45 Days Of CCS, #42: Sandy Steen Bartholomew

Sandy Steen Bartholomew, a supremely skilled cartoonist and illustrator, submitted four different items for review. First is a kids' book, Blue Roo, which is a comic but does have some sequential elements. It's about a girl named Albina, who is obsessed with the color white and overall tidiness and order in all things. Her most prized possession was her white kangaroo stuffie Roo. When her messy little brother Jojo accidentally gets Roo dirty, he panics and sends Jojo down the laundry chute, where he gets mixed in with colors and turns blue! This provokes a crisis for poor Albina, until Jojo returns Roo to her and Albina learns to loosen up. Blue Roo is a pure delight, and I especially like how Bartholomew uses lettering as part of the storytelling. I've rarely seen text incorporated in such a way with the drawings in a children's book, and it's clear she means to delight readers with both aspects of storytelling.

The minicomic Fish takes the prompts from an Inktober challenge and combines it with the 24-hour comic challenge. Most 24-hour comics are terrible, but Bartholomew manages to create an odd narrative about the titular fish finding the body of a mouse king and endeavoring to free his spirit. The king returns the favor by saving him from horseshoe crabs. Bartholomew kind of uses brute force to string together the otherwise unconnected prompts without any other text, but it works because of the surreal quality of the images and the propulsiveness of her storytelling. Learning To Surf was the result of a 30-day daily drawing exercise done spontaneously each day. Bartholomew's characters are often versions of herself from childhood, and this is no exception, as a girl is swept along into the heart of a whale and discovers the fish from the previous mini there to help her. The mix of black & white and spot color is very effective as the quest goes in interesting directions.

From these two comics, I get the sense that despite her talent and imagination, Bartholomew struggles without structure. This is evident in issue six of Begin Again, her autobiographical series that shifts from diary comics to gags and in this issue, a year's worth of drawings of her extensive toy collection. While this isn't really a comic, it's still interesting to focus on how much comfort Bartholomew drew (and still draws) from these toys. They were companions at some points of life that were clearly lonely ones, and it was obviously deeply meaningful for her to honor them by way of her craft. Bartholomew is still trying to find herself as a cartoonist and creator, but her ability to comfort and delight herself with the joy of her own art is quite evident. 

45 Days Of CCS, #41: Fantology 4

The fourth volume of Fantology is probably the weakest volume overall, but there's still plenty of interesting material in there. A lot of it felt strangely rushed; there were numerous spelling errors and the margins were so tight that I couldn't read some of the stuff toward the middle. Some of the pieces were so sloppy that I was surprised they were published, and the sequencing of the stories also felt somewhat off-kilter. That said, the best stories were excellent, and the overall concept remains sound. 

This is an anthology of fantasy stories set in the same world, based around a central map. Some of the stories are continuing serials, and others are one-shots. This volume's theme is "maps," which is a great theme for a fantasy anthology. There are a number of non-CCS folks in here as well, but I'll start with CCS artists first. Whiteley Foster kicks off the book with a 7-page story that simultaneously feels like it's too long and totally insubstantial. It's about two characters arguing about taking a job as surveyors. Her character design is so Disney-cute and exaggerated that it was hard to see them as characters. Alex Washburn's latest Clan Zargs chapter is something I covered earlier in this feature, but suffice it to say that he makes great use of the map to further his narrative, and the focus on surprising character twists added a lot of spice. 

Carl Antonowicz's unsurprisingly downbeat story follows a religious pilgrim and two servants going on a quest in a deadly desert. The attention he lavishes on world-building is actually a clever misdirection, as the quest itself ends in failure. It's the relationship between the characters that's most interesting. I wasn't crazy about his use of a digital font considering how sketchy his linework was. 

Catalina Rufin has another winning entry in her Barbarian Family series. With the burly barbarian dad Brono and his teen daughter Satu going on a map-led quest, Rufin explores family dynamics in a way that transcends the usual limits of the genre. With Brono harshly critical of Satu's ideas, Satu is vulnerable to a deep gnome's sweet words and promise of magic. Rufin asks some tough questions here, and her character design is sharp and expressive. 

Rainer Kannenstine sketchy and cartoony story about a lonely explorer in over his head in a dungeon takes advantage of old-school Dungeons & Dragons map construction to build the narrative. The looseness of the art gives it a lot of energy and helps play up its whimsical, funny aspects. It even has a genuinely emotional end.

It was such a pleasure to see co-editor Kristen Shull return to her serial. It's about a down-on-her-luck mage and her unlikely partnership with a princess whose quest is to assassinate a god to save her people. Even switching over to drawing digitally and working with a surprising lack of detail, Shull shines doing fantasy work in a way she doesn't in other genres. Her pacing, her understanding of how to depict action, her sense of humor, and her flair for the dramatic make each chapter a rousing success. 

As for the rest, there are a few highlights. F.Ostby's story about young rabbits exploring a forest at night for a treasure rachets up the tension but has a delightful payoff, with a pleasant mix of cartoony characters and a naturalistic setting. Niloufar Lari & Soroush Elyasi have perhaps the best-looking strip in the book, and it's about a quest of transformation and the intimacy of dance; only the digital font detracts from its elegance. Emily Claire's short story about a soldier finding his way back to his lover after three years is quietly devastating. PMK's bar crawl story is hilarious and exceptionally well-cartooned, and it embraces the map concept fully. Finally, Stephen Pellnat's story is a masterful piece of narrative misdirection. The cartooning is excellent, and the swerve is set up early on in a way that is easy to ignore. I missed a few serials from previous issues, which likely led to some replacements, but hopefully, they will be followed up on in the next volume. 

45 Days Of CCS, #40: Hole

It's a tremendous advantage to be a CCS student (or local alum) and have access to their print lab. That allows one the chance to do, for example, an anthology with multiple cut-outs. That's the case with Hole, a ridiculously elaborate anthology that reminds me of the early days of CCS. It's a bit like the old Four Square anthology that would have four artists and a theme or something you'd find on the I Know Joe Kimpel web storefront. 

This anthology features five artists and begins with a series of pages, each with a hole cut in the center concentrically. Holes cut somewhere on the page feature prominently as a formal device in each story, but all for different reasons. In Ben Adkins' "Down In The Hole," the protagonist gets away from the world by digging a hole and living in it. Wondering if he made the right decision, he looks up to the sky from his hole, and sees blue sky in a story that was otherwise black & white. It's a dramatic way for the character to make a major change in how he wants to live his life by rejecting isolation.

Ruby Arnone's "Alligator Pit" is about a delivery person whose job is to throw meat down to gators in a pit in what seems to be a zoo. They then dream about that same pit, but this time the hole expands to see the gators devouring not meat, but people--presumably, the zoo keepers. It's a punchy story that's effective because of the expressive use of colored pencils.

Kate Fairchild's "The Ever-Hole" uses cut-outs more consistently than any other story, and it's all in service to an actual "metaphysical hole" called the Ever-Hole that one character is trying to fill. It's another story about isolation, this time concluding with a hug that represents a lateral solution to filling the hole. Nothing could fill the hole, at least not alone, so the solution was to stop trying and connect. Fairchild's linework is simple but effective, working well with the big formal decision of cutting so much out of each page with the hole.

The most visually ambitious story was Melody Calderon's "Pory." It is quite literally about bubbles: living in a bubble, the bubbles that proliferate on our phones that demand our attention, the bubbles that fog our brains when we're drunk. Calderon takes what is a fairly simple idea and makes it sing with her extensive use of color and the multiple circular cut-outs on so many of the pages. The final story, "Fullness," is an "adapted Sanskrit verse from the Ishavasya Upanishad." Compared to the other stories, this is a very simply designed story that is no less successful for its simplicity, as it gets across its concept of fullness--a concept that cannot be reduced or diminished. The artist, Keena, uses black and white shapes that transform with a single cutout. The anthology as a whole is successful because there's enough variety in terms of formal approaches and storytelling to prevent the kind of stale repetition that sometimes happens in these kinds of anthologies. 

45 Days Of CCS, #39: Ruby Arnone, Clover Ajamie, Taylor Hunt

Ruby Arnone's And The Bat is their version of the Aesop's fable assignment. Like many who have taken it on, they have chosen to bend it to their own interests and concerns rather than a more straightforward adaptation. In this case, Arnone did a take on "The Birds, The Beasts, And The Bat," the fable about a bat who sits out a war between the birds and beasts by not identifying with either side but gets shunned as a result. Arnone abandons that narrative to examine the genocide in Palestine, noting that war is rarely a conflict between morally equivalent sides. This is an unapologetically didactic comic with some lovely pencil drawings.

Clover Ajamie's Healer's Tale is a beautiful, wordless story about a medicine woman of some kind who goes about her days in the forest. She's looking to heal trees but encounters signs of a mysterious and benevolent magic that's clearly healing the forest she loves so much. There's a delightful sense of the methodical as she goes about her day, munching on toast as she digs around the mushrooms. The encounter she has at the end feels entirely earned in its warmth and intimacy, and all of this is heightened by Ajamie's use of browns, yellows, and oranges. 

Tyler Hunt's contribution last year was very funny, and this year's God's Away On Business mixes humor and existential discovery. Done as part of the Ed Emberley assignment (made mostly out of squares, triangles, and circles), it's about a despondent priest who kills himself in order to get an audience with god. Despite that angle, this is actually a funny comic. The priest winds up in limbo, guided by a skeleton bureaucrat through a dizzying environment before meeting the creator. He's told by god that he just got burned out because Earth was especially annoying. The priest steals god's pen and is ready to right some wrongs before being asked by the skeleton, "Do you think you won't get tired, too?" Hunt really goes to town on the cartooning details, even if those turn out to be a shaggy dog story. The best thing about the story is its pacing, as Hunt keeps the reader engaged from the very beginning, and the priest's case against god is very compelling. 

45 Days Of CCS, #38: Fern Pellerin

Fern Pellerin has a sharply refined if familiar style of cartooning. Creation Myth is a visually compelling and fluid version of a very common story: the trans journey of discovery. Pellerin used a somewhat cliched visual metaphor in the stage of development of a butterfly, but it's so beautifully executed and succinct (9 pages) that it worked fine. Pellerin's page composition is elegant and filled with decorative flourishes that enhance the narrative. This comic was part of a larger anthology whose theme was gender and transition, and Pellerin understood that it was important to get to the point. 

Heave Away is a lesbian seaside fantasy romance that similarly does well in establishing a setting, thanks to the frequent use of open-page layouts and dramatic composition. Pellerin's somewhat limited character design impedes the story, and you can see the limitations of their cartooning in the way they depict action and movement as well. There are other problems, like wonky proportions, but Pellerin's ambitions as a storyteller were on display. The future setting but provincial characters certainly had their charms, and what Pellerin did best here was establish a sense of place. The story felt too long and not long enough all at once, as parts of it dragged early on but the world as a whole felt like needed more time to bake. This is pretty much straightforward YA fiction, but given Pellerin's talents, I'd be curious to see what direction they'll go in next. 

45 Days Of CCS, #37: Fernanda Nocedal

Fernanda Nocedal is clearly working through a lot of things with body horror-tinged fiction. In a short, untitled minicomic, they evocatively use a lot of shapes and colors to depict the horrific sexual assault of what appears to be a child. Working wordlessly, the visual wolf & rabbit metaphor is clear and unsettling. This is a really well-designed and effective comic that uses its sparse economy of colors and images for maximum impact. 

Their other comics aren't quite as clearly designed. Darling Angel Flesh is a visceral story that seems highly influenced by Japanese horror. It's about a girl named Lilith (a bit of a giveaway) who finds herself transforming into her true, winged demonic form in the middle of a high school bathroom. This is less a story than it is a mood, as it touches upon the cursed feminine form and other gender ideas and dives deep into their guts. Nocedal's drawing isn't quite assured enough to pull of what they were attempting here, but the overall impact was still effective. 

Grieving Hearts is the longest of Nocedal's comics, and I suspect it was their first-year final project. The story follows a young woman named Elizabeth living in a small town with her grieving and dissociating mother Carmen. She soon learns that the utter weirdos in the town aren't just taking a bizarre and inappropriate interest in their grieving over the death of Elizabeth's father--they are a cult planning to sacrifice them in order to summon some kind of demon! Nocedal's cartooning is much more effective here, and there's a delightful glee to be found amidst the gore, violence, and creepiness. The final panel, implying that Elizabeth may have been transformed against her will anyway, is classic horror storytelling. Nocedal uses a dense and inky style in support of clear and unnerving character design, with big expressions and lots of highly effective exaggeration. You can see how Nocedal is using their time at CCS to really hone their craft. 

45 Days Of CCS, #36: Maia Foster O'Neal

Maia Foster O'Neal's business card reads "Comics, Crafts, & Feelings," and their comics certainly are an example of truth in advertising. There's Sparklemaia's Little Zine Of One Pot Vegan Soup Recipes, which is exactly what it sounds like. Little is a four-page comic that's mostly an excuse to try some expressive color as Maia comforts a younger version of themselves. 

Cracks is a variation on one of the most common subjects I see these days from young cartoonists: the trans journey of self-discovery. In Maia's case, there's a little more nuance because even though top surgery was an extremely important step in her gender-affirming care, she noted that "there's no simple answer." In a nicely illustrated sequence, focusing on specific labels was the equivalent of mistaking the map for the territory. The rest of the comic is straightforward and familiar, but the use of an open-page layout, expressive cartooning, and gentle approach to their dysphoria made this a pleasant and engaging read. 

Harebells was Maia's first-year final project, and it fits into their ambition to work in middle-grade publishing. It's a story about two quarreling sisters and their mother who uses folk tales to help soothe sore feelings. It's a gentle story that touches on gender identity, as well as figuring out new roles in a family when circumstances change. Visually, it's a slightly more personal and idiosyncratic approach than the typical Scholastic/First Second playbook, especially with a nuanced use of color that allows Maia's line to still shine. 

Maia's most interesting comic by far was Entangled. It's a clever two-track narrative and a visual tour-de-force that eschews the more cutesy aspects of their cartooning in favor of something far more visceral. The narrative is about how the human body is comprised of "bacteria, viruses, archaea, and fungi" and goes on to describe how fungi are hard to kill, adaptable, and can even hijack nervous systems. The open page layout is framed by branching, distorting images of roots and fungi that are hidden to us but ever-present. It's implied that the main character we see has been hijacked, changing their behavior (once again, there's not only dysphoria, but the kind of bullying that leads to isolation) in a way that is not necessarily negative, but integral to survival. Maia is generally pretty blunt with their storytelling, especially in terms of doing a lot of telling along with showing, but this mini shows that this doesn't need to be the case.