45 Days Of CCS, #20: Alex Washburn

Published in the pages of the Fantology anthology, Alex Washburn's serial Clan Zargs works well a solid fantasy story, a romantic serial, and a humorous narrative. There's a frantic energy to it where the plot can take sudden, massive, and unpredictable shifts while never veering from the glue that holds it together: the character relationships. Clan Zargs IV follows the ragtag team of adventurers as they've gotten in way over their heads, captured by the Missionaries of Jahk. One of Clan Zargs, Sasha, has agreed to join the missionaries, but it's part of a plan to break out their fellow clan members. 

Here's what makes this story interesting: Washburn abandons the action of the plot and takes a detour into interpersonal drama for seven pages. As it turns out, Sasha wanted to try something new and genuinely wanted to join the missionaries, though she wanted to free her friends as well. This was such an interesting left turn for the story, as Washburn defied typical fantasy conventions in breaking up a team in this way. The story then takes another sudden turn as the threat of violence arises, only to be quelled by another new character. There's a lot of talking and backstory in this episode, but it never supercedes the emotional narrative that runs through it. Washburn's line is thick and chunky, but you can see the confidence in his drawing increasing episode by episode. That thickness allows for rubbery, exaggerated action, like in Washburn's two-page short, Azzy's Pork Buns. That quality is ideally suited for comedic storytelling, which is true of this story about a side character hunting a pig for a recipe, but it's also true of the main series as well. 

45 Days Of CCS, #19: Annabel Driussi, Tom O'Brien, Ashley Jablonski

When Natalie Norris wrote her sexual assault graphic memoir Dear Mini, she dedicated it to "girls like us." In Dear Natalie, Annabel Driussi tells her own story in epistolary form to Norris, because of how much Dear Mini meant to her. Driussi's mini-comic is very different from Norris' deeply detailed account of the experiences leading up to and after her assault, in that many of the events are alluded to off-panel. The candy-colored hues of the mini and the anecdote about her telling one of her stuffies about her secret masterfully signify that the 14-year-old Driussi was a child when she experienced her own trauma--both literally and emotionally. At the same time, she "hated my childish body" and wanted to look like a woman. She was neither here nor there, and boys took advantage of this. This looks like it was done in crayon, which does much of the narrative heavy lifting, but Driussii's thin and tender line aptly reflects her own vulnerability. 

Ashley Jablonski is mostly doing very short minis these days about their experience teaching art to very young children. They delight in Jablonski as much as Jablonski delights in them, and this is reflected in their Life As An Elementary Ghost mini-comics. Jablonski draws everyone as cute ghosts and essentially relates funny anecdotes, like a kid saying "I made that shot," with an asterisk of "Definitely did not make that shot." Kids ask to spell words like "googleplexian," jump into piles of leaves and encourage Jablonski to do so, and play choose your own adventure. I also quite liked Jablonski's Apples As People, wherein she imagines what Granny Smith, McIntosh, and Baldwin might look like. Here, Jablonski's use of color is especially effective and evocative. 

I hadn't seen anything from Tom O'Brien in a while before I saw him at CAKE. He's working away at an illustrated guide to knives called The Knife Guide, and he gave me a mini of Chapter 4 to look at. This chapter covers different ways to hold a knife and cutting techniques, mostly for the kitchen. As someone who likes to cook but who knows very little about knives, I found it fascinating. It was helpful that he was careful with his image-to-text ratio, keeping the captions in each panel to five lines at a maximum. Anything beyond that would not only be too much text to read and absorb, it likely would have gone beyond the actual illustration in each panel and would have demanded another image anyway. O'Brien uses a six-panel grid as a base, collapsing panels along rows as per needed. The best thing about this was just how particular O'Brien was about illustrating fine details, like precisely how to handle and wield a knife to get a particular kind of cut, be it a mince or a chop. Not being afraid of these details is exactly what a beginner needs to see. The minicomic used grayscale shading but the actual art is in color (see above), which heightens the contrast of the object to its background; however, the constantly shifting color backgrounds are distracting. 

45 Days Of CCS, #18: 666 Comics

The latest iteration of 666 Comics, edited by Ian Richardson has some of the usual CCS names in a fun format: six stories, six pages per comic, six panels per page. Some of the artists take extreme liberties in these restrictions, as what is a "panel" is pushed to the limit at times, but the spirit of the idea is there. As the title would suggest, some kind of deviltry is generally part of the package, but the tone swings wildly from comedy to emo to twisty EC-style horror.

Max Riffner opens up with "Stretch Mark Of The Beast," a Rosemary's Baby/The Omen spoof where a man becomes pregnant by way of his wife after she joins a satanic cult. This is a classic two-track narrative, as the text is a straightforward, sad-sack narrative about being left by his wife then leading to being totally oblivious to the demon inside of him. Meanwhile, Riffner goes all-out with gore and over-the-top images until the final one, which puts the protagonist's stupidity into sharp, ominous relief.

Denis St. John is up to his usual EC Comics-flavored silliness with "Hellarella Pinball Ballyhell,", with his vampy demoness luring a demon to play a pinball version of her. The twist? He becomes the ball when he puts his quarter in! His line, as always, is pleasingly inky and dense, which adds a little weight to the cavalcade of puns mixed with cartoony violence. 

Richardson's "Hell Of A Deal" is the most traditional horror story in the comic. It's about a woman who turns to a psychic because of a deal she made with a demon. The psychic promises to help, but she gets a nasty surprise when the nature of the initial deal is revealed. Richardson's art (and lettering) reminds me a lot of Jack Chick's--naturalistic but with cartoony expressions, and a certain rigidity for effect.

As for the other stories, Jamie Messerman's "The Devil Takes Care Of His Own" is a tender story about a caring demon and someone going through trauma, done in a fairly standard, manga-inspired style. It's an odd fit for this anthology, but then there's usually one outlier in Richardson's collections. Jeff Lorentz's "Root Of All Evil" is a pretty obvious satire where the devil is talking about how humanity has ruined Earth far more than he has. Amanda Kahl's "Superstition" is one of the best stories in the collection, about a midwife in a small town encountering horror in a delivery. Connecting it to the superstitions that are really a manifestation of collective wisdom was a bit of clever storytelling. The use of blacks is especially effective, though the italic font is distracting. Overall, Riffner and Kahl were probably the best of the lot, while Messerman's piece was such a tonal shift (visually and thematically) that it felt out of place. 

45 Days Of CCS, #17: Pat Leonhard

I've been watching Pat Leonhard develop his graphic novel Margo since sitting next to him during a class at CCS when I visited for Industry Day in 2018. Margo is a horror-comedy-fantasy novel that is a cross between "The Monkey's Paw," Shawn Of The Dead, aliens, monsters, ancient civilizations, and much more. Part 1 is the first 70 or so pages of a story that's over 200 pages. Despite the fact that the book turns out to be an epic, at its heart it's the story of the friendship between Margo (a reanimated zombie girl) and Fran (the weird museum-obsessed kid who comes up with a lot of great plans. 

Leonhard loves to create double-takes for readers. The first comes when we meet Margo, and the reader realizes that she's a zombie or ghoul, with part of her face eaten away. She is also a perfectly typical girl. The second comes after she bites her half-sister Becky, and the reader realizes that Margo has accidentally turned her into a flesh-craving zombie. Leonhard unspools the plot slowly so as to focus on mean girl dynamics and to introduce Margo's cruelly buffoonish father Mortimer. It is revealed that Margo's mother is an archeologist who discovered a real-life monkey's paw amid an ancient civilization. Mortimer stupidly uses the paw to make a wish, but the wishes are cursed--Margo dies as a result. He reluctantly brings her back from the dead, but she comes back as the undead, which leads to her mother being able to speak only in an ancient language, which lands her in a mental hospital. 

Leonhard has gone through a lot of permutations in order to make two key segments of the book not only readable, but wildly entertaining. Part of this is his clever use of color. For the segment that reveals the key scenes in the story "The Monkey's Paw," Leonhard uses a sepia tone designed to make the pages look like an old horror comic (except for one page, where he forgets to do this). For the scene where we learn why and how Margo's mother wound up in her situation, Leonhard uses a purple wash in an action-packed segment. Giving the reader a lot of narrative pipe while finding ways to keep it entertaining prevents the story from bogging down until it really blasts off halfway through. There are so many delightful little jokes, easter eggs, and other visual details that enhance what Leonhard is doing. The final version will be an absurd, action-oriented YA fantasy on the level of Mathew New's excellent Billy Johnson book.

45 Days Of CCS, #16: Faith Cox, Penina Gal

Obstructions, Vol 0, by Penina Gal. I've always enjoyed Gal's work, whether it's fantasy, memoir, or comics-as-poetry. This time around, it's graphic medicine, in a zine about their Upper Airway Resistance Disorder (UARS). It's a cousin to the more common sleep apnea, but like many "hidden" disorders, especially for AFAB people, it's often misdiagnosed as a psychiatric disorder. The comic is interesting, as it's an illustrated guide to the symptoms and treatment for the disease, with occasional interjections by Gal as to their experiences. It describes their sleepiness in high school as well as out of breath while running in college. It includes detailed drawings of the orthodontic apparatus that they are currently wearing. This is less a traditional narrative than it is a kind of medical diary, as future updates are promised in this interesting hybrid of diagrams and drawings. 

I Can Feel It All, by Faith Cox. Many comics are howls, raging against pain, trauma, and mental illness. Fewer comics show the breakthroughs, the moments where the fog clears, and the pain subsides. That's what this comic is, as Cox enumerates all of the things they are taking the time to feel: their inner calm, the gardens in her neighborhood, the fruit at the farmer's market, and the summer air. She discusses the feeling of being a "prisoner to yourself," and the central theme of the comic is not taking any of it for granted. Cox's open-page layouts allow the images to breathe in the same way her character is breathing free, and the sketchiness of the drawings gives the whole thing a sense of immediacy.

45 Days Of CCS, #15: Ana Two

Ana Two's Hyperfawnus got an Ignatz nomination, and it was well-earned despite it being so short (just twelve pages of story). There's a neat trick and swerve on the first two pages, where we see a deer and a girl, and we are led to believe that the girl is the narrator, as the narration says "Follow me, little fawn." Instead, it's the Old Man of the Forest who's narrating, which we learn when the girl accidentally shoots the deer with an arrow. The rest of the comic is devoted to the price she must eventually pay after she refuses to fulfill the price of a single drop of blood. It's clear by the way that Two uses color, as well as their themes, that E.M. Carroll is a big influence. However, Two uses Carroll as a launching point for their own themes, interests, stories, and visual expression, rather than directly imitate what Carroll does. This comic is a great example of a story where much is hinted at but little is revealed, other than what is directly needed to resolve the character narrative. Here, that narrative is simply a price that must be paid; all other motivations and world-building remain unspoken. Two's panel design frames the work with unusual shapes, and the concave construction of many of them leads to a feeling of things closing in on the protagonist. 

Their latest project is Darkroom, published by the Shortbox Comics Fair. (Full disclosure: there is a longer version in the works that Fieldmouse might become involved with.) The story follows a vampire named Seraphina, forever in a young body despite her many years. She's in love with a photographer named Lynn, who is obsessed with trying to capture her on film. The story flashes several decades to Seraphina and another lover named Esther who was also obsessed with trying to photograph her. The other member of the cast is a mousy detective named Ira who has found a trail of bodies following Seraphina, and they are closing in.

Ana Two's comics explore a lot of aspects of power relationships and exchange vis-a-vis kink. That's part of what's going on here, but the main thrust of the character narrative is objectification. Seraphina is clearly a monster, but she is capable of love. Feeding for her is like a shark eating its prey; it is an amoral act of survival. Two gives some hints about how Seraphina lives with herself; memory for her is not a linear process, but instead "swimming upstream a river." What she remembers is "blood, tastes, scents." This explains why she doesn't completely recall how the older photographer, Esther, used her in the same way Lynn did. All Seraphina wanted was a connection, no matter how fleeting they all tended to be, but what the photographers wanted was their own version of immortality, through their work, using Seraphina as the means to get there. Ana Two's use of color is brilliant: grayscale wash (with spot color) for modern-day scenes, sepia wash for the older scenes, and a dark red wash for the darkroom. Two's work is thoughtful, subtle, and forceful all at once. 

45 Days Of CCS, #14: Colleen Frakes

One has to admire Colleen Frakes' persistence. One of the original CCS students from the class of 2007, Frakes is one of the few from the class who has continued to do comics since graduating. Knots represents her first book with a big-sandbox publisher after many attempts. It's interesting that it's a quasi-autobiographical book, considering that much of her output throughout her career has been fantasy comics with a feminist edge. The main exception was Island Brat, about spending part of her childhood on a prison island where her parents were guards. I've always loved Frakes' self-caricature, thanks in part to her pen-and-ink mastery and use of gesture. 

With Knots being a book from a big publisher, it's not surprising that it was in full color, which was done by Mercedes Campos López. I've read several comics from López in color that looked great, but the color in this book feel perfunctory at best, and a lot of it drowns out Frakes' linework. Indeed, her line weight feels a tad thinner than in her other work, leading to a sketchy spareness that is ill-served by the color filling up space in the blank backgrounds. Considering that the plot follows a disaster when Frakes' stand-in character dyes her hair, the use of color for hair looks surprisingly flat because of the variety of background color fills. I wish this book had a 2-color wash or used brighter spot colors to emphasize hair. 

That said, Frakes' cartooning was still top-notch and the story was so surprisingly raw. Most middle-grade memoirs tend to focus on friendships and/or romances, but Knots is a story about a family going through a difficult time. Frakes was wise to make this quasi-biographical, because it allowed her to smooth over certain narrative elements to make the story flow well, while still retaining key elements from her own experience. The story follows Norah, entering into sixth grade, who is trying to find ways to express herself. She lives her parents and hellraising younger sister Lark, and it's established that her family has had to move multiple times because they kept getting transferred in their employment as prison guards. 

The plot device of Norah giving herself a bad dye job and wrecking it a few times is the story's visual hook. The real story comes when Norah's mom is transferred yet again, which leads to her parents deciding to split the family up. Her tempestuous mother would take Lark with her to their new city, while Norah would remain with her easygoing father. Frakes completely sidestepped predictable formula work here with a tremendously vulnerable, revealing, and frequently absurd portrayal of a family that was trying to do its best but was struggling. In this portrayal, there are no villains; however, there is a major critique of both parents who don't listen and Norah, who is afraid to speak up and express her needs. 

Frakes does a marvelous job in portraying Norah's anxiety and fears surrounding her parents' jobs working in law-enforcement, often in hilarious ways. At one point, Norah has a nightmare that her teacher calls the cops on her, her parents divorce as a result, and she goes to prison with her quarrelsome younger sister. When she's told it's a spider prison (a huge fear), Norah bolts awake and wonders "What is wrong with my brain?" Norah's awkwardness is as relatable as her wanting to expand her horizons and get out of her comfort zone. The intense loneliness she feels after her mother leaves, with her father working constantly, is portrayed in an almost palpable way. Hooking the narrative into a classmate who was sent to live with his grandparents after a casual admission of neglect in class added another level of very real pain in a way that is unusual for this kind of book. In the end, Norah is able to express herself more clearly when her parents want to move again, and they finally start to listen. That said, she noted that things didn't magically change, either--everyone just tried a little harder, but at least they were together. It's that sense of authenticity, even in a work of (mostly) fiction, that sets Knots apart. 

On top of that, Frakes' catch-up mini So What's New With You? talks about Knots, her husband and daughter, video games, and doing an event with cartoonist Laura Knetzger where she affirms that she plans to continue to self-publish. It certainly provided that pen-and-ink fix I missed in Knots!

45 Days Of CCS, #13: E.B. Sciales and Gabrielle Tinnirello

There is something delightfully old-fashioned about E.B. Sciales' comic Sal #1, featuring "Sal, the Tiny Artist." This pen-and-ink collection of gag strips feels like something I might have seen in a "Best Cartoons of 1957" book that Lawrence Lariar put together back in the day, but they also feel delightfully fresh. Wearing a jaunty beret and sporting a thin handlebar mustache, Sal is always feverishly at work on a new painting. Whether he's spilling a lot of sweat over a single dot or fretting endlessly over someone possibly making money with a painting he through away, Sciales' expressive cartooning makes Sal an instantly compelling character. Every gesture is meaningful and intentional, and Sciales is especially adept at using space in interesting ways. Frequently eschewing a standard grid, Sciales flips between open page layouts, squiggly panel borders, panels that are puffy-bordered dream sequences, and a host of other techniques. Sciales has the chops to do any kind of gag or humor comics she wants.

Gabrielle Tinnirello's zines are consistently beautiful, colorful, and emotionally vulnerable. I'm not exactly sure that they are comics in any traditional sense. Her extensive use of mixed media does convey a sort of emotional narrative even if there's not any kind of grid or familiar use of an open-page layout. J'Obsessed features a cavalcade of photos of Tinnirello in a bikini, surrounded by a whirl of collage images that include name stickers, photos, decorative hand-drawn patterns, her own hand-lettered commentary, and other colorful images that express Tinnirello's unabashed and unfiltered sense of joy. Local Whorish is a much more dense diary comic following Tinnirello's self-described "boy crazy" summer and her various crushes. The feeling she captures here is one of tantalizing possibilities, the thrill of desire and being desired. She rides that wave throughout the comic as she employs her exaggerated, looping line that centers her intense use of decorative elements. Those elements dominate every page, as though Tinnirello is inviting the reader to frolic inside her journal or vision board with her. That said, her figures (a mix of cute and distorted) still stand out and fit snugly with the other elements on her page. Her comics are more about a feeling than narrative, and one can't help but feel the sweet pangs of her almost innocently portrayed crushes along with her.

 

45 Days Of CCS, #12: Wayne Carter and King Ray

Wayne Carter is a humorist. The comics I've seen from him have been absurd and well-designed, with sly surprises. His comic The Saddest Angriest Black Boy Anywhere initially seems like a joking tribute to Robyn Smith's classic The Saddest Angriest Black Girl In Town, down to the use of a vellum cover with an image that overlays an image underneath it. However, it is most certainly its own thing apart from what Smith did, even as it describes a similar experience: being a Black person in the extremely white White River Junction, VT. Smith talked about how othering this experience was, and did it in her own poetic, sensitive style. Carter addressed similar issues in his own style, which is satirical and blunt. He uses a fluid open-page layout and begins with a slavery "joke" that someone made at a bonfire he held. 

Carter then lists a bunch of microaggressions, just plain aggressions (like a cashier who refused to acknowledge him), and the essential point of just how exhausting it is to live in an environment like this. This comic is a seething, unapologetic expression of how angry he is at this exhaustion, but it is also a love letter to Smith, who was his professor at CCS. As he said, "She made it feel less lonely." That said, the comic focuses less on outright, in-your-face racism from that cashier and more on his white peers who see him as someone to foist all of their insecurities about race upon. Part of that anger is that their feelings are not his problem. The comic is also a statement on his own identity, mixing sequential anecdotes with full-page text stops for emphasis. He ends by noting "Here is a place where my anger is good. My anger leads me through the bad." He makes no claims for anyone else, which is one of the most important points of the comic: Carter doesn't presume to speak for others, so why do others presume to speak for him and project their fears on him? Carter makes a statement here, and he does it in style.

King Ray's comic Birds vs Planes is typical of Ray's quirky storytelling and the way they integrate word and image on the page. It manages to include the crazy tale of pilot "Sully" Sullenberg, who famously managed to land a plane after geese flew into his engines, as a sort of patron saint figure who brings peace to the warring factions of birds and (sentient) planes. As it turns out, the conflict between birds and planes was heightened when a bird named Claudia and a plane named Steve fell in love and later broke up. This triggered all-out war before Sully stepped in to promote peace and announce that Claudia was pregnant with Steve's child. Ray cleverly transfers soap-opera tropes to a ridiculous scenario that nonetheless has its own internal logic.

45 Days Of CCS, #11: Amelia B.C. Dutton (ABCD)

Amelia B.C. Dutton has the awesome pen name of ABCD, and this first-year student has already stacked up a few impressive-looking minis. Leading the way is Arcana Arena (Chapter Zero), the first part of what clearly seems to be her long-form project going forward. Done in what appears to be extremely dense digital color, it follows a character who has been invited to be on a "televised tournament of skill" wherein each participant represents one of the 22 major arcana. The protagonist is the Chariot, and she furtively leaves home under the cover of night on her motorbike Rhonda to travel cross-country in order to participate. This comic essentially sets up the basics: it's a competition of some kind, and the judges are the four Aces (Wands, Swords, Cups, and Pentacles). The Chariot is a little stressed about the competition, and the judges are stressed that one member of the Arcana is missing: the Fool, naturally. Dutton lays character exaggeration and expression on thick, and the project feels like it's heavily influenced by animation. Most of the time this looks interesting, but some of the figures have the stiffness of illustration instead of the fluidity of cartooning. I suspect this will change in future chapters where the contests actually begin. 

Error 404 is a short mini done solely in pencil. It dips once again into Tarot for the cover, and it follows a character whose computer stops working. Taking it to a strange shop for repair, she gets a very nasty surprise from the repairman. It's a shocking end to a 9-page story, as the poor protagonist never has a chance. Dutton's pencil work is expressive and dense, but her sketchy characters have a lot of life. The final mini here is bittercold, which is about a breed of insect called the "bittercold moth" that swarms on trees and carries pathogens that cause depression. This is a beautifully-cartooned comic that is a sort of compromise between the denseness of the first comic and the sketchiness of the second. It's also somewhere between a body horror comic and an emotionally resonant metaphor for mental illness, especially in cold, isolated places. Dutton packed a lot of punch into three short comics, and their ambitious visual storytelling got my attention in each comic. 

45 Days Of CCS, #10: Andy Warner

Andy Warner has an uncanny knack for producing informational comics that are exceptionally well-researched but also fun to read. Like many CCS grads doing "applied cartooning," Warner's books aren't information for their own sake; he has a particular point of view that he's trying to push. Or rather, he's pushing back against traditional historical narratives that emphasize the supposed heroism of colonizers of all varieties while denying the basic humanity of their victims. 

In Spices And Spuds: How Plants Made Our World, Warner focuses on a seemingly neutral idea (plants are the bedrock of civilization) and examines it more carefully to show how exploitation and cruelty in service of profit have been part of humanity for thousands of years. He lightens all of this up with dopey jokes made by the actual people in the story, which was a necessity for a narrative of this magnitude--it's a lot of medicine. He also makes it a bit easier to process by separating the book into separate, smaller narratives, based on the plant: cotton, tea, tulips, pepper, rice, etc. He explicitly tells the reader that it's OK to skip around, and he's careful to craft the book in such a way that one can indeed enjoy and understand it, especially since a lot of the things he writes about tend to repeat themselves. 

The chapters on tea and pepper were especially interesting, and along with the chapter on sugar, are very revealing in how the addictions of a certain class can lead directly to the oppression of a marginalized class. Tea is a great example of this; the buzz of its caffeine led to a worldwide frenzy in its trade, leading to wars, destabilization of entire countries through opium addiction, and general misery. Innovation leads to demand, which leads to finding ways to maximize profit at the expense of the poor and othered. Warner is a great writer who has a way of breaking down complex concepts in a clear and direct manner, and he knows how to do it very briefly. 

The problem with having to cram this much information in such a small space is that every page is overwhelmingly text-heavy. The tiny panels have no room to breathe in a relatively small book size. Compounding this problem is drowning the book in color that overwhelms Warner's line on nearly every page. Warner does everything he can to ameliorate this problem with his witty cartooning, but at a certain point, this becomes more of illustrated text than anything resembling a more familiar comics narrative. This is a big publisher he's working with, which means certain commercial demands, but even a slightly bigger page would have made the comic feel less claustrophobic. It's a tribute to Warner's writing that the book is enjoyable to read, but it would also have looked so much better in black & white, or with spot color. Once again, the realities of commercial comics dictated he had to go in a different direction, but as a critic, it was frustrating to read something that was good that could have been excellent if different design decisions had been made. 

45 Days Of CCS, #9: Ellie Liota, Al Varela and Iona Fox (with Cooper Whittlesey)

Ellie Liota has shown a knack, in her young career for drawing anthropomorphic animals, or animals who are intelligent. Trash Town is a fun little comic that plays up both the comedic elements of a group of animals who are dumpster diving with the grim, visceral realities of what this really means. It's a nice art object as well, with a cover flap of a dumpster revealing the raccoon, opossum, and skunk staring up at the reader. Trash Town is a good example of an effective use of two-track storytelling; the dialogue is free-flowing and light-hearted as the animals dine on their dumpster buffet, but the visuals tell a nastier story. For example, one of the young possums brings their mother a severed human finger. A swarm of maggots is referred to as "disco rice" by Maude the possum rice because of the way they squirm, and their mother Annie the fly yells at the animals for eating her kids. Another great two-track moment is when the raccoon digs through the maggots to find something shocking. The reader thinks it's shock at finding a human corpse, but instead, it's shock at finding wet cat food. Liota manipulates the expectations of anthropomorphism and cleverly creates interesting story beats when the talking animals don't react the way a human would. Her cute character design only helps emphasize this further. 

Al Varela's Young, Dumb & Queer slice-of-life queer romance series is perfectly attuned, josei manga-inspired cartooning. It's colorful and populated by characters with big feelings who aren't afraid to talk about their feelings. The mini Hate My Ex is a good, short example of this, as the characters Tyler and Leslie chat about break-ups from their past. In what is essentially a talking heads comic, Varela keeps the reader's eye occupied with Tyler shooting hoops and then later eating lunch. Leslie is a great character because she recognizes her own self-sabotaging tendencies thanks to her bipolar disorder. Seeing both of their exes dating each other is a hilarious twist that provides a satisfying conclusion for what is just a 12-page comic. Varela's work is much more refined than when I first encountered it a couple of years ago. 

It's been a while since I had seen a comic from Iona Fox, but she's certainly had good reason. She had to deal with advanced-stage rectal cancer and the subsequent quality-of-life issues her survival (happily) entailed. In her funny and frank comic Tough Shit, Fox immediately dives into how the language around cancer is odd and "babyish," perhaps in an effort to talk around a disease that is not only deadly but whose treatments are grueling. Contracting cancer at the same time COVID was at its height, all while negotiating a new relationship, was a tough triple threat for Fox. However, the focus of this short comic is how she dealt with having a colostomy bag after her treatment. It's reflective of cancer treatment in general; there's plenty of attention to the actual treatment, but there's much less concern given to quality of life issues for survivors. A lot of detail (and information) is devoted not only to having a colostomy bag, but also information provided on the kind of underwear that should be worn with, sex, and finally how to discuss it publicly. This is one of the better cancer-related comics I've read, in part because Fox deliberately avoids valorization narratives and treatment-related infodumps in favor of her actual lived experience. 

Fox's line is much more loose and scribbly than I remembered, but it's highly effective and expressive. Abandoning naturalism in favor of crazier scribbles served her narrative well, just as it seems to serve New Thing, a comic she's doing with Cooper Whittlesey. It's about a twitchy man who's going to pick up. a dog at a special dog pound, one with strange rules. This was just four pages from a longer work, but I'm pretty sure Fox is doing all of the drawing here. The slightly grotesque character design fits with the absurdity of the narrative, and I'm excited to see Fox continue this kind of cartooning. 

45 Days Of CCS, #8: Hannah Kaplan and Anna McGlynn

Hannah Kaplan is someone I hadn't seen in seven years, which was the last time I reviewed her work. I was happy to run into her at the Philadelphia Comics Expo and got a lot of work that was new to me. Kaplan's work is funny, frank, and restlessly smart. The work covered here is from 2017 to late 2022. 

We're All Gonna Die One Day is in the classic Kaplan style: philosophical diary strips done in colored pencil with an emphasis on sex, friendships, and creativity. Her strip from 5/22/17 talks briefly about the agitation of feeling horny, leading to her discussing why the show Twin Peaks was meaningful to her. its focus on the tangibility of evil, death, and aging allowed her a kind of comfort, in part because all of them are expressed as illusory to some degree. There's an extended sequence of going to the comics show CAKE in Chicago, including a particularly funny one where a tipsy Kaplan approaches cartoonists Kevin Huizenga and Gabrielle Bell to see if they remember her. Kaplan's use of color does a lot of heavy lifting for the emotional narrative of her comics, along with making them interesting to look at. 

Lately jumps ahead to 2018, done in the same style, with a lot of visual flourishes. This digs further into the essence of Kaplan's comics, which can be roughly summed up as "What is my purpose?" Finding a way to connect her desires with a need for meaningful interactions and a larger sense of what she can do in the world drives these comics. This is true whether she's hanging out with her close friends, feeling frustration over an interesting temp job ending after a week, going to therapy, and dating a new & odd guy. Kaplan's work reminds me a bit of Gabrielle Bell's, only she's much more open in revealing details to the reader. The main similarity is her sense of humor, both in terms of witty dialogue and funny drawings. 

Fantasy Land is an interesting comic that seeks to distance an author who usually (but not exclusively) works in memoir from the experience of a character (who bears a great resemblance to the author) who has decided to try "sugar dating" as a way to make money. Of course, this has been well-documented in M.K. Harkness' comics, though her circumstances were far different than the ones of the unnamed character here. It's an important distinction to make because Kaplan is revealing certain things here that are otherwise not discussed in her comics. This comic depicts the fledgling era of the character's career as a sex worker, and the ambiguity allows for Kaplan to show the awkward humor, the feeling of self-empowerment, and both the mundane qualities of sex work as a job like any other but also the ways in which it is dangerous. Using this bit of distance in the way that Phoebe Gloeckner does in her work allows the focus to be on the narrative itself instead of the voyeuristic qualities of the experience. 

Diary 2011/2021 is an interesting variation on the daily diary comic. Starting with January 1st, Kaplan does a page from 2011 that is immediately followed by a single panel on the same date, but ten years later. The entries are generally more mundane than her usual comics, but the point of this is to take a gestalt view of her life as a 25-year-old with a particular group of friends and as a 35-year-old dealing with the global pandemic in Philadelphia. Kaplan cleverly makes the images similar in each pairing, even if the life events they portrayed were dramatically different. 

August Diary was done a few years after her last comics as a way of working with her friend Anna McGlynn. The threads are interesting to pick up on here, as Kaplan is moving in with her boyfriend Kyler, someone first seen in comics from five years earlier during a time when her dating life was much more fluid and tenuous. Kaplan notes feeling a greater overall sense of solidity even as she remains unsure of precisely what qualities define her, and this feeling runs through this entire collection. While much of the comic is devoted to moving and creating a new normal in living with a partner, this is all contrasted by Kaplan contracting COVID and time taking on a weird, fluid quality. As always, her comics are less about specific events and more about someone living in her head who struggles to be in the moment. 

Finally, Alone Together/Together Alone #2 is a collaboration with McGlynn from 2018. Kaplan uses a six-panel grid in the style of Gabrielle Bell with a purple wash here, and the tone of the comics is similar to Bell's traditional July diary comics. There are more shenanigans than usual for Kaplan and her line is a lot more refined and careful than in some of her other work. Her droll sense of humor and ear for interesting dialogue are both working well here, but the slightly ramshackle and colorful quality of her other comics is what I tend to like most about them. That style is certainly a better fit for working with McGlynn, whose comics have a more structured sense of narrative than Kaplan's and are generally more polished. Her self-caricature is delightfully sloppy, giving it a cartoony contrast to everything else she draws. It's interesting to see where the two friends intersect as well as when they're completely apart, like when McGlynn goes to Amsterdam. Overall, Kaplan's comics are thought-provoking, experimental, and funny, which isn't what I tend to think of with regard to diary comics. Hopefully, she will continue to make more. 

45 Days Of CCS, #7: Jarad Greene

If there's a single word to describe Jarad Greene's work, it's focused. From the very first time I met him at SPX years ago, it was clear that he had found his niche doing memoir-inflected young adult and middle- grade comics. While his comics have big supporting casts, the books revolve around his stand-in protagonists. This is especially true for his middle-grade comics A-Okay and his new one, A For Effort. In the former, Greene's Jay Violet character tries to come to terms with his severe acne and his dawning understanding that he's asexual. In the new book, Jay struggles with academic expectations and how a theater class is taking him out of his comfort zone. 

Once again, there's a big cast of characters for him to bounce off of, but no one else has any kind of well-developed character arc. This is meant as more of an observation than a criticism because most YA and MG books tend to focus on friendships and relationships more than anything else. For Jay, those are all secondary concerns. Where Greene excels is in providing both fine details regarding his protagonist's desires and a lot of colorful side details to accentuate the plot. In A For Effort, Greene builds the structure of the book around Jay's class schedule. Geometry and Biology are struggles, but it's being placed in a theater class that really flummoxed him--especially since he was looking for an easy "A."

Jay navigates new friends, like the studious Cepos and arts-oriented Frida and Marin, as well as the overachieving, handsome, and charming Paul. The hypercompetitive nature of the school, even for frosh, becomes more of a subplot than the focus of the narrative. While grades (especially with pressure from his parents) are a source of stress, the real story of the narrative is not just Jay discovering the joy of trying something new but not worrying about being great at it, it's also using this newfound confidence to assert his own agency with his parents and his friends. Visually, Greene's art straddles the line between typical MG art and something that's a bit cartoonier and more expressive. I wish it had been possible to do this in black & white because Greene's line is compelling enough on its own to not need color. Color in this book is fairly perfunctory, serving to add depth and weight to some pages (ala Raina Telgemeier) but not really doing much for the narrative itself or conveying emotion. 

It's interesting that with his books having this individual focus, that some of Greene's recent mini-comics have gone in another direction. Everyday Friend is about the concept of having a "best friend" (which Greene says he's not sure he's ever had) vs. an "everyday friend" (a concept his sister told him about, where it's someone you see all the time). Greene notes he's had many of those, but that they also tend to fall by the wayside thanks to work or simply diverging paths. In Tunnel To Dreamland, Greene uses a fun fantasy backdrop to explore the tunnel vision he used to achieve his lifelong goal: being a cartoonist. That focus I saw when he was still at CCS served him well, making him one of the more significant success stories from the school with three books to his name at a young age. However, he candidly reveals that in so doing, he had to sacrifice human connection and love--"no person to share it all with." He concludes by saying (through a metaphor of coming out a tunnel into the sun) that things are shifting. I'll be curious to see how this changes his work in the future. 

45 Days Of CCS, #6: Steve Thueson

Steve Thueson's comics are in that sweet spot between comedy and straight-ahead genre stories, with a heavy helping of slacker dialogue. Whether it's fantasy comics, kids' adventure comics, or a horror spoof with his The Night Never Ends, Thueson is careful to give the reader a satisfying genre story as the foundation for his nonsense. The beauty of doing slasher-style horror is that the best examples of that genre work in a lot of character development stuff, especially early on. Creating memorable characters gives your story greater stakes for the audience, rather than a series of anonymous victims. 

Thueson establishes that a group of friends who are starting to age out of youthful shenanigans are getting together for the birthday of Kate, who is turning 30. She wants to hang out at a well-known abandoned house that is rumored to be haunted. Her childhood Brett is there, along with Kate's friend Trey, who is hilariously detached from everything going on. Also attending are a couple, Alison and Em. It's very much a modern-day quintet, with multiple queer characters, including a non-binary person in Trey. 

Trey is an incredible character, in that they embody every Gen-Z stereotype imaginable. From their ridiculous mullet to their facial tattoos to their Instagram handle (anarchocumslut69), Thueson creates a hilarious and recognizable caricature of a person who is constantly glued to their phone, speaks in mostly monosyllables, and is totally disinterested in interacting with anyone. At one point, as the group is using a Ouija board as part of Kate's birthday fun, Trey suggests going to a secret concert. Trey is just the worst, in so many ways. 

This could have led to a perfectly fine slice-of-life comic involving all of these characters. Instead, Thueson essentially shoves all of these characters into an entirely unconnected narrative involving a group of murderous cultists who are using human sacrifice in an attempt to complete some kind of satanic ceremony. What they are actually doing is completely irrelevant; they are just a plot device to kick-start a long chase scene, as the group of friends runs away on foot. Thueson cleverly removed the one thing that would have short-circuited the plot: Kate is mad that her friends are on their phones, so she grabs them and throws them in a closet. Being separated from technology forces them to try other solutions, but it also forces Kate and Brett to re-examine the last vestiges of their fading youth and how everyone is reacting to growing older. 

The climax of the story smartly brings in a dangling plot thread as a sort of deus ex machina, and it doesn't skimp on blood-splattering violence, a house in flames falling down around everyone, and over-the-top thrills that the slacker protagonists must endure. Thueson's overall character design is a little more boring in a more conventional setting than in their fantasy comics and sometimes relies too much on agitated character expressions. There's not much in the way of subtlety in their cartooning, and while it works well for the action sequences, it's not quite as interesting in the quieter character moments. That said, the book fits like a glove in Silver Sprocket's catalog, as it's pop punk in its purest form. It's definitely a cousin to Benji Nate's Hell Phone, with a tighter focus on action than character mysteries. As always, Thueson's dialogue is hilarious and sustains even the slower scenes, and they have a wonderful handle on how group dynamics work. 

45 Days Of CCS, #5: Daryl Seitchik

It's been enjoyable to follow Daryl Seitchik's ambitions as a cartoonist and publisher. With partner Dan Nott, their Parsifal Press has released some interesting comics. That includes Seitchik's fantasy series Follow That Doll, which leans heavily on Russian folklore. The second issue follows young Elena, who must endure her new stepmother and two daughters. Elena has a magical doll that looks just like her (a sort of matryoshka doll) that her stepmother discovers, and she forces Elena to make dresses for her daughters so they can marry wealthy men. The doll helps Elena do this as she's thrown on the fire every night, only to return in the morning with colorful thread. A strange young man haunts her dreams and appears outside of her window, delivering a message that says, "The witch is watching you."

Baba Yaga, the witch figure of Slavic folklore, has always had multiple guises and interpretations. Given that one of the people Seitchik thanks in the acknowledgments is Baba Yaga herself, it's pretty clear where they come down on this issue. This series is one of many stories seeking to rethink witches' tales from a feminist perspective, instead of seeing witches as being unequivocally evil. That's a narrative pushed by men and patriarchal religious hierarchies, while witches had more to do with women's health and well-being than anything else. Baba Yaga is both a creator and destroyer, and in Follow The Doll, that ambiguity plays out with regard to Elena's deceased mother and her stepmother's revulsion toward anything that remained of her in the house. Of course, the stepmother was willing to play with metaphorical fire if it meant she got what she wanted, and Seitchik hints at an interesting comeuppance. 

What sets this apart from Seitchik's other projects is their beautiful, meticulous use of color. In this story, color has a decorative purpose as well as a narrative purpose. Seitchik's storytelling has always had a muted, deadpan quality to it, especially with regard to character design and even lettering. This visual restraint has always been in contrast to the subconscious and emotional turmoil their characters experience. You can see that play out here in the early going, as even the brightness of the dresses is muted by the dour quality of the stepmother. However, Seitchik later just goes for it, with a spectacular splash page featuring a burning bed on a black background. They follow that up with an interstitial page with decorative features with a shell motif, which segues into Elena having a dream about meeting a mysterious young man underwater. Elena makes a comment about understanding that she is compelled to "stitch her inner chaos into a pattern," and one gets the sense that this is what Seitchik has always done as a cartoonist. 

45 Days Of CCS, #4: Iris Yan

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45 Days Of CCS, #3: Chuck Forsman

Chuck Forsman's career has seen a lot of unpredictability. Even his most extreme genre projects were always oddly paced and filled with many moments of reflection. In a fantasy anthology like Snake Oil, the demons had their own side conversations that had nothing to do with the humans they were torturing. In The End Of The Fucking World, the small moments defined the relationship between the two leads to an achingly painful extent. Even in his hyper-violent ode to 80s action b-movies, Revenger, Forsman had long stretches of flashbacks and monologue time in between his carefully crafted fight scenes. 

That said, I still wasn't prepared for his ode to John Stanley comics filtered through a sleazy, nasty lens called Here Comes...Chesley. The title character, Chesley Gooseneck, is revealed to be an orphan whose parents hanged themselves. Young Chesley keeps a noose around his neck as a reminder. He pals around his rich pal Morty Sweetstock and gets into adventures that are like demented Harvey Comics. In the opener, we meet the appropriately named Bert Crime, a homeless grifter who accidentally kills his dog in the first story and then tries to swindle Chesley and Morty with a "candy mine." Morty tricks Bert ala a Richie Rich scheme, but Chesley is genuinely beside himself with sorrow for making Bert feel bad. In a subtle way, this story and the comic in general are a master class in how to use subtle details to create atmosphere. Forsman's use of a flat, four-color color scheme that mimics the sort of comics he's doing an homage to, complete with dropping out background details in flavor of bold color swashes. His character design feels like it's something old fashioned without there being a particular artist or style he's referencing. The way he draws hair, for example, is highly stylized: three swoops for Morty, an unruly mop for Chesley, and a Josephine Baker-style hairdo for Myrna. 

Forsman does something else that's interesting: he follows Chesley as he gets older. First, he and Morty bribe a clown to let them into the "Lurid Exotic Ladies" show at the carnival, only for the dancer (Myrna Lovely) to chastise them for sneaking in. As it turns out, she's Morty's lover. The running theme of Chesley constantly being traumatized by everything to the point of total surrender but being attracted to people cooler than him leads to painfully wistful encounters with a skateboarder and a weird girl at school.

 There's an essential sweetness to this sad sack of a character that is brought into sharp relief in the story "Extremity." Here, an older, teenage Chesley is going down on his girlfriend, who stops him because she's not in the mood but notices fork marks on his hand. He recounts the cops picking up him for graffiti, his cruel grandmother drugging him, and then stabbing him with a fork when he had trouble waking up. There's a matter-of-factness to Chesley's acceptance of his misery, yet there's an agency that suggests that he will only tolerate so much. His essential sweetness is unchanged and he's still very much a clod of a teenager, but no matter what happens to him, he's always surrounded by people who like him and even stand up for him. Despite all the mayhem, it's one of Forsman's less nihilistic comics, even if the road to meaning is difficult. 

45 Days Of CCS, #2: Bread Tarleton

It's been exciting to track Bread Tarleton's development as a cartoonist. (Full disclosure: Fieldmouse Press will be publishing their book, Soften The Blow, early in 2025.) The writing and concepts have always been there, but Tarleton has notably sharpened not just their drawing, but their entire vocabulary surrounding cartooning. You can see how confident they are now on the page as they start to enter their mature period as a cartoonist. Tarleton's comics are about suffering, growth, and love, and the ways all three are connected. 

That's certainly the case in their one-person anthology showcase Ponyshow. The opening story is a conversation in a diner from the point of view of an otherwise unseen person. Tarleton uses an unusual angle in order to emphasize the story of the person who arrives and does most of the talking. It's a quiet story about empathy and human connection, and it features Tarleton using cartoony, distorted anatomy to further emphasize point of view. The second story, "Perfect Life," sees Tarelton going in a more surreal direction. An anthropomorphic marble is "born" and goes down a chute to live his life. He's privileged from the start, with a Rube Goldberg mechanism ensuring that he's born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He offers commentary the whole time, as he goes through the "Adult Happiness Machine" after having a baby and then through the "Making Peace Machine" when he felt empty ("Got it! That was easy!") 

The best story was the hilarious, strange, and touching "24 Hours," which is about a man capturing and releasing a fly. Of course, it's not that simple, as he reveals to the fly that he was once a fly but for some reason turned into a human. A reverse-Kafka, if you will. The fly-human gets clothes, a job, food, an apartment, and even a woman (from FetLife, of course) who would let him "fertilize her ovipositor." Things take a dark turn when someone sees through his horrific disguise, and even the released fly comes to a tragic (but hilarious) end. There's a sad, droopy quality that Tarleton gives to the protagonist, and this is a story where you can see the ways in which Tarleton's cartooning has leveled up. The other stories are brief anecdotes about an older man at a beach with his family recalling ritually humiliating someone in the army, a cigarette that lasts all summer, a "lone wolf" desperate for attention, and a series of floral gifts from an abandoned bouquet. Tarleton exquisitely captures moments in time: absurd, cruel, painful, loving, and tender. 

Horse 2 goes in a different direction, as Tarleton takes on the challenge of one of the more infamously difficult things to draw and turns it once again into a choose-your-own-adventure story. It reminds me a bit of the extreme absurdity of a Jason Shiga story in the same vein, where things can get out of hand very quickly in extreme ways. This isn't just a story about a horse; it's about a horse who finds a time machine. In addition to being funny, the whole thing is clever, as traveling forward or back in time has different implications. On top of that, going back and doing different stories gets you the code for a secret page which is wonderfully meta that ends the issue. Even in the silliest of stories, Tarleton still has a way of making an emotional connection with their readers. Sometimes this is dramatic, and sometimes it is mundane, but the feelings of Tarleton's characters are always every bit as important as the narrative itself.