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.