31 Days Of CCS, #8: Cuyler Keating

While Cuyler Keating's comics have fantasy elements, it would be more accurate to say that she's really a medievalist. What that translates out to is a great deal of misery, death, disease, and squalor. That's certainly the case in the first two issues of her series Oblivioun, but Keating takes that a step further. The setting is a world where the empire is in ruin, plagued by a disease that ultimately results in the afflicted losing their memories. This is worse than death for some--the utter obliteration of self and memory. 

Keating centers this around two scavengers: a one-armed former knight named Ollie and his young friend Remy. They pick over battles and gravesites in an effort to get enough metal and jewelry to get food and lodging. Their relationship is familial, with an easy sense of teasing between the two. The first issue sees them finding armor and weapons they can sell, but encounter an armored knight who begs them to tell him what his name is. The second issue finds them selling their scavenged loot, with Ollie attempting to woo the daughter of the smith. 

Keating's line is fluid, with a focus on sharply delineated character work. Ollie is drawing with a rakish grin but also an occasionally hollowed-out stare. Remy is still young and full of hope, but one gets the sense that Ollie sees no future. Indeed, the red-soaked flashbacks, full of violence and past battles, reflect that Ollie welcomes the idea. One gets the sense that Remy is the only thing keeping Ollie tethered to reality and day-to-day survival. It feels like there's a long way to go in this series, and things are only going to get worse. Keating has a strong sense of design on top of everything else, and the decorative aspects of the cover and inside covers adds to the overall aesthetic of the comic. 

31 Days Of CCS, #7: Ruby Arnone

What's most interesting about Ruby Arnone's Frankie & Jam is that, despite its origins as a formal cartooning exercise with some formal constraints, the actual comics are fluid and funny. It follows a trans woman anthropomorphic bunny named Frankie and a hoodie-wearing kid named Jam, with most of the strips featuring their observations, gags, and general quirkiness. One of the reasons why the comic is so enjoyable is that Arnone doesn't force things. Some of the strips aren't funny; they're just small but important moments in the lives of the characters. It reminds me a little of certain Peanuts strips that have small epiphanies, or like Pablo Holmberg's book Eden.

There are absurd and surreal strips as well, like the anthropomorphic college professor dog whose academic specialty is the habits of staplers, which he views as sentient entities. There's the imperious and threatening Lizard Queen, who is reduced to washing her clothes in a laundromat and eating at cheap restaurants after ruling a kingdom. Arnone's cartooning is sophisticated, but I also see a lot of experimentation here with grid vs no grid, multiple line weights, and silent strips that depend on flow vs gags that depend largely on the text. This is fertile ground for future ideas, as Arnone generated half a dozen characters and ideas that could be explored for a long time. 

31 Days Of CCS, #6: Melody Calderon

With Arroyo, Melody Calderon does the best kind of horror comic: one that is almost entirely dependent on its visuals to tell its story. This is a story about the Latinx horror urban legend La Llorona, the "Weeping Woman." She was said to have drowned her children in a fit of rage against her husband's infidelity, and now she lurks around bodies of water, looking for new victims. An arroyo is a narrow gully formed by fast-flowing water. In the story, a man drinks from a fountain that is a statue of La Llorona in an almost flip manner. He falls asleep, only to awaken to a flooded house and city (an arroyo) and the long hair of La Llorona telling him to give her his hands to receive her blessing. As one would expect, it does not go well. 

What makes this comic so good is its attention to detail. From the elongated lettering for La Lloronna to the use of paint for spot color to depict her bleeding forehead, Calderon's willingness to lean into the exaggerated aspects of the story gives it power. Her page composition is innovative, especially as she has a repeating motif of hands being plunged into water. The outstretched hands initially seem to be praying hands, and La Llorona's similarity to the Virgin Mary in the story is not lost on me. There is no mercy to be had here, as her "affections" are arbitrary and merciless. Calderon's got it all working here, and this makes me want to see much more. 

31 Days Of CCS, #5: The Final Dot

The Final Dot is one of the CCS group anthology projects. This one features Dylan Sparks, Ellie Liota, Michael Albrecht, and Anna Passlick. I was excited to get a copy at SPX, because I've never seen one of these outside of the library at CCS. Looks like the take on the assignment was a take on Harvey Comics characters. The artists, who shared tasks like in an old mainstream comic, chose to do a dark parody of Little Dot. The results, which include multiple pages of fake ads, are absolutely unhinged. Little Dot, for those unfamiliar with the concept, really liked dots and things with dots on them. In the first story, she meets an appaloosa (with speckled "dots"), and it kicks her in the face. In a later story, she accidentally puts her friend Little Lotta in the hospital stirring up a beehive, and her parents take away her dots..

This leads Dot to skin her dalmation, show up to visit Lotta, and realizing that the colors in the strip were actually Ben-Day dots. Dot starts absorbing all of the color dots in a bid to be eternal, but Lotta grabs a shotgun from a hilarious Daisy rifle ad and shoots Dot in the chest. The quartet of artists takes the concept absolutely all the way, using metafictional humor in a way that feels earned by diligently building up not just the basic premise but also the presence of the ancillary material. Some of the line art is a little wobbly here and there, but they otherwise just nail the features of your average Harvey comic before turning it into a sci-fi/horror story. I'm curious as to the division of labor here, especially since I know and like the work of Sparks, Liotta, and Albrecht. 

31 Days Of CCS, #4: Sierra Edwards, Wayne Carter

Kiki is a small departure for the talented Wayne Carter. This 8-page mini is done in full color (I think it's a Risograph comic), and it packs a lot of punch. It's about two brothers who play a fighting video game on a day when the weather forces them to stay indoors. The real action of the comic is hearing a fight between their mom and dad, as the former accuses the latter of cheating. There's a loaded question about why "Kiki" is calling the house, with a response that she's "keke'n" (gossipping) with everyone. The competing narratives (visual vs the unseen fight between the adults that the kids keep trying to drown out with the TV but find it doesn't get loud enough) are heartbreaking precisely because the kids aren't all too surprised. The last page is a splash after a lot of 4-panel grids, and we see police cars pulling up to the house. This is a great example of working around a narrative without showing it; the pink and purple palette is the color of bruises. The visual of a fighting game standing in for the actual conflict, especially as a way for the boys to work out their aggressions and frustration, was extremely affecting. Carter was already good, but this represents a real levelling up.

Man Rock Lake looks like another Riso comic, and it's by Sierra Edwards. Each page is a splash, starting with the titular man on a rock in a lake. From the very beginning, it's an ontological query, as the man wonders if anyone else is there. He receives an immediate answer of "no," which then turns into an eventual negation of reality. It's cleverly done, as the final negation doesn't even have language--it's simply a dark page minus all of the original elements. The cartooning seems pretty basic here, but the real meat of it is more conceptual than visual. I'd love to see more of Edwards' work. 

31 Days Of CCS, #3: Ana Two, Iris Gudeon

Ana Two is one of the most exciting artists to emerge from CCS this decade (and I believe this so fervently, that we will be publishing book by them soon). This little mini, Storm Drain, came from this year's Riff Raff anthology, which in turn is edited by CCS alum King Ray. This is only a 4-page, but so many of Two's interesting storytelling elements are at work here. This is a two-track narrative, with the first arc being about a nameless narrator leaving behind a journal on a napkin that yearned to be drained, washed away, and become a new person. This accompanies the distorted, psychedelic imagery of a body wasting away, becoming skeletal, and finally being reformed. The bottom third of each page is taken up by big text, acting as a sort of call-and-response with the rest of the narrative. Every gesture and statement Two makes in their comics is big. The emotions are over-the-top, bursting out--uncontainable. The desire to live, to die, to control, to be controlled, supercedes everything else, and the exaggerated art reflects. 

I find Iris Gudeon's strange little comics to be utterly baffling in a way I enjoy. The figures (usually animals) are simple and cute, the humor is often corny in a deliberately labored way, and it all amounts to what you see is what you get. There's no larger message, no intricate character work, no intense drawings. It is purely strange and cute gag work, but less in terms of having punchlines and more in terms of one artist's fancy flowing smoothly and freely on the page. All of this is true about Standing Cats, whose sensibilities are somewhere between Dr. Seuss and B.Kliban. Drawn in what looks like colored pencils, there's a vibrancy to these yellow cats going about various activities, including building chairs (with or without a sense of obligation), doing taxes, and staring at the sun. It's just a bit of nonsense, but I always look forward to this kind of nonsense from Gudeon. One thing I did notice is that their line is much more confident here than it was in their earlier minis. 

31 Days Of CCS, #2: Daryl Seitchik & Ellie Liota

Daryl Seitchik has built up an impressive body of work since their first minis over a dozen years ago, and I was especially excited to see another "Missy" comic. These comics are adapted from her childhood diaries, and Seitchik seamlessly works that material into a visual presentation that offers up ironic, funny, cruel, and deeply sad juxtapositions against the original text. As the title suggests, the new Missy 9/11 is Seitchik's impressions of the 9/11 terrorist attack as an 11-year-old in middle school. An entry a few days before the event finds her lamenting her body image and slow going through puberty. The next entry is two days after 9/11, and she's already moved on. The rest of the comic is structured as a news report, starring Daryl as a newscaster clad in a red jacket, first commenting on the school cafeteria's food and then moving on to 9/11 itself. A later story where that particular date had its own family meaning is a fascinating anecdote, and young Seitchik's attempts at creating a sense of gravity with her text are painfully earnest. Seitchik's cartooning, as always, is fluid and assured, and the red, white & blue color palette adds an additional satirical touch. 

Ellie Liota's Foreward is an older comic, done as part of the Ed Emberley assignment at CCS. This assignment calls for students to draw a comic in the style of Emberley: built on circles, squares, and triangles. It's a reduction of line to its basics that asks a cartoonist to focus instead on the cartooning that can be created through this simplicity of form. Liota further constrains things by rendering everything within a six-panel grid. She deliberately plays around with negative space by not introducing any kind of backgrounds--the reader is asked to focus on a tiny figure and what they have to say. Liota essentially turns this into a meta exploration of Emberley's technique, focusing on formal elements as the character brings forth various colorful objects. Later, it becomes meditative, as the figure asks the reader a number of questions. It's playful all the way through, and that sense of play through the motion on the page is the essence of Emberley's work.