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. 

45 Days Of CCS, #1: Emma Hunsinger

If you're a cartoonist and you're trying to make actual money in the profession, it's been fairly well-established that the only genres that are growing and paying real money are middle-grade and kids' comics. Even the young adult genre was long ago oversaturated in the market, especially as more and more young cartoonists have emerged. As such, while I was happy to see that the very talented Emma Hunsinger got a middle-grade deal with Harper Collins, I was also a bit sad to see her perhaps limited in a genre that has fairly exacting rules. 

I needn't have worried. Her debut How It All Ends is not only one of the most sharply-realized narratives about the middle-school years I've ever read, it actually feels like it's on the same continuum as her CCS thesis project, Chunk. That was a beautifully-cartooned, emotionally complex, and nuanced story about awkward love relationships and friendships at art school. How It All Ends is a similarly layered story about a young girl trying to establish her identity after skipping a grade and going straight to high school. Hunsinger's loving depiction of Tara Gimmel, her sister Isla, and Tara's delightfully overactive imagination is a visual feast and a master class on how to write dialogue. 

Hunsinger's style is a delightfully expressive series of scribbles and scrawls that emphasizes gesture, body language, and the relationship of bodies in space above all else. She avoids a traditional grid in favor of a more fluid open-page layout, but her attention to story flow is impeccable. Her big gimmick for the book is that Tara is a daydreamer, imagining all sorts of fanciful (and sometimes anxiety-inducing) scenarios that allow Hunsinger to really cut loose in fun ways. Tillie Walden did the colors for the book, and Hunsinger wisely used a mostly two-tone scheme. When Tara is engaged with the world, the color wash is a foam-green. When she's off on a flight of fancy, the wash is a variant of red. Happier fantasies are lighter shades of red, but anxiety is closer to brick red. This simple distinction does so much work in the book, both narratively and emotionally. 

Hunsinger gets out of her own way with regard to the plot. She keeps it bare-bones simple, as the narrative is entirely about Tara adjusting to going from 7th grade to 9th grade, and how difficult this process is. Her own anxiety is in the way, but it's less a plot device to be overcome and more a chance for Tara to deeply examine herself. Her older sister Isla (two years ahead) is a crucial character: something of a guide and a mentor, but she's going through her own stuff. The way that Tara relates to her family is joyful, especially being able to play pretend with her toddler brother. Having that loving foundation makes a later conflict with Isla feel raw and real. They fight (physically and otherwise) the way that only siblings can fight. 

Hunsinger's attention to detail with regard to every character allows the book to breathe and develop in a way that feels organic, instead of seeing the Lesson inherent in these sorts of books from a mile away. The rowdy boys in Tara's English class who slowly come to love the material, the put-upon teacher who learns how to respond to the aggressiveness of the boys, Isla's friends interest in Tara's blossoming friend Jessup all give Tara meaningful characters and situations to bounce off of. Isla is a secondary character (albeit an important one), but she is fleshed out in such a specific and delightful way that I would have been perfectly content reading a book entirely about her. 

All of that sets up the most important parts of the book: Isla's crush on a boy named Joel, and Tara's budding friendship with a girl named Libby. It's clear to the reader regarding Isla's crush, but Tara is not only oblivious to it, she's oblivious to her deeper feelings for Libby. Hunsinger depicts this ache in such a beautiful way precisely because these feelings are messy, complicated, and Tara is clearly not ready for them. Much of the book consists of her confronting the idea that she's not ready for high school and not ready to grow up. She vacillates between pretending she's something she's not at times and feeling as though she's doomed, with a level of catastrophization that is frequently hilarious (but also very much a symptom of OCD). Learning to come to terms with her identity along with pumping the breaks on the idea of romance was such a well-suited ending, and I especially liked the way that Hunsinger avoided romantic cliches and plot entanglements. This is a remarkably assured debut that could easily be part of a series, or I could see Hunsinger doing something completely different but equally compelling. 

Jason's Upside Dawn

Having read Jason's entire output, I've found that his most interesting comics are those that follow his current cultural influences into ridiculous flights of fancy. The Left Bank Gang (imagining the Lost Generation writers as cartoonists) and Goodnight, Hem (imagining Ernest Hemingway as a sort of real-life action hero) are two of his best, but I've also enjoyed the way he's managed to insert the immortal Musketeer Athos into a number of his comics. The eternally deadpan way he draws his anthropomorphic characters just seems to make more sense when he's riffing on something that interests him. In particular, his delight in mixing high and low art never fails to amuse. 

His newest collection of short stories, Upside Dawn, is a pretty big one, with 17 stories. Jason seems to be working shorter and snappier, not allowing his high concepts to wear out their welcome. The result is maybe my favorite Jason book since I Killed Adolph Hitler and The Left Bank Gang, which had the twin appeal of novelty and sharp conceptual gags. Absurdism is a running theme in this book, and the opening story, "Woman, Man, Bird" is a sort of tribute to absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco. It's a story of a man and woman meeting for a date at a restaurant called "Eugene's," and their small talk is solipsistic to the point of ridiculousness, as neither perceives or responds to what the other says as their visual representations also become increasingly bizarre. One of Ionesco's themes is the impossibility of communication via language, and this piece is a marvelous visual representation of this concept, particularly in the end of his play The Bald Soprano. Speaking of which, in Jason's short story "Ionesco," that play is mistakenly referred to as "The Bald Prima Donna" by a documentarian-type figure, who becomes increasingly irrelevant in the absurd story that revolves around bananas and a shifting, imaginary figure from his past named Bobbie Watson. It's fitting that Jason should be drawn to this play in particular, given that the Romanian Ionesco wrote it while learning English, and of course, English is not Jason's native language. 

The second story, "Perec, PI," imagines the OuLiPo writer and filmmaker known for his use of constraints as a private investigator getting mixed up in a byzantine murder investigation, but his hard-boiled narration is clipped of the endings of the sentences. It's a funny way of thwarting reader expectations in panel after panel. "I Remember" seems to be a bit of self-indulgent nostalgia until it builds into something more far-reaching without breaking stride or changing tone.  "Vampyros Dyslexicos" is a retelling of the old "Carmilla" vampire story that works really hard to get at the gag suggested in the title. Death being frustrated by a juvenile knight (as played by Max von Sydow) in "Seal VII" and storming off is another great gag based on a familiar bit of cinema. Jason mashes up Kafka and The Prisoner, adding a level of tedious bureaucracy to the mysterious goings-on in the Village. 

Mash-ups are a dime-a-dozen, but what sets these apart is his unrelenting commitment to his deadpan style of humor, frequent use of silent pauses, and a highly deliberate and slow pace--even in adventure strips. Some of the stories are reframed versions of classics like "Crime and Punishment," but one of my favorites was reimagining "Ulysses" as a murder mystery thriller. Seeing Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus as action heroes was hilarious, while Jason elides actual action scenes with blackout panels labeled things like "fight scene" or "sex scene." Jason is often less interested in the content of particular works and is more interested in form, like in "What Rhymes With Giallo?", a spoof on the bloody Italian horror films of the 70s done with a Dr. Seuss-like rhyming scheme. 

The back part of the book is the most sentimental in many ways, as he digs deep into his oldest pop culture loves. "The City Of Lights, Forever" reimagines the old Star Trek episode "The City On The Edge Of Forever," only this time it's Spock who travels to Montparnasse in 1925 to become a painter. This era has been one of Jason's running interests for much of his career, and there's kind of a sweet sentimentality in this story about Spock loving cats, painting the famous model Kiki, and a cameo by Athos. "Who Will Kill The Spider?" adds some spot primary colors in what at first seems to be a kids' story but has a punchline that is something entirely different. "One Million And One Years, B.C." is one of the more straightforward entries, notable mostly for Jason drawing dinosaurs. 

"E.C. Come..." and "...E.C. Go" are both tributes to the classic horror and science-fiction comics from EC with frequent twist endings. The former is about a stage magician whose murder of his assistant/wife has unexpected consequences, and the latter is about a crew of astronauts who arrive on a world that surprises them with its (literal) homeyness. These are entirely straightforward stories in this style, just done in Jason's distinctive hand and voice. "From Outer Space" is a classic two-track narrative story. The visual narrative consisted of scenes from the classic B-movie "Plan 9 From Outer Space," but the textual captions were apparently a personal account of a bad acid trip. The effect it created was pleasantly bizarre, given how nonsensical the film is and how an acid trip can scramble meaning and the ability to communicate. Of course, this is a running theme throughout the collection. 

Finally, "Etc." is a collection of one or two-page gags that are a melange of pop music, movies, Athos the Musketeer, and Death. Death hiding from the immortal Athos was an especially funny gag. It's stuff that Jason has been drawing since the beginning of his career and material that he continues to mine for comedic content. What sets this collection apart from his other work is the fact that he left a lot of it behind in favor of branching out to new inspirations while still retaining his core sense of humor. The final image of the book, an absurd image of "Sartre Night Fever," sums Jason up: high and low, absurd and refined, deadpan and silly. 

It's A Vibe: The Comics Of Benji Nate

The key to understanding Benji Nate's intentions as a cartoonist can be found in the introduction to her minicomic Cold Soda #1 (the older one, published by Milk Money Books). It said "Cold Soda is where I dump everything I've been working on including the adventures of a group of friends who do stuff, another group of friends who also do stuff, and of course, Spacedog." Most of her comics can be reduced to "a group of friends who do stuff" with the optional proviso of "and sometimes in a horror setting." Her friend group comics tend to be gag-oriented and highly episodic, with only the occasional strands of a larger narrative. This is especially true of her most popular comic, Girl Juice (Drawn & Quarterly), which was a big success on Instagram and isn't the first time D&Q has published this sort of comic (Aminder Dhaliwal comes to mind). With plot usually being an important part of horror, those comics are more narrative-oriented, even if the vibe of the characters remains exactly the same. 

Indeed, the vibe is exactly what Nate is going for here. The vibe is not a naturalistic one, though Nate is skilled at delivering meaningful dialogue. Instead, everything about Nate's comics is highly stylized and leans heavily into shoujo-style character design and energy. Even in quiet moments, they have a frenetic quality, as every moment tends to be invested with drama (real or imaginary). Cute horror is a mainstay of Silver Sprocket, which is why her books like Hell Phone and Lorna are such a snug fit there. However, a running theme of Nate's work is that they talk about horrific acts or being big sluts, but Nate tends to only want to talk about and around without actually digging into anything. Not that the comics specifically need grisly violence or tons of sex and nudity, but in thinking about a comparable work like Elizabeth Pich's Fungirl, Nate's overuse of restraint adds up to a lot of telling and not enough showing in the storytelling. Taking things a little further (especially in Girl Juice) would have made these comics funnier and/or scarier. 

At the same time, this use of restraint could have been perfectly effective if Nate went a little deeper into her characters. Bunny in Girl Juice is such an overwhelming presence that she borders on caricature, and her roommates feel underwritten at times as a result. The relationship between Sadie and Tula begs for more air time, and Nana's bizarre arc (a cartoonist who is sexually attracted to clowns) is more interesting than Bunny's self-involvement. Of course, Bunny's narcissism is a feature, not a bug, and her ridiculous excesses are the whole point of the appeal. It's just that without some kind of narrative tether, the act gets repetitive. 

Speaking of a narrative tether, Hell Phone (Book One) might be Nate's most effective comic. It introduces us to two best friends (Mona and Sissy) who go on a supernatural odyssey when Sissy discovers a ringing flip phone. The voice on the phone instructs them to go to a particular address, where they discover a dead body killed in some kind of ritual. When they call the cops, they don't find a body and the phone they have isn't activated. That leads them on an increasingly bizarre series of tasks as Nate slowly reveals details about her protagonists. When all of this connects to their friend Trent, the questions that are answered only lead to more questions. The story is contrasted by the ultra-cute character design and bright use of color. 

Lorna is another collection of comics from Webtoon, about a comically murderous young girl. Once again, the contrast of super-cute character design and hints at grisly murder is the attraction, but this is another comic where the gags get repetitive. Halfway through, one could sense Nate getting restless with the premise and crafted a story called "Lorna's First Date," which established her friend group and had a story with an actual plot. The only problem is that Lorna was such a one-note joke character that it felt a little dissonant to attempt to add depth to her. 

The same was true in Girl Juice, where after over a hundred pages of Bunny demanding attention for herself and/or her dog Britney, it suddenly transitions into a sixty-page story called "Tallulah's Demon." It involves youtuber Tula (Tallulah) being haunted by a demonic presence while streaming. It goes to some pretty ridiculous if predictable places, as she becomes possessed by a demon and a priest is called in. Here, Bunny's ridiculous self-absorption has a real target to play against, like referring to the hot priest as "Father Daddy." It doesn't quite come together, but it has the same kind of page-turning quality that made Hell Phone such an enjoyable read. It is funny that Lorna, the horror comic, drifted toward a relationship story at the end, while Girl Juice, a "Sex And The City"-coded comic, drifted toward horror. It reflects how Nate is betwixt and between at this point in her career, but it seems like the eventual answer will be combining the two in a coherent narrative that doesn't lose her sense of humor, charm, and keen understanding of character dynamics, especially for her characters who are women.

Jeffrey Brown's Kids Are Still Weird

It's funny to see where cartoonists wind up in their careers. Jeffrey Brown burst onto the alt-comics scene over 20 years ago with his self-published memoir, Clumsy, which was about losing his virginity. He was one of the central figures of what Tom Spurgeon called "Sad Boy Comics." This term has been subject to parody in later years, but at the time, this was more of an extension of the thoughtful, vulnerable, and even poetic comics of cartoonists like John Porcellino and Dave Kiersh. Brown's comics, especially in his first three books (which he dubbed "The Girlfriend Trilogy"), built on that template and added a structural, narrative solidity that set his work apart. His visual style was a mix of the ratty line typical of the Fort Thunder era that was also informed by Gary Panter and a highly palatable, cartoony simplicity. Jeffrey Brown's figures were and are cute, which at once made them more approachable for a reader but also acted as a distancing device for the more jagged emotional moments of his books. 

However, at heart, Brown was always a humorist. In his many years publishing with Top Shelf, Brown drew a bunch of superhero parodies, Transformers parodies, and other total nonsense. Part of the fun was seeing him draw genre comics in his resolutely anti-commercial style. However, what really made them interesting was Brown's keen instincts as a parodist who genuinely admired these kinds of stories. His first more mainstream humor book was Cat Getting Out Of A Bag And Other Observations, but what really made his career was Darth Vader And Son, an improbably warm and funny use of the arch-villain and young Luke Skywalker. This led to an entirely new career doing these kinds of Star Wars-related comics (Jedi Academy became another one) at around the same time he became a father. He stopped doing memoir comics altogether, perhaps because he was too busy with other work or perhaps because the narratives he had been doing no longer made sense. 

He did, however, do a book called Kids Are Weird, a "kids say the darnedest things"-style collection of observations about his first son, Oscar. Now publishing with NBM, he dipped his toes back into smaller press publishing with Kids Are Still Weird, which is about his younger son, Simon. Brown's ability to create verisimilitude in his dialogue without it feeling clunky or forced has always been one of his best assets, and that particular ear for dialogue is the lynchpin of this book's success. That ear led him to use a variety of compositional structures to highlight the particular gag or feeling expressed by Simon. Sometimes Brown uses his old, trusty four-panel grid. However, he also sometimes uses, on a given page, a gag that's two or three panels (like a comic strip) with a single image below it that is its own separate gag. 

Brown gently depicts Simon's frequently defiant, aggressive, and oppositional energy as a toddler. As a three-year-old, Simon is just starting to push boundaries and assert his agency on the world. Whether it's yelling at the GPS on a phone to stop talking, yelling at his mom during playtime that he's "talking to Daddy," or telling his older brother he doesn't love him, his pugnaciousness is also an expression of his overall curiosity. At the same time, Brown observes him doing ninja moves, debating whether or not he's a "big boy," and declaring that his preferred superpower is to shoot lasers out of his eyes. He also expresses moods and emotions, like saying his brain doesn't feel good, or that he can only come up with horrible stories. Brown creates a pleasant rhythm from comic to comic that doesn't overstay its welcome. Wisely, he doesn't attempt to create a more coherent narrative; instead, he favors little moments in time. Small struggles, tiny triumphs, moments of wisdom, and plenty of just-plain weirdness (as promised!) fill this collection. It's all done in Brown's familiar style, and in color; Brown's overall expressive line is the key to filling these amusing anecdotes with their own sense of life.