45 Days Of CCS, #32: Edea Giang, F.G. Meanie

It's difficult to get a handle on what kind of cartoonist first-year CCS cartoonist F.G. Meanie is at this point from the two comics they submitted for review. What is clear is that Meanie is a talented writer and thinker about the comics page. In Wobbegong, which seems to be the Ed Emberley assignment, this comic printed on purple paper is about a figure (drawn in stick-figure silhouette) about to be executed for treason/heresy who escapes and goes on a long rampage in their escape. The ending reveals that their heresy may not yield the result they had hoped and makes great use of vast amounts of negative space. Meanie definitely knows what they're doing on the page in terms of composition. 

Turtles South Of Vegas was drawn digitally, and it takes place in a car. There are four stacked horizontal panels on each page, and the figures are just barely sketched out in green and red, respectively. The two men here are Mafia hitmen, and one named Carlo gets in the car and is greeted warmly by his old friend Cazzo. Their job is to bury the body of someone who pissed off their boss. Meanie lays the dialogue on a bit thick, although it's understandable since the story depends on it more than the art, which is more of a visual placeholder and rhythm-setter. Once again, there's a nice twist in the story that feels satisfying. This comic is an interesting visual experiment, but this level of abstraction isn't sustainable for a cartoonist largely writing genre stories. I'm interested in what Meanie's actual drawing and cartooning style turns out to be. 

Edea Giang's three minis are all short, but she gets across a lot about what she's about in a brief number of pages. Giang's relationship with science, nature, and biology seem to be the backbone of her comics about transformation and alienation. The unfolding micro-mini Lanternfly, Lanternfly reminds me a lot of John Porcellino's Mosquito Abatement Man stories, as it starts out with the narrator talking about killing these insects that are dangerous to crops and unfolds into a visceral sense of genuine empathy. The mixture of drawing and diagrams is especially clever. 

Decompression Sickness is a narrative that begins with an underwater creature and the extreme & specific depth it thrives in on top of the page and the near-embryonic form of the narrator at the bottom of the page. As the story proceeds, we move further up from the bottom of the ocean and the narrator takes on an ever-more humanoid form until they move past the ocean, above sea level, and even into orbit. It's a fiendishly clever convergence of science and personal narrative with an eye-catching use of color. Finally, Enigma Taxa is about Barnacle seeking aid from bivalves and crustaceans, both of which reject her, because she's being hunted by Finch and is beset by a parasite. Every crazy thing Finch says about Barnacle, including the legend that they spawn geese, is not only historically accurate but also occurs in the story. Giang's ability to turn science into visceral, jaw-dropping action is a gift. There's a lot of cleanup regarding lettering and other compositional issues, of course, but Giang is ready for much more ambitious narratives.