return it to its owners. They name the cat Diamond, and it has a tendency to run away but lead them to useful places. This is when their journey becomes increasingly strange, as they seek out a town that doesn't exist on maps called West, and they are pursued by sinister agents of the Office of Road Inquiry, who badly want the cat. One of the running subplots in the book is Lou teaching Bea how to drive. It's a useful skill, but it's also a metaphor for the role Lou plays for Bea in this book. She's not a rescuer. She can't solve Bea's problems. She's not her mom or her sister or her lover. But Lou has been through some things and knows that if you can be mobile, you can outpace your problems for a while. 

They both learn lessons from the cat. The most important one that's revealed is that the cat, despite the belief of the Office of Road Inquiry and their own eyes, does not possess magic powers. The magic is in the land, available to anyone who sees it and believes in it. There are some spectacular chase scenes worthy of Carl Barks in the book; they are beautifully cartoony and ridiculous, but also terrifying. The heroes just barely stay a step ahead of their pursuers, we discover, because they want to stay ahead of them.They find West and Bea returns the cat because her will is far stronger than she understands. It's the steely will of a victim who refuses to be victimized again. It's the will of a survivor, and that's what Bea and Lou are.

The question "Are You Listening?" refers to how we listen to the land and ourselves--our own potential. Lou is a fascinating character because there are ways that she's lived a life similar to Walden's. As she depicted in Spinning, Walden spent years as a competitive ice skater, throwing her entire life into it, until she just quit. Walden then threw that intense discipline and work ethic into comics, completing six graphic novels in about five years' time and graduating from CCS. That too, took its toll. Being a prodigy doesn't necessarily just mean displaying great talent at a young age. It's a reflection of the obsessive need to be good at a certain thing and practicing it endlessly. Sometimes, you need a break. Sometimes, you need to visit your aunt, especially when other aspects of life come crashing down on you. Walden shows a great deal of kindness to these characters, allowing them to get what they need from this trip while supporting each other. She feels for both of them, because she understands what both went through, to different degrees. 

The only thing I wanted from this book that I didn't get was for it to be bigger. It needed to be French-album size in order to really stretch out its pages. It needed Texas to feel bigger. It needed the colors to really spread across its pages. The size and scope of its environment needed to swallow up its characters just a bit more, allowing them to grow in stature, emotionally speaking, when the time came. Despite the hundreds of pages Walden has drawn up to this point, featuring bold experiments and resonant characters, it still feels like this is all prologue. This was the first book of hers that started to balance her playful sense of experimentation with more personal storytelling, all while staying within her usual lane of exploring particular kinds of friendship and love. It's exciting seeing her on this journey. 

31 Days Of CCS, #31: Aaron Cockle

Aaron Cockle continued to roll on with three new issues of his enigmatic series Andalusian Dog in 2020. Ostensibly about the development of and playing of an apocalyptic video game, Cockle's comics dig deep into the relationship between capitalism and metaphysics. In the January issue, Cockle makes notes that seem almost autobiographical at times in recalling hearing about a Samuel Beckett story involving artificial intelligence and reading about them on comics-futurist websites. This was all while working a strange receptionist job in New York that also involved oversight in moving from building to building. This framework was built over a series of neon Risographed pages that discussed superpositioning. The back half of the issue discusses various kinds of player traps in the game that are mostly conceptual, as well as a history of player dwellings. All of this makes a great deal of sense if you have any experience playing free-flowing, world-building games like Minecraft, only with a far deeper degree of ontological power. 

In the February issue, dreams and diagrams take center stage. This issue is super text-heavy and surprisingly sexual, as the dream diary often refers to unspecified sexual relationships and masturbation. The text is over more of that pink and blue neon Risographed coloring, adding dissonance to the storytelling even as Cockle adds "panels" to each page over the text, even if they don't conform to typical panel-to-panel storytelling. That makes this comic especially difficult to parse, although I think the information-jamming is part of the point. In all of the Andalusian Dog comics, Cockle is deliberately playing with the concept of how the brain is unable to comprehend multiple streams of information. 

In the October issue, Cockle used a slightly more straightforward approach as he imagined a scenario influenced by the science-fiction writer A.E. van Vogt and his novel The World Of Null-A. Van Vogt was a big influence on Philip K. Dick precisely because his scenarios did not quite add up. They had a mysterious, evasive quality that appealed to him, and it's clear that van Vogt influenced Cockle here, along with Dick, Borges, and others. One of the stories seems to be related to the project/video game and is related to astral projection and time travel, and how they are related. The stories relate to the plot of van Vogt's novel, and to how having an "extra brain" makes him an ideal detective in a world without crime. In general, van Vogt's project was talking about intuitive leaps in thinking rather than deductive reasoning, and all of that is very much in line with Cockle's project. He keeps coming at the reader at oblique angles, where it's difficult to determine how much of his project is carefully-planned and how much is not only improvised but entirely random, like a Dada performance that relies on the subconscious. There is a game and a meta-game, a story and a meta-story, and Cockle is deliberately cagey on how the two are to be sorted out. 

31 Days Of CCS, #30: Dakota McFadzean

Dakota McFadzean's short stories reflect desolation. His stories are set in rural Canada, and the isolation of the area is almost palpable and contributes to the sense of existential dread and horror that is in every one of his stories. I've reviewed most of the stories in his newest collection, To Know You're Alive (Conundrum), in High-Low and other places, but the design of the book and the sequencing of the stories gives them a different context, so I decided to review them with fresh eyes. 

One running theme in McFadzean's work is the liminal space between reality and frightening fantasy and how children often make no distinction between the two. In "Gnoshlox," for example, an adult recalls playing in a sandbox and creating these sort of clay golem creatures he called "Gnoshlox." It was all matter-of-fact, and one day it ended, with the implication being that he changed somehow and was no longer able to make it happen. It was, metaphorically, the difference between magical thinking and the age of reason. This story was part of a suite about childhood experiences. "The Truck" is about the way children push each other to cross and push ethical lines and social mores, and what happens when lines are crossed. 

"Buzzy" expands on this idea and explores the ways in which socialization can warp kids. The title character is a misanthropic kid who starts going to a new school and finds that while he has to deal with the same kind of assholes as ever, his weird tics and explosive temper doesn't make life any easier for him. That's especially true when he doesn't know how to react to someone being nice to him and inevitably drives her away. McFadzean leans heavily on a John Stanley/Little Lulu style of scaled-down, cute-kid drawings as a way of contrasting the idealized quality of kids with a frequently more brutal reality. "Good Find" is a sort of companion piece to "Truck" in that an older kid eggs on a younger kid...but it's slowly revealed that this is a world where their monstrous features are just a casual fact of everyday life. "Hollow In The Hollows" moves the ages up a bit, where there's a greater understanding of one's own actions and how we hurt each other. It ends on a hopeful note, where the magic that one of the characters so desperately wishes is real manifests in the presence of a friend who has forgiven her behavior.

The "Intermission" section contains short pieces that reveal that even when McFadzean does gag work, it's tinged with dread. The most disturbing is "Ghostie," which is about a Casper-type boy ghost who gets rousted by bumbling ghost hunters and their monkey, and then remembers for a moment that he is dead and lets out a howl. It's funny and terrible all at once. "The Pasqua Penny Savor" draws a little on Chris Ware and others who've done fake comic strip pages with tiny panels, and it mixes in fantasy stuff with unnerving slice-of-life comics about families and parenting. 

The second half of the book is about the transition and tension between childhood and adulthood. The longest story is a gibberish title where the bear from a cereal box comes to life and menaces a kid in a non-stop parade of horror that's jammed into 24 panels per page. It's frantic and disturbing, as the kid does whatever he can to stop the leering, cheery menace that only seems to mutate and multiply. After seemingly vanquishing it, the bear returns in his adulthood to menace him further...only for the kid to pop back into childhood. The key to the story is its use of a bloodline spot red. It's sparing at first, but the kid eventually accepts the monster as his entire world is red. This silent story is an effective metaphor for understanding that our fears never really go away, but we can accept them. 

"Debug Mode" is about a programmer trying to find bugs in a game for a company with a weird hierarchical structure, only to learn that the game is much broader than she suspected. "First" is about first contact with an alien lifeform whose lack of demonstrable intelligence, but the story is really about the way in which social media and our cultural attention span quickly moves on to new, frequently stupid topics when the old one fails to entertain. "To Know You're Alive" is an autobiographical story about McFadzean taking care of his difficult toddler son. Being alone and taking care of a kid who is absolutely melting down is unbelievably difficult, and McFadzean captures the horror of that moment of losing one's temper and yelling back. That forbidden, guilt-inducing feeling of wanting to be freed from the burden. It centered around Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood on an old website, including weird, creepy episodes that were silent or filmed in the dark. 

The story reflected that key understanding that time is a different construct for kids, who will pass through that inconsolable rage and return to the steady-state of seeing his parents as his whole world and needing his father because he's scared. It is a fitting capper to a collection that reflects a parent's anxieties: fear of a child dying, fear of a child being bullied, fear of a child bullying, fear of a child not fitting in, and fear of failing your own children above all else. It's not an accident that the entire collection uses red as a spot color, because these stories are about McFadzean facing and ultimately accepting his own fears, understanding that they will always be there. We are always in the red.

31 Days Of CCS, #29: Anna Sellheim

Anna Sellheim is best known for her raw and open autobiographical work, but the work she submitted for this year's CCS review is varied in terms of genres and approaches. In the DC Zinefest Covid-19 Zine, she had a one-page autobio piece done in Sellheim's usual style. She draws herself in a hoodie, her face obscured, which has always been an interesting part of her stylistic choices that make her work so distinctive. Many of Sellheim's comics are about her deeply-ingrained anxiety order, but this comic about the pandemic is funny because she revealed that when a real crisis comes along, she can handle it. It's her life the rest of the time that gives her problems! At the same time, she shares her brittle bone disease diagnosis that affects her hands, and how having to take off the gloves and repeatedly wash them is literally painful. It concludes with her tiny dogs not caring in the least that her hands are in pain, because they need walking, and dealing with that need is clearly centering.

Sellheim is an excellent letterer and makes that part of her style. She knows how to balance image and word balloons even in a particularly wordy strip. Her lettering is clear and the various kinds of word balloons she uses feel as much a part of the gestalt of the image as the actual characters. Everything about her drawing is very slightly wobbly, from the freehand panel composition to the actual drawing itself, and this raw, expressive style is well-suited for the kinds of stories she tells. 

My Lifelines is a painted mini meant for a mini-comics vending machine at a book festival. Seeing Sellheim slather on color, in comparison to their crisp line, is an interesting change of pace. The comic is about her two dogs and how they are helping her through the isolation she has to go through since she had to quarantine herself for possible coronavirus. The way she draws her dogs is adorable and some of her best character design; the tiny dogs' personalities come through in the shapes she used to build them. This is less a story and more of an experiment designed to have a strong visual impact. 

The Intern is an interesting departure for Sellheim, although she's done horror comics before. Co-written by Leah Weightman, it's a cleverly-constructed horror piece with a number of swerves. Its main character is Katie, a summer intern in Washington, DC. Right away, the reader is informed that there's been a rash of interns disappearing, with her mother asking after her safety. There are a lot of subtle character touches, like Katie talking about wishing she was talking to her grandmother, that don't seem significant at the time but play a role later. There's a swerve regarding who the murderer might be, then another swerve regarding Katie's fate with regard to the murderer. There's a series of panels where the murderer thinks they have easy prey in their kindly disguise, until Katie calmly explains that's not fooled in the least and the creature removes her arm from around Katie and starts to shake. This comic is in black and white, and Sellheim doesn't quite pull off the atmosphere needed in the story with her backgrounds, which are frequently cluttered with extra lines that detract from the narrative. This is a story that cried out for a simpler line approach and color.

#saveTucaandBertie is a tremendous short story that starts with something relatively trivial that ultimately reveals a deep, simmering rage. When the Lisa Hanawalt-created show Tuca And Bertie was canceled after a single season, Sellheim first reflected on not being a big fan of it at first. Then she enjoyed it not because of its humor (which wasn't her style) but because of the way it portrayed female friendships and how boundaries are often tromped upon. When she learned it was canceled, a slow-building rant built up and exploded in a conversation with her mom, as she decried the sexism that was inherent in the cancellation, then it morphed into a rant about oppression in general. Two things stood out: Sellheim's open-page layout with a clever use of spot color (in part to evoke the imagery from the show) and how Sellheim often depicts her emotions exploding because of how difficult she finds it to connect to them. 

Dreamzine is a blender's worth of Sellheim's comics. It's a comic inspired by dreams, and Sellheim noted that she only wanted to use positive or funny dreams--no nightmares. The logic in the strips is wonderful; in the first story, an anthropomorphic cat (with four fully-exposed teats) does a brief stand-up routine before she introduced an artist whose brilliant new installation was...the burrito. Hilariously, he didn't accept questions about his art, but he did invite questions about the night he ate the delicious burrito that inspired him. Sellheim's use of spotting blacks and color contrasts is especially sharp here, something that was no always present in her work. 

A dream about encountering Jesus in the Antarctic, only she's the comic strip character Cathy, was absolutely hilarious. That particular reveal is done to heighten its comedic punch, and the entire strip is very much in character, even as Jesus asks her to become a Christian. Sellheim uses spot color, loose sketches, pencil-heavy images, and an array of different techniques that somehow all flow within the comic. Sellheim closes the comic in a remarkable way; a dream comic that she had drawn about being a lawyer for a family of murderers that included the comic strip character Nancy was found in the hospital she was visiting because of surgery for her mother. The mention of murder triggered an intervention by the hospital's administration and nearly landed her in a psych ward! That particular true story was far weirder than anything else in the comic. It's a reflection of willingness to go deep and talk about whatever is bothering her through her comics, as though that's the way she best communicates with those feelings and ideas. 

31 Days Of CCS, #28: Rainer Kannenstine

Rainer Kannenstine is an artist experimenting with different kinds of fantasy and sci-fi storytelling. His latest comic, Bog Beast, is a silly, all-ages adventure about an obsessed captain and his easygoing prey. Spoofing Moby Dick is always a good place to start from, and Kannenstine commits to total ridiculousness in this comic. The comic opens in a swamp, where the captain's crewmen Joe and and Jeff argue about the existence of the Bog Beast. The tone is set with their over-the-top character design; Joe has a nose like a toucan and Jeff resembles a leprauchan with a jaunty derby. Jeff then opines that the Bog Beast exists and it must be the missing link between cow and lobster. Kannenstine isn't so much crafting gags with punchlines but rather making every panel laughable and silly. 

There's lots of slapstick involving Jeff and Joe, including managing to end up in specially-designed bag traps. The Bog Beast turns out to be friendly and laid-back. The Captain's reason for her hatred of the Bog Beast is absurd. There's an extended flashback sequence to kindergarten done in crayon, as though it was in a kid's hand. The story's flow is effortlessly smooth as Kannenstine goes from silly situation to silly situation. That smoothness is earned through his visual approach. Kannenstine keeps his figures simple and stylized, but their construction is rock-solid and the way they interact in space is natural. However, it's Kannenstine's use of color that does much of the work in keeping things moving. His choices are deliberately non-naturalistic; instead, color is used to add weight to pages, fill up negative space, accent character design, and add to the light-hearted nature of the story. There's not a wasted line or any over-drawing in this comic, and that allows Kannenstine to accomplish his goal of writing and drawing wonderful nonsense. 

31 Days Of CCS, #27: Bread Tarleton

Bread Tarleton's ambitious Losing Comics is a fascinating metacommentary on storytelling in the manner of Pirandello meets Scott McCloud. Indeed, the title and the cover logo were direct references to McCloud's book on comics art, Understanding Comics. However, the simple, iconic character is dropped into the middle of a story and is alerted of this fact by the unseen narrator, who is said to represent the artist. It's left up to the nameless character to find their purpose, all while Tarleton explores the elastic nature of comics storytelling. 

The book has the cadence of certain manga in terms of its willingness to slow storytelling down to a crawl and force the reader to advance the action slowly, turning page after page in order to move things along. The existential quality of the comic also reminds me a bit of Anders Nilsen's "Monologues" comic, only this book doesn't have the jokey quality of Nilsen's work. Indeed, there is an impassioned sincerity to the struggle of the protagonist, as they go from confusion at their predicament and the narrator's purpose for them to anger at their fate to despair to determination. All they could do was keep going, trying to understand themselves while desperately wishing for connection. 

Losing Comics is a perfect example of cartooning and drawing being related but separate skills. The drawing in this book is simple and non-naturalistic. The cartooning, however, is complex and deeply affecting. Beyond Tarleton's command of gesture, there's a sequence where the character desperately wants the reader to tell them what they should look like, tortuously altering their face again and again. It's heart-breaking and dramatic, and it's a testament to Tarleton's skill as a cartoonist that each image is as powerful as the next. It's followed by an expression of gratitude toward the reader for bringing them to life by reading the book and accompanying them on their journey, even if it's a journey that they ultimately completed through their own willpower. It's a testament to the power of seeking out connection and understanding that we are always connected to others, even if it's not immediately obvious. 

The character's journey is the journey of anyone who struggles to understand their purpose in life, who feels everything is absurd and meaningless, and doesn't even know who they really are. In the end, the struggle, the journey, and the company provide enough meaning, a sentiment earned not through treacly sentimentality but through a viscerally difficult trek for the character and the reader. Losing Comics is a powerful conceptual achievement that may not seem beautiful on its surface, but it's more than worth exploring to get to its underlying truths.