45 Days Of CCS, #27: Natalie Norris, Keena

From the very first, the comics I read from Natalie Norris dealt with trauma. Regardless of the assignment, it was clear that Norris had a burning need to work through her trauma through her art. That culminated in the first half of her memoir about a horrific sexual assault titled Dear Mini. She's currently working on part two of that story (about the aftermath of the incident), but she did a mini-comic for Paper Rocket's Mini Memoir Project. It's called Scar Tissue that I Wish You Saw, and it's about what happened when she was sent to an inpatient facility for mental illness. It's laid out plainly on page one: various forms of pain, including endometriosis, along with major depressive disorder. 

At the same time, Norris tells the story from her perspective as a 16-year-old, where her major problem was that she was in love with her older sister's boyfriend Shane. Young Natalie is the picture of the unreliable narrator, as she refuses to discuss her trauma with her doctors and seethes with anger when her doctors take away her Percocet. She sneers at another teen for being an alcoholic because she "ruined partying for the rest of your life," noting that of course, she could "handle my shit." There's a lot of two-track narrative used in this comic as she visually recalls a lifetime of medical trauma while denying trauma to her therapist. Natalie in this story is certain that she and Shane (an older drug dealer) are a perfect match, and she fumes when she reveals that her mom told him to stay away from both her daughters. This is one of Norris' best comics, as her storytelling is subtler than much of her earlier work, and it makes the depiction of her trauma all the more effective. This version of Natalie in the story is wounded but bratty, not capable of loving herself or feeling worthy of love, and the subsequent acting out is captured in such a direct but not overly obvious way.

Speaking of feeling worthy of love, her comic Belles Heures ("Book of Hours") is less a narrative than it is a series of immediate sensory impressions of the early days of a loving relationship with a man named Ima. Generally, someone's diary entries of a loving relationship are as tedious as any anecdote, but Norris is going for something else. These are loose, immediate drawings that are a revelation for Norris precisely because they had never experienced anything quite like this before. It's as though she had to capture these experiences as quickly and directly as possible, not just for fear of forgetting them, but as a way of concretizing them. In this way, it's a sort of way to prove that it wasn't all just a dream. It's a form of devotional study.

Keerthana Srinivasan, aka Keena, is a CCS student who came to cartooning by a rather circuitous path. In her early 50s, she began doing art after a lifetime in IT when her children grew up and her husband took a job in another city. Prior to CCS, she did a book in collage form using basic color shapes to tell this story, and it's called Journey. Despite featuring no drawing, it's actually a well-done piece of cartooning whose meaning is easy to grasp. She's a red shape, her husband a blue shape, and their kids yellow and green shapes, respectively. When the kids go on their own journeys, there's an especially poignant page where the red shape is shown to be old and wrinkled. When her husband goes on his own journey, she finally attempts her own on a turbulent ocean. She sees her children fly away, but her husband arrives again to act as a sail to steady her own, new journey. It's a lovely and touching story. Keena also contributed a two page piece that was more illustrated text than comics about her father near death, wanting to make sure that the suitcase that had represented his livelihood was safe. Keena has a great storytelling voice, and I'm curious to see her make something more in the vein of traditional comics.