Donna Almendrala & Nomi Kane submitted their most recent work
together, which makes sense since they are both staff artists at Schulz
Studios. Yep, they get to work with the Peanuts properties as they are
currently still being published.
Kane came into CCS with an incredibly beautiful, fine line and a
hard-won skill as both illustrator and cartoonist. What I think CCS did for her
was enhance her narrative skills, as it’s clear that her ability as a draftsman
is even more refined now than when she was in school. If Kane has a weakness as
a storyteller, it’s a lack of subtlety. Things are spelled out very clearly,
all of the time. That’s even true in some of her minicomics that range from the
very silly to the political. The Alt-Left, for instance, takes the absurdity of
that very concept and spells out its joke (essentially, oh no! The Alt-Left
will destroy the country with health care for all!) on page after beautifully
drawn page. Shut Up, Donnie! uses quotes
from the president with silly pictures to go along with them, which R.Sikoryak
did to a more absurd extent and Warren Craghead continues to do in a far more
grotesque manner. The result here is more silly than satirical.
On the other hand, Artsy Fartsies and I Don’t Want To Know How
This Happened make great use of her playful style. The former is exactly what
it sounds like: hilariously cartoony drawings of people farting with pithy
descriptions, and the latter is Kane imagining new crossbreeds of dogs. The
former comic works because it is designed to be funny, not disgusting. The latter
works because of Kane’s incredible skill in drawing dogs, especially mashing up
breeds in funny ways with amusing new names. The “Dachsador” (Labrador +
Dachsund) was especially cute in a simple way, while Kane really went to town
in drawing the Chihuapei (Chijuahua + Sha Pei), with all of the folds adding to
the cuteness of the tiny dog. Anyone who loves dogs will enjoy this mini.
Almandrala, unlike Kane’s vivid use of color, sticks to pen and
ink. Pick Your Poison is an Inktober challenge, where an artist receives a
prompt to work from every day and tries to link each up in a way that makes
some degree of narrative sense. Almandrala seems to enjoy drawing monkeys
(based on her past work), and so it’s no surprise that a monkey should be the
star of this densely inky of a monkey tossing pies and tomatoes at his friend,
a one-horned demon. It’s really just an excuse for her to draw fun things, like
giant spiders and space suits. Birbwatching takes the internet meme and
squeezes it til the point of asphyxiation in search of laughs. Essentially a
slang name for any kind of cute or odd bird on the internet, Almandrala mixes
her skill as a draftsman with the tendencies of a stand-up comedian. Captions
like “Heading to Birbcon”, with a bird carrying a pile of sticks and in flight,
are an example of the amusing but not explicitly funny. On the other hand, a
bird scratching its beak in the ground with the caption “Calling Ubirb” made me
laugh out loud. Almendrala picked on a number of hipster or young people’s
activities and used “birb” somewhere in there to poke fun at them, but it was
also clear that she was poking fun at herself as well.
The Wanderer’s Guide To The Wilds is another illustration zine,
this time taking creatures encountered as part of Jason Lutes’ own fantasy role
playing game. Without the pressure that a drawing challenge presented,
Almendrala clearly took her time with these drawings, and the result was
beautiful. By using RPG style descriptions (example: “Hostile, Large, Group”),
the reader gets a sense of what the encounter with each creature must have been
like. Creatures like the Heavily-Armored Ravens are perfectly conceived and
illustrated, with just the right amount of minimalist background. My favorite
were the Miklos (“Clamfolk, At War, Lawful, Medium”), fantastic drawing of a
creature that’s both vaguely cute and definitely strange, which I think sums up
much of Almendrala’s work.
Lone Rock Falls is an anthology featuring both cartoonists as well
as Kat Efird, with each doing their own chapter that takes place in the same
town at around the same time. Kane’s piece is one of her best to date. The
usual strongly-developed character design is there, but she uses odd angles at
times to vary the way the characters interact with each other in space. In this
cowboy story from an indeterminate era, the protagonist is a pigtailed young
woman who has a few tricks up her sleeve. With a for page grid maximizing the
sheer size of her characters, we soon learn that she’s in town to be an
apprentice to the greatest magical mastermind around. Along the way, she fixes
her horse’s hoof, pacifies a group of bounty hunters who are after her, guns in
hand, and charms the local barmaid. It’s the queer western magic show story I
didn’t know I needed, as Kane twists any number of clichés into a satisfying,
funny narrative.
Almendrala’s story once again involves a monkey and sorcery, this
time as a monkey revenant digs its way out of a grave and crosses a desert for
some unseen act of vengeance. Its story is being narrated by an owl, who first
sees the monkey bury her child, and then set off on her quest. The owl can’t
stop asking questions both occasionally profound but mostly banal, finally
stopping when she reaches what she believes may be her own clutch of eggs. She
leaves the fearsome warrior to her quest, concluding, “Vengeance is tiring”.
Almendrala’s line is scratchy and relies blacks being heavily spotted as well
as huge swaths of negative space in the form of the desert. She also turns any
number of clichés on their heads in this surprisingly cute story, when one
considers the subject matter.
Efird is not a CCS grad, but she certainly fit right in with this
take on vampires and gothic romances set in that same old west town. Half of
the story is a shaggy dog story as we await what possibly could be the source
of the scratching in a widowed woman’s old house, and the other half goes down
that roller coaster into a hilarious rush of a monster-hunting story. Her style
has some of Almendrala’s scratchy tendencies combined with the detail that Kane
uses in her faces. Overall, this is a nicely cohesive anthology that flatters
the talents of each of its creators.
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