Ruby Carter's I, Candy

Ruby Carter's I, Candy reveals another side of the artist. Her bird comic (published by Fieldmouse Press) featured minimalist cartooning, deadpan humor, and low-level anxiety throughout. However, her other work (often in color) is often colorful, weird, and grotesque. I, Candy explicitly purports to be about objectification and consumption, and those elements are certainly evident. The title has a double pun regarding both of these elements. There's another word that Carter uses on the back-cover blurb, and it's the most applicable: visceral. 

The comic features the titular performer in fishnet stockings and squeezed into a tight outfit before a crowd of leering eyes. Carter uses a repeating motif of her lipsticked lips twisting, biting, and distorting themselves. The effect is not just visceral, but deliberately lurid. Over the span of the comic, Carter subverts the image of not just a performer on stage, but of any woman enduring the gaze of society at large (and not just a male gaze). The titular Candy complains that she is "always left hungry," and the implication is that she is left devouring herself. That's until the very end, where she pulls her tampon out and munches on it, completing the performance and sating herself at last. 

Carter's commitment to the bit and subversion of burlesque imagery helps punctuate what is simultaneously a solid gag, a political statement, and a howl. Making red the only color seen in the comic helps play up the performative aspects of the comic--both from the perspective of the character and Carter's technical choices. 

Jonathan Baylis' So Buttons #15

Jonathan Baylis has been writing comics for about a decade now, working with cartoonists to relate anecdotes from his life in the tradition of Harvey Pekar. What's changed for him over the years? Well, as evidenced by the latest issue of his anthology series So Buttons, he's starting to think like less as a writer and more as an editor. What I mean by that is that the way he sequences has become more sophisticated and his themes are more emotionally resonant. 

In So Buttons #15 (with a cover by C.M. Campbell that pays homage to a Barry Windsor-Smith cover from a Machine Man miniseries in the 80s), Baylis quickly establishes his theme as fathers and sons. Frequent collaborator Noah Van Sciver is a perfect choice for a loose and expressive story about a younger Baylis going with his father to visit his father's old neighborhood in Brooklyn. The message of the story ("be yourself") was a little pat, but the details of his affection for his father, along with how Baylis was frequently mystified by him, are what linger. The follow-up story, where TJ Kirsch draws a brief anecdote about solid advice on take-out, is a good gag strip that gives further color with regard to their relationship.

Baylis is a film and TV guy, having worked in the industry for a number of years. As such, he often drops interesting anecdotes about various encounters but also describes how and why film has had an impact. Sometimes, like in this issue, it leads to interesting stories, like how David Lynch's films and shows made him feel like a little less of an outsider but also indirectly helped him land a job. (Bhanu Pratrap's angular, distorted cartooning was a perfect match for this subject.) When Baylis stays away from played-out, tedious references like Star Wars or superhero stuff (essentially, Kevin Smith territory) and focuses instead on more personal and meaningful work, it's easier to see how and why it is so resonant for him. 

The stories about his time as an intern at October Films (as drawn by Danny Hellman, Karl Christian Krumpholz, and Nathan Gelgud) are not only interesting on their own as anecdotes, but they also reveal a lot about what's important for him aesthetically and how it bleeds into his personal life. That focus on movie segues into a beautiful story about his recently-deceased mother's love for West Side Story, drawn by Becky Hawkins. What represents a step up for Baylis as a writer is that this isn't simply a sentimental, emotional anecdote (although that is part of it); it's also an examination of the lacuna that now exists about why his mother felt a certain way about things. It's something he will never really know, as there are many mysteries that parents leave behind. The single-page drawing from Eleanor Davis about his mother-in-law is the single best page in the whole comic; it's a beautiful visual explication of not feeling one's own age. 

The only real misstep was Baylis' text explaining his themes at the end. I get why he might have done this, but it felt unnecessary. The themes and how they connected were clear to any reader willing to read closely. That aside, Baylis was right in asserting that this was his most cohesive issue of So Buttons to date. As a writer and as an editor, this is a clear sign that Baylis has hit his stride, and I'm excited to see his work continue to evolve. 

K. Woodman-Maynard's Tuck Everlasting

Adaptations of prose works into comics form can be tricky. How much of the original prose should be kept? What should be trimmed? How does one transform one medium into another while doing justice to both? In the case of K. Woodman-Maynard, it's her use of layout, page composition, and especially color that sets her apart from similar, more visually mundane attempts at adaptations. 

That was true for Tuck Everlasting: The Graphic Novel (written by Natalie Babbitt) as well as her prior adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The evocative metaphors of Fitzgerald were taken to whimsical visual extremes by KWM. For Babbitt, KWM chose to use certain concrete metaphors (like life as a wheel) as a recurring visual motif, and it made each occurrence all the more resonant. 

The story, which concerns a young girl encountering a family made immortal by a spring in a forest near her home, raises all sorts of fascinating philosophical questions about the implications of eternal life. Meeting the immortal Tuck family and being asked to keep their secret while having to contend with the sinister and avaricious Man in the Yellow Suit is all secondary to the protagonist of the story, young Winnie Foster, being forced to examine her deepest beliefs. Beyond simply having an adventure and stepping out of a highly-ordered life, Winnie must think about death and its implications. Interacting with Ma and Pa Tuck, as well as their sons Jesse and Miles, gives her a number of points of view about immortality. Is life just an adventure? Is a life without roots meaningless? As Pa Tuck says, is immortality essentially throwing you off of the wheel of life?

KWM gives each character their own wheel motif; the fun-loving Jesse has a rollercoaster, for example. Winnie's own dilemma is often spelled out in an omniscient narration that's written in the clouds, the trees, and other background elements. It's a clever trick that allows KWM to retain a lot of the original text without making it feel clunky. Indeed, she endeavors to make the lettering part of the art in a number of ways, like the sinister, persistent line of persuasion the Man in the Yellow Suit uses on Winnie's family, as the tails on his word balloons literally ensnares them. KWM's clever page composition often turns tree branches or roots into panels, creating a beautiful flow that allows the reader to process a lot of information very quickly.

However, it's KWM's use of watercolors to set tone and mood that does most of the storytelling work here. Shifting between the naturalistic hues of summer to highly expressionistic uses of color meant to depict emotion allows her to shift the mood in the comic without needing to make it obvious with her other storytelling. The result is something both lush and heartfelt, exciting but bittersweet. 

31 Days Of CCS, #12: Jeff Lok

Most of Jeff Lok's career was spent on extremely dark, bizarre humor comics. His scratchy line was a big part of the appeal of those strips. We at Fieldmouse Press published his memoir Totality, which represented a big step forward artistically and narratively. Lok didn't lose any of his bleak, acidic sense of humor in a memoir that was essentially a takedown of the American Dream.

His most recent comic, Fifth Time's A Charm, continues his focus on memoir, this time turning back to his childhood. Lok picks at old, strange memories, unspooling creepy but otherwise not totally events. Much like in Totality, where crazy events are told in a matter-of-fact, deadpan style, so too does this comic start with Lok sucking on a strap-on dildo before he gets pegged by a woman. The gag here is that it's in a seedy motel, but both of them were surprised that the bed wasn't bolted down. Lok's roly-poly character design and scratchy line obliterate any trace of the erotic from this scene; it's meant to be absurd. 

This causes him to reminisce about his childhood friend whose father recorded him constantly (and creepily) and threw him down the stairs randomly. His friend's behavior was weird enough to suggest that there was some kind of horrific abuse going on, but it stayed just outside young Lok's awareness. Much of this comic focus on core memories but also memory gaps, implying that trauma is the cause for a lot of these gaps. What's most interesting about this comic is that just when it seems like Lok is rambling discursively with an anecdote, he suddenly ties it back into this central, vague idea that there's a mystery he can't quite unravel. An anecdote about being trapped in the Dartmouth library at night was a way for Lok to explore the idea of fate, as he uncovered a book that he not only never saw again, he was unable to prove that it even existed. There's a David Lynch quality to all of this: the dark underpinnings of a childhood that had certain utopian qualities, like his parents building a treehouse, a swimming pool, and more in their expansive back yard. The presence of his friend undermined all of this somehow, yet Lok freely associated with him. Lok has really hit on something here, and it's exciting to see him work in the same vein as Totality. 

31 Days Of CCS, #11: Short Comics from Faith Cox, Ashley Jablonski, August Driussi, Michael Albrecht, Coco Fox, Mercedes Campos Lopez

Some short CCS reviews for some short CCS comics: 

a berry silly Love Letter, by Coco Fox. Fox is really good at cute, pun-based comics, and this tiny comic sealed in a tiny envelope (sealed with wax!) is no exception. The puns here are based on food, and it's reflelctive of the kind of kids' comics that she's best known for, as well as her penchant for art and craft projects. 

Life Is A Hiiighway, by A. Driussi. This is a hilarious mini about how doing a Lightning McQueen drag king act changed his gender identity. Hilariously, it caused him to want to be a car, but he settled on being a man instead. The drawing of Driussi in that drag is completely ridiculous, and the whole thing is a very lighthearted (yet true-to-life) account of deciding to transition. The almost lurid color scheme is what makes it work.

The Long Game, by Mercedes Campos Lopez. The thing I immediately noticed about this short bit of autobio is how much smoother her line has become. This is a story about growing up with two brothers and how they were all obsessed with the game pieces of a Pokemon-themed Monopoly game. Campos Lopez detailed sneakily pillfering them from her brothers until they were missed. The segue into adulthood, where her brothers wondered whatever happened to the pieces, led to a very funny wink by the author at the end. 

Laundry & Marginalia, by Michael Albrecht. Albrecht is another CCSer with enormous promise; all of his longer form comics thus far have been very interesting. These short minis show off his cartooning in different ways. Laundry is about a ghost who goes to a laundromat, washing itself in a machine and then coming home dripping wet, hanging itself on a line to dry. Albrecht's pencil work here is just lovely, all in service of a gag. Marginalia is just that: doodles, scribbles, half-formed ideas, exhortations, and moments of despair. 

Life As An Elementary Ghost #4 & #5, by Ashley Jablonski. I love the genre of teachers writing comics about the ridiculous things their kids say in class, and Jablonski's twist on it is drawing everyone as ghosts. It's a clever idea because it conveys the spirit of the idea with simple, stylized drawings without adding too much identifying detail. 

How to be: Mysterious, by Faith Cox. Cox is another big-time talent, and this purports to be the latest volume of a larger How To Be series. Using a delightful rabbit character (doing this like posing in front of a mirror while saying "I am a sexy enigma"), the illustrations belie the dubious instructions of the "manual" in amusing ways. For a quick one-off gag, this was executed with considerable care. 

31 Days Of CCS, #10: Ana Two

Full disclosure: Fieldmouse Press will be publishing Ana Two's horror comic Dark Room next year. A running joke I have with Ana is that, regardless of the subject of their comics, they are always inevitably about power exchange and power relationships in kink-oriented relationships. Even their delightfully deranged comic for Diskette Press, Girl Yaoi, starts with a ridiculous premise but then inevitably gets down to the same kind of exploration Ana Two has done in their other comics. This isn't a criticism but rather an amused observation; the artist just can't help themself!

Girl Yaoi is unhinged from the very first page, and while I am not the target audience for its subject (women who read boys love comics, aka fujoshi), Ana Two deftly and hilariously gives all the context for the story that a reader might need. Aster Zhou is a yaoi enthusiast with a magic ring that allows her to enter the stories she reads in her dreams and allows her to fuck to her heart's content. This is quickly complicated when her new next-door neighbor, Summer Li, gets ahold of Aster's favorite yaoi and magic ring. This leads to them fucking each other, in boy form, in a series of shared dreams. 

There's backstory that includes Aster's teenage crush on Summer and feeling betrayed when Summer read Aster's highly sexual journal. They become neighbors thanks to the whims of fate, but Aster doesn't reveal her true feelings because getting to experience a different yaoi every night is too much of a draw for her to turn down. This is the best part of the whole book--Ana Two's warped genius in crafting so many different yaoi stories is hilarious and yet completely true to the genre. There's a frantic quality to their storytelling, with big, thick, angular lines and crazy angles for the panels. Sometimes, this leads to confusion while reading, as the order of the panels is not always clearly laid out, and this is a distraction. For the most part, the context clues usually sort out such problems, and Ana Two's use of spot color (yellow for Aster, pink for Summer) cleverly allows the reader to quickly identify the identity of each woman in the many, many sex scenes in the book. 

That speaks to the excellent production values from the new stewards of Diskette Press, Dylan Box and Robin Rowe. Their offerings have uniformly been a huge step above the previous iteration of the press, and Girl Yaoi is one of their greatest triumphs in that regard. Ana Two's writing is so sharp, especially in the way the reader comes to be deeply sympathetic toward both characters, even as issues of desire, consent, betrayal, and kink all come to the fore. This isn't a story about kink or power exchange as much as it is two vulnerable, sensitive people who eventually find a way to let the other in. 

31 Days of CCS, #9: Iris Yan

Iris Yan, on occasion, will engage in a solid gimmick for her comics. In The Story Of Some Objects, the cover depicts photos of 11 seemingly random objects. However, Yan spins stories about how each of them came into her orbit, using her typical anthropomorphic animal style. The list included a ring adorned with Legos, an eraser that changes colors in the sun, an uncomfortable pair of panties she had bought to make herself feel inwardly sexier, an electric bug zapper, and a delicious bag of potato chips. 

The mundanity of these stories is the point, as they serve to illustrate the quirky aspects of her life and the lives of her friends and family. There is a matter-of-factness about every aspect of her life that makes her comics so funny; whether it's food or sex or work or the meaning of life, Yan approaches it without exaggeration or florid language. The art in this comic feels less rushed than some other recent efforts, especially with regard to lettering and line weight. It's a great introduction to her work overall, as she keeps things light and on theme.