E. Joy Mehr's E. Joy Comix #1

E. Joy Mehr's comics have an easy, scrawled, and unaffected quality that gives her diary strips a comedic charge that most examples in this genre lack. There's a crudeness, both in terms of style and subject matter, that works because of its intentionality and a sense of the artist appearing not to give a fuck. Yet, from the lengthy introduction in E. Joy Comix #1 alone, it's clear that Mehr is keenly interested in honing her craft, both in terms of the actual drawings and the jokes. 

If her comics are similar to something, I'd say she's close to the spirit of Newave-era minicomics, with a lot of her drawings reminding me of Sam Henderson. Her jokes aren't as sharply assured as Henderson's at this stage, but there's also a personal element that gives them a certain charge. Mehr's jokes are funny, her drawings are funny, and her cartooning is clear and fluid. I'm fascinated by the sketchbook pages she included here that are largely drawings of dicks (with the occasional drawings of female forms to round things out), but even these drawings are lively and fun. Mehr has a knack for self-deprecation that pushes a premise all the way, like a comic about perseverance that somehow veers into dog-fucking as a metaphor. Even Mehr realizes that is nonsensical, but she declares she's going to do it anyway. The longer stories at the end are both pretty dumb, but there are kernels of darker material at their core, like a story about watching the film The Goonies, which had its origin in depression. Anxiety is at the heart of other strips. Everything is grist for the mill, but Mehr never lets the reader forget why some of these laughs should feel uneasy.

Sea Legs, by Jules Bakes & Niki Smith

Jules Bakes and Niki Smith's middle-grade memoir Sea Legs has a unique hook: Bakes spent much of her childhood as a boat kid. In other words, her parents were itinerant sailors who would rarely stay long in one area, taking on jobs before sailing on to a new locale. This particular narrative begins with her parents deciding to go on a year-long trip to the Caribbean, which meant Bakes (renamed Janey for this story) went along with them, being home-schooled a few hours a day. 

This narrative has a lot going for it. The character hook is irresistible, and Bakes leans into it all the way, in a manner one would expect for Scholastic. Bakes drops all sorts of nautical terms and ocean-related factoids throughout the book, which makes sense given its target audience likely is unaware of this information. Bakes manages to make it a comfortable part of the narrative, given Janey's own obsession with facts and stories. Janey is an amiable narrator; goofy and awkward but also loving, curious, and loyal. Smith's playful, lively, and at times whimsical art is crucial in conveying the narrative, as she fully captures Janey's clunky awkwardness that goes hand-in-hand with her wild, expressive enthusiasm. Smith also has the chops to portray the ship and life at sea, breathing life into the narrative with a blend of cartoony facial expressions and realistic backgrounds. 

The plot is less important than the world-building here; while there's a hurricane that throws everything into disarray, the plot is more in support of the central theme of the book: the matter of being, in the philosophical sense. For a lighthearted book in some ways, Janey's character is one who has a deep sense of the void, of non-being, and she fears it. She cannot escape the thought of it, as it is personified in this cold, blue hole in the ocean that was over an underwater cave. It represented the absence of everything, but above all else, it represented ultimate isolation and disconnection. From the very beginning of the book, Janey values friendship above all else. Leaving behind her best friend from school is devastating to her, even as she tries to stay connected through writing letters. 

Of course, the problem with existential terror is that by its very nature, it is isolating and even solipsistic. Janey's terrible loneliness at sea drives a wedge between her and her parents, but especially her mom. When she makes friends with a cold, aloof fellow boat kid named Astrid, it alleviates her loneliness but not her sense of belonging. Astrid is desperate for her own sense of connection, but Janey doesn't understand why until much later. Bakes hints at Astrid's trauma in being around an abusive and alcoholic father who is charged with taking care of her younger siblings, especially in relation to the things that Janey has but cannot see: loving parents. 

Janey's obstinacy is what she has to work through in the course of the story, as well as the feeling of self-absorption that inhibits her ability to fully empathize with others. This leads to some adventures that she gets into precisely to feel older and cooler than she actually is, to seek meaning, and to fill the gap of existential dread with adrenaline. It is fitting that the ending is an anti-climax in some ways; she never gets to read Astrid's last letter to her, never hears from her again, and even the beloved Merimaid, her parents' boat, is badly battered by the storm. All that remains is to write her a letter and put it in a bottle, repair the ship, and try again--a little older and a little wiser. 

45 Days Of CCS, 2024-25: The Index

Thanks to all who followed this year's iteration of this year's feature on the students and alumni from the Center For Cartoon Studies. Below is a list of every entry and a link to that specific article.

1. Emma Hunsinger.

2. Bread Tarleton.

3. Chuck Forsman.

4. Iris Yan.

5. Daryl Seitchik.

6. Steve Thueson.

7. Jarad Greene.

8. Hannah Kaplan, Anna McGlynn.

9. Ellie Liota, Al Varela, Iona Fox.

10. Andy Warner.

11. Amelia B.C. Dutton (ABCD).

12. Wayne Carter, King Ray.

13. E.B. Sciales, Gabrielle Tinnirello.

14. Colleen Frakes.

15. Ana Two.

16. Faith Cox, Penina Gal.

17. Pat Leonhard.

18. 666 Comics.

19. Annabel Driussi, Tom O'Brien, Ashley Jablonski.

20. Alex Washburn.

21. Crank Case, Iris Gudeon.

22. Filipa Estrela.

23. Riffraff.

24. Violet Kitchen.

25. Adrienne Adkins.

26. Anna Sellheim.

27. Natalie Norris, Keena.

28. Robyn Smith, Dylan Sparks, Kat Ghastly.

29. Michael Albrecht, Ben Adkins.

30. Emil O'Melia.

31. Coco Fox.

32. Em Sauter.

33. Edea Lee Giang, Noah Mease.

34. Sofia Martin, Ria Garcia, Andy Lindquist.

35. Simon Reinhardt.

36. Maia Foster O'Neal.

37. Fernanda Nocedal.

38. Fern Pellerin.

39. Ruby Arnone, Clover Ajamie, Taylor Hunt.

40. Hole.

41. Fantology 4. 

42. Sandy Steen Bartholomew.

43. Rust Belt Review 6.

44. Luke Healy.

45. Kit Anderson.

45 Days Of CCS, #45: Kit Anderson

Kit Anderson's Avery Hill collection of her short stories, Safer Places, is a big, warm hug of a book. Sure, it's barbed, haunted, and even desperate at times, with some characters who are yearning for comfort that never comes. But it's also resolutely compassionate toward all of their dreams, with unusual links between seemingly unrelated stories that build a tapestry of empathy or a house full of the titular safer (not always safe, but safer) places. 

I've reviewed many of the stories in this collection in their original minicomic or short story form, so I'm mostly going to comment on the sequencing and the way the themes were built. There are two different interstitial features in the book, both of which are fantasy-related in their own way. The first is "Quest," a series of anecdotes about a tiny wizard and the shopkeeps who wonder what he does all day. One sneers at this small being doing anything useful with mushrooms and twine, while the other is resolutely certain that the wizard is more capable and powerful than he looks. The wizard is a Radagast-type figure, taking care of nature and helping things grow and heal in the face of war and disaster. Quest appears as the comic the sole protagonist is reading in "The World's Biggest Ball of Twine," which happens to be about a desperately lonely man who is clinging to the memory of a tourist trap trip he spent with a loved one, connecting moments to memories like snapshots. 

The other track of interstitials is the "Sleep Tape" grouping. Each of them is a two-track comic with a narrative that's a classic meditative (and functionally soporific). Each story has a different tone and function for these tapes. "Country Lane" is a story about someone who's unable to fully commit to a relationship, but the gentle tape somehow gently taps into their subconscious to lead them inevitably to the warmth of connection. "Forest Walk" is a futuristic story that grounds an isolated character through their day, substituting the cold efficiency of their routine with the pleasant ambling of a walk in the woods. "At The Seaside" repeats this idea, this time with a man trapped in rigid, cold routine being allowed to expand his consciousness into the night sky. 

There are other stories that explore variations on this theme. "The Basement" uses dream logic and a cat guide in order to have a boy work out grief and the anxiety of living in a transitional period. "Deep Breath" offers a brief glimpse of an underwater world. "Lookout Station" is about a lone scout at a station on another world whose sentient computer tries to guide it in a guided meditation but is resisted by the desperate pull of potential connection. "Wallpaper" similarly uses computer backgrounds in an attempt to enter this meditative state that promises freedom, escape, and safety. "Ride" uses a bike ride to escape an undesired move. "Wonders Of The Lost City" goes in the opposite direction, as the fantastical goal of a quest is too much to absorb, and the characters hastily retreat back to their mundane life.

"Weeds" is the centerpiece of the collection, about a college student who contracts a disease that causes her to sprout flowers from her body. The disease will eventually cause her to turn fully into a plant, so much of the story revolves around where she wants to end up. There's a sweet friend who offers her a place on her table, her overbearing mom wants her in her backyard, and the student is just trying to finish her poetry dissertation. Ultimately, she chooses to lie down in a park, but the transformation is not quite what she expects, as she transitions to a new, unknown phase of her life. Anderson works in a wide variety of visual styles here: sumptuous color for the wizard stories & "Wonders", colored pencil for "Weeds", spot color, color washes, and black & white. It all goes to the same conclusion: nothing ever stands still, no matter how much we might want it to. We either move on or we risk being trapped. 

45 Days Of CCS, #44: Luke Healy

After reading Luke Healy's Self-Esteem And The End Of The World, I thought that the book was the inevitable conclusion to the sort of books he's been doing the past several years. My immediate reaction was hoping that he was done with this direction. The book is so meta that it threatens to disappear up its own ass on multiple occasions, an effect that was not only obviously intentional, it was spelled out on the page. 

Healy reviews the entirety of his published output as part of the narrative, with a particular focus on his first long-form comic done at CCS, Of The Monstrous Pictures Of Whales, which I reviewed well over a decade ago. Healy's stand-in character (one that looks like and is named Luke Healy, of course) notes that this story was a thinly disguised, gender-swapped story about a trip taken with his brother and mother, one that had other implications as he was just coming to grips with the idea that he was gay. This was when Healy was still bothering to conceal that his stories were mostly autobiographical, a disguise that fell away in Americana (about hiking in America and coming to grips on the influence the country had on an Irishman like him) and was further perpetuated in The Con Artists (where Healy puts on a mustache as a "disguise" while alerting the reader of this).

The punchline is that Self-Esteem And The End Of The World is built on largely fictional chronological elements, while the emotional beats feel genuine. None of that is important information for a reader; I'm interested in a story, not a confession or (worse) a series of anecdotes. What is definitely consistent with recent books is that making them at least autobiographical on the surface has led him to indulge some of his worst storytelling instincts. In particular, his relentless self-negativity and overall sad-sack behavior have become less and less funny and more and more tedious. Healy is obviously well aware of this, critiquing his own self-indulgence, albeit in a self-indulgent manner. 

That self-indulgence, ironically is what turns the book around. After a bunch of self-pitying shenanigans with his twin brother and his wedding (where Healy gets humiliated live on camera), Healy keeps jumping forward in time for more self-indulgent shenanigans that veer between self-aggrandizing (and painfully unaware) and self-pitying. However, in the background, the disastrous effects of climate change start wreaking havoc in dramatic ways. Massive floods nearly lead to the death of Healy and his mom after he flees a job that he's messed up. After the death of his brother, he almost dies in a rockslide on a Greek island, thanks to ground loosened by a flood. Even later, he travels to a Hollywood that's mostly underwater in order to visit a movie set adapting one of his comics. Hilariously, Healy doesn't dwell much on these increasingly alarming events, as he never wavers from his self-centeredness (and self-loathing) until the very end: Everything changes; all told, he was lucky. More than any of that, one senses just how exhausting it is to feel that the barbs you aim at the world are really meant for yourself. Outrage is tiring. Self-loathing is hard work. Even when he was being deliberately provoked by the director to lash out in a self-righteous fury, the older Healy expresses and understands, for the first time, the pointlessness of such gestures. 

It's hard to tell the boundary between Healy the person and Healy the artist and provocateur, and it really doesn't matter. This book feels like his attempt to excise feelings that had been festering for a long time, and the ever-clever Healy stretched them over multiple, absurd setpieces that amplified his deadpan but absurd sense of humor while zeroing in on shedding this sad-sack persona. Healy's best work (like in Permanent Press) had tremendous empathy for its many and (presumably) fictional characters, something that he rarely afforded to most of his own stand-in characters. Hopefully, this signals yet another new direction for Healy, one that perhaps returns to more expressive and varied art. Especially in comparison to his earlier comics, this smoothed-out version of Healy's art felt monotonous, something that felt clear with the inclusion of his own work. 

45 Days Of CCS, #43: Rust Belt Review 6

Sean Knickerbocker is always willing to take a lot of chances when putting together an issue of Rust Belt Review. Some of them don't pay off, but some of the anthology's best entries are often among the best comics of the year. In this issue, that's certainly true of Ivy Lynn Allie's story, "The Kingdom." Allie tells what's sort of an anti-coming-of-age story about two pre-teen girls, Nico and Chrissy. Nico is the narrator, and she talks about playing during the summer with a clearly surly Chrissy, who is a horrible friend and a borderline bully. There are a series of events and characters--a sleazy handyman, an overbearing mother, minor crimes--that would seem to indicate a major trauma. Except none of that happened, and things went back to normal. It's a story that is defiantly anecdotal, yet there are aspects of it that hint at lingering personal issues for Nico. As always, Allie's cartooning is expressive and cartoony, with just enough of a fine control on line to contain Allie's flourishes. 

Knickerbocker's own "Best Of Three" serial reaches its penultimate chapter, and the exceedingly seedy quality of the narrative is matched only by the pathetic and self-delusional quality of its cast. It's Knickerbocker's best-realized long narrative, and I'm excited for the final chapter. Knickerbocker's swerves and desperate characters remind me of the film work of the Coen Brothers. 

There are several other very good stories in the anthology. Valerie Light's "How To Walk" is an exceptionally well-drawn and cartooned takedown of the femininity industrial complex, especially with regard to how young women and girls are taught certain "standards" of how to walk, dress, act, etc so that they can successfully marry. Maggie Umber's "Those Fucking Eyes" is another triumph for her, with a series of splash page drawings that tell a loose narrative about desire and being desired. Andrew Greenstone's "Lemurman 2" is a successful bit of horror pastiche that's notable for his grotesque, exaggerated cartooning. Ana Pando's interstitials are all intriguing and enigmatic, especially the piece about finding a double of herself and getting no explanations. 

The rest of the stories are less memorable like Matt MacFarland's unfortunate entry in the "dudes gettin' laid" genre; slight pieces from John Sammis and David Caldwell, a horror parody piece by Brian Canini that felt repetitive in comparison to Greenstone; and a gritty piece by Alex Nall that felt a bit too much like Knickerbocker's piece. There are more misses in this volume than in most of the other issues, but the best pieces are truly outstanding. 

45 Days Of CCS, #42: Sandy Steen Bartholomew

Sandy Steen Bartholomew, a supremely skilled cartoonist and illustrator, submitted four different items for review. First is a kids' book, Blue Roo, which is a comic but does have some sequential elements. It's about a girl named Albina, who is obsessed with the color white and overall tidiness and order in all things. Her most prized possession was her white kangaroo stuffie Roo. When her messy little brother Jojo accidentally gets Roo dirty, he panics and sends Jojo down the laundry chute, where he gets mixed in with colors and turns blue! This provokes a crisis for poor Albina, until Jojo returns Roo to her and Albina learns to loosen up. Blue Roo is a pure delight, and I especially like how Bartholomew uses lettering as part of the storytelling. I've rarely seen text incorporated in such a way with the drawings in a children's book, and it's clear she means to delight readers with both aspects of storytelling.

The minicomic Fish takes the prompts from an Inktober challenge and combines it with the 24-hour comic challenge. Most 24-hour comics are terrible, but Bartholomew manages to create an odd narrative about the titular fish finding the body of a mouse king and endeavoring to free his spirit. The king returns the favor by saving him from horseshoe crabs. Bartholomew kind of uses brute force to string together the otherwise unconnected prompts without any other text, but it works because of the surreal quality of the images and the propulsiveness of her storytelling. Learning To Surf was the result of a 30-day daily drawing exercise done spontaneously each day. Bartholomew's characters are often versions of herself from childhood, and this is no exception, as a girl is swept along into the heart of a whale and discovers the fish from the previous mini there to help her. The mix of black & white and spot color is very effective as the quest goes in interesting directions.

From these two comics, I get the sense that despite her talent and imagination, Bartholomew struggles without structure. This is evident in issue six of Begin Again, her autobiographical series that shifts from diary comics to gags and in this issue, a year's worth of drawings of her extensive toy collection. While this isn't really a comic, it's still interesting to focus on how much comfort Bartholomew drew (and still draws) from these toys. They were companions at some points of life that were clearly lonely ones, and it was obviously deeply meaningful for her to honor them by way of her craft. Bartholomew is still trying to find herself as a cartoonist and creator, but her ability to comfort and delight herself with the joy of her own art is quite evident. 

45 Days Of CCS, #41: Fantology 4

The fourth volume of Fantology is probably the weakest volume overall, but there's still plenty of interesting material in there. A lot of it felt strangely rushed; there were numerous spelling errors and the margins were so tight that I couldn't read some of the stuff toward the middle. Some of the pieces were so sloppy that I was surprised they were published, and the sequencing of the stories also felt somewhat off-kilter. That said, the best stories were excellent, and the overall concept remains sound. 

This is an anthology of fantasy stories set in the same world, based around a central map. Some of the stories are continuing serials, and others are one-shots. This volume's theme is "maps," which is a great theme for a fantasy anthology. There are a number of non-CCS folks in here as well, but I'll start with CCS artists first. Whiteley Foster kicks off the book with a 7-page story that simultaneously feels like it's too long and totally insubstantial. It's about two characters arguing about taking a job as surveyors. Her character design is so Disney-cute and exaggerated that it was hard to see them as characters. Alex Washburn's latest Clan Zargs chapter is something I covered earlier in this feature, but suffice it to say that he makes great use of the map to further his narrative, and the focus on surprising character twists added a lot of spice. 

Carl Antonowicz's unsurprisingly downbeat story follows a religious pilgrim and two servants going on a quest in a deadly desert. The attention he lavishes on world-building is actually a clever misdirection, as the quest itself ends in failure. It's the relationship between the characters that's most interesting. I wasn't crazy about his use of a digital font considering how sketchy his linework was. 

Catalina Rufin has another winning entry in her Barbarian Family series. With the burly barbarian dad Brono and his teen daughter Satu going on a map-led quest, Rufin explores family dynamics in a way that transcends the usual limits of the genre. With Brono harshly critical of Satu's ideas, Satu is vulnerable to a deep gnome's sweet words and promise of magic. Rufin asks some tough questions here, and her character design is sharp and expressive. 

Rainer Kannenstine sketchy and cartoony story about a lonely explorer in over his head in a dungeon takes advantage of old-school Dungeons & Dragons map construction to build the narrative. The looseness of the art gives it a lot of energy and helps play up its whimsical, funny aspects. It even has a genuinely emotional end.

It was such a pleasure to see co-editor Kristen Shull return to her serial. It's about a down-on-her-luck mage and her unlikely partnership with a princess whose quest is to assassinate a god to save her people. Even switching over to drawing digitally and working with a surprising lack of detail, Shull shines doing fantasy work in a way she doesn't in other genres. Her pacing, her understanding of how to depict action, her sense of humor, and her flair for the dramatic make each chapter a rousing success. 

As for the rest, there are a few highlights. F.Ostby's story about young rabbits exploring a forest at night for a treasure rachets up the tension but has a delightful payoff, with a pleasant mix of cartoony characters and a naturalistic setting. Niloufar Lari & Soroush Elyasi have perhaps the best-looking strip in the book, and it's about a quest of transformation and the intimacy of dance; only the digital font detracts from its elegance. Emily Claire's short story about a soldier finding his way back to his lover after three years is quietly devastating. PMK's bar crawl story is hilarious and exceptionally well-cartooned, and it embraces the map concept fully. Finally, Stephen Pellnat's story is a masterful piece of narrative misdirection. The cartooning is excellent, and the swerve is set up early on in a way that is easy to ignore. I missed a few serials from previous issues, which likely led to some replacements, but hopefully, they will be followed up on in the next volume. 

45 Days Of CCS, #40: Hole

It's a tremendous advantage to be a CCS student (or local alum) and have access to their print lab. That allows one the chance to do, for example, an anthology with multiple cut-outs. That's the case with Hole, a ridiculously elaborate anthology that reminds me of the early days of CCS. It's a bit like the old Four Square anthology that would have four artists and a theme or something you'd find on the I Know Joe Kimpel web storefront. 

This anthology features five artists and begins with a series of pages, each with a hole cut in the center concentrically. Holes cut somewhere on the page feature prominently as a formal device in each story, but all for different reasons. In Ben Adkins' "Down In The Hole," the protagonist gets away from the world by digging a hole and living in it. Wondering if he made the right decision, he looks up to the sky from his hole, and sees blue sky in a story that was otherwise black & white. It's a dramatic way for the character to make a major change in how he wants to live his life by rejecting isolation.

Ruby Arnone's "Alligator Pit" is about a delivery person whose job is to throw meat down to gators in a pit in what seems to be a zoo. They then dream about that same pit, but this time the hole expands to see the gators devouring not meat, but people--presumably, the zoo keepers. It's a punchy story that's effective because of the expressive use of colored pencils.

Kate Fairchild's "The Ever-Hole" uses cut-outs more consistently than any other story, and it's all in service to an actual "metaphysical hole" called the Ever-Hole that one character is trying to fill. It's another story about isolation, this time concluding with a hug that represents a lateral solution to filling the hole. Nothing could fill the hole, at least not alone, so the solution was to stop trying and connect. Fairchild's linework is simple but effective, working well with the big formal decision of cutting so much out of each page with the hole.

The most visually ambitious story was Melody Calderon's "Pory." It is quite literally about bubbles: living in a bubble, the bubbles that proliferate on our phones that demand our attention, the bubbles that fog our brains when we're drunk. Calderon takes what is a fairly simple idea and makes it sing with her extensive use of color and the multiple circular cut-outs on so many of the pages. The final story, "Fullness," is an "adapted Sanskrit verse from the Ishavasya Upanishad." Compared to the other stories, this is a very simply designed story that is no less successful for its simplicity, as it gets across its concept of fullness--a concept that cannot be reduced or diminished. The artist, Keena, uses black and white shapes that transform with a single cutout. The anthology as a whole is successful because there's enough variety in terms of formal approaches and storytelling to prevent the kind of stale repetition that sometimes happens in these kinds of anthologies. 

45 Days Of CCS, #39: Ruby Arnone, Clover Ajamie, Taylor Hunt

Ruby Arnone's And The Bat is their version of the Aesop's fable assignment. Like many who have taken it on, they have chosen to bend it to their own interests and concerns rather than a more straightforward adaptation. In this case, Arnone did a take on "The Birds, The Beasts, And The Bat," the fable about a bat who sits out a war between the birds and beasts by not identifying with either side but gets shunned as a result. Arnone abandons that narrative to examine the genocide in Palestine, noting that war is rarely a conflict between morally equivalent sides. This is an unapologetically didactic comic with some lovely pencil drawings.

Clover Ajamie's Healer's Tale is a beautiful, wordless story about a medicine woman of some kind who goes about her days in the forest. She's looking to heal trees but encounters signs of a mysterious and benevolent magic that's clearly healing the forest she loves so much. There's a delightful sense of the methodical as she goes about her day, munching on toast as she digs around the mushrooms. The encounter she has at the end feels entirely earned in its warmth and intimacy, and all of this is heightened by Ajamie's use of browns, yellows, and oranges. 

Tyler Hunt's contribution last year was very funny, and this year's God's Away On Business mixes humor and existential discovery. Done as part of the Ed Emberley assignment (made mostly out of squares, triangles, and circles), it's about a despondent priest who kills himself in order to get an audience with god. Despite that angle, this is actually a funny comic. The priest winds up in limbo, guided by a skeleton bureaucrat through a dizzying environment before meeting the creator. He's told by god that he just got burned out because Earth was especially annoying. The priest steals god's pen and is ready to right some wrongs before being asked by the skeleton, "Do you think you won't get tired, too?" Hunt really goes to town on the cartooning details, even if those turn out to be a shaggy dog story. The best thing about the story is its pacing, as Hunt keeps the reader engaged from the very beginning, and the priest's case against god is very compelling. 

45 Days Of CCS, #38: Fern Pellerin

Fern Pellerin has a sharply refined if familiar style of cartooning. Creation Myth is a visually compelling and fluid version of a very common story: the trans journey of discovery. Pellerin used a somewhat cliched visual metaphor in the stage of development of a butterfly, but it's so beautifully executed and succinct (9 pages) that it worked fine. Pellerin's page composition is elegant and filled with decorative flourishes that enhance the narrative. This comic was part of a larger anthology whose theme was gender and transition, and Pellerin understood that it was important to get to the point. 

Heave Away is a lesbian seaside fantasy romance that similarly does well in establishing a setting, thanks to the frequent use of open-page layouts and dramatic composition. Pellerin's somewhat limited character design impedes the story, and you can see the limitations of their cartooning in the way they depict action and movement as well. There are other problems, like wonky proportions, but Pellerin's ambitions as a storyteller were on display. The future setting but provincial characters certainly had their charms, and what Pellerin did best here was establish a sense of place. The story felt too long and not long enough all at once, as parts of it dragged early on but the world as a whole felt like needed more time to bake. This is pretty much straightforward YA fiction, but given Pellerin's talents, I'd be curious to see what direction they'll go in next. 

45 Days Of CCS, #37: Fernanda Nocedal

Fernanda Nocedal is clearly working through a lot of things with body horror-tinged fiction. In a short, untitled minicomic, they evocatively use a lot of shapes and colors to depict the horrific sexual assault of what appears to be a child. Working wordlessly, the visual wolf & rabbit metaphor is clear and unsettling. This is a really well-designed and effective comic that uses its sparse economy of colors and images for maximum impact. 

Their other comics aren't quite as clearly designed. Darling Angel Flesh is a visceral story that seems highly influenced by Japanese horror. It's about a girl named Lilith (a bit of a giveaway) who finds herself transforming into her true, winged demonic form in the middle of a high school bathroom. This is less a story than it is a mood, as it touches upon the cursed feminine form and other gender ideas and dives deep into their guts. Nocedal's drawing isn't quite assured enough to pull of what they were attempting here, but the overall impact was still effective. 

Grieving Hearts is the longest of Nocedal's comics, and I suspect it was their first-year final project. The story follows a young woman named Elizabeth living in a small town with her grieving and dissociating mother Carmen. She soon learns that the utter weirdos in the town aren't just taking a bizarre and inappropriate interest in their grieving over the death of Elizabeth's father--they are a cult planning to sacrifice them in order to summon some kind of demon! Nocedal's cartooning is much more effective here, and there's a delightful glee to be found amidst the gore, violence, and creepiness. The final panel, implying that Elizabeth may have been transformed against her will anyway, is classic horror storytelling. Nocedal uses a dense and inky style in support of clear and unnerving character design, with big expressions and lots of highly effective exaggeration. You can see how Nocedal is using their time at CCS to really hone their craft. 

45 Days Of CCS, #36: Maia Foster O'Neal

Maia Foster O'Neal's business card reads "Comics, Crafts, & Feelings," and their comics certainly are an example of truth in advertising. There's Sparklemaia's Little Zine Of One Pot Vegan Soup Recipes, which is exactly what it sounds like. Little is a four-page comic that's mostly an excuse to try some expressive color as Maia comforts a younger version of themselves. 

Cracks is a variation on one of the most common subjects I see these days from young cartoonists: the trans journey of self-discovery. In Maia's case, there's a little more nuance because even though top surgery was an extremely important step in her gender-affirming care, she noted that "there's no simple answer." In a nicely illustrated sequence, focusing on specific labels was the equivalent of mistaking the map for the territory. The rest of the comic is straightforward and familiar, but the use of an open-page layout, expressive cartooning, and gentle approach to their dysphoria made this a pleasant and engaging read. 

Harebells was Maia's first-year final project, and it fits into their ambition to work in middle-grade publishing. It's a story about two quarreling sisters and their mother who uses folk tales to help soothe sore feelings. It's a gentle story that touches on gender identity, as well as figuring out new roles in a family when circumstances change. Visually, it's a slightly more personal and idiosyncratic approach than the typical Scholastic/First Second playbook, especially with a nuanced use of color that allows Maia's line to still shine. 

Maia's most interesting comic by far was Entangled. It's a clever two-track narrative and a visual tour-de-force that eschews the more cutesy aspects of their cartooning in favor of something far more visceral. The narrative is about how the human body is comprised of "bacteria, viruses, archaea, and fungi" and goes on to describe how fungi are hard to kill, adaptable, and can even hijack nervous systems. The open page layout is framed by branching, distorting images of roots and fungi that are hidden to us but ever-present. It's implied that the main character we see has been hijacked, changing their behavior (once again, there's not only dysphoria, but the kind of bullying that leads to isolation) in a way that is not necessarily negative, but integral to survival. Maia is generally pretty blunt with their storytelling, especially in terms of doing a lot of telling along with showing, but this mini shows that this doesn't need to be the case. 

45 Days Of CCS, #35: Simon Reinhardt

Simon Reinhardt is another CCS cartoonist whose work I hadn't seen in years before seeing him at CAKE in 2024. I'd always enjoyed his conceptual, text-heavy comics like Mystery Town. Most of the comics he gave me this time around, interestingly enough, were mostly drawings from his sketchbook. Reinhardt has worked hard on his thick, sketchy line; it's starting to remind me of Dylan Williams a little in terms of its looseness and enigmatic quality. Radar In The Wild and wild atlas emphasize that chunky quality that elicits a feeling of dread and anxiety; another cousin is the work of Chris Reynolds. The latter sketchbook has more character-oriented drawings and even some short sequential pieces. 

Radar Mountain is a 24-hour comic, a format that fits with Reinhardt's frequent stream-of-consciousness style. It's about a character tromping through a cemetery, looking for the titular mountain. There's a giant looking for dogs, a sentient & detached hand named Fred literally picking up our protagonist. In the end, the title makes sense and a dog continues to be involved. This is less interesting as a narrative and more interesting as a way to explore multiple environments and propel characters through them. 

Mutate And Migrate brings to mind another potential influence: Mat Brinkman and the overall Fort Thunder aesthetic. Like all of the other comics and sketchbooks here, it feels like Reinhardt is workshopping a lot of visual ideas and styles, rather than producing something fully-formed. There are individual stories like "The Party," which is a nested narrative about a couple going to a series of increasingly-strange parties. The title refers to many short stories about trips, traveling, or massive changes. "The Vanishing World," for example, is a story about how portions of the world are constantly "disappearing for good," that observing this both takes training and is enormously disorienting. That's a good way to describe Reinhardt's work in general in this zine. It takes a lot to engage the material as narratives, and even doing this often results being taken down conceptual dead ends, shaggy dog jokes, and other general weirdness. I'm curious to see what will emerge from the murk when Reinhardt is ready to zero in on a particular idea. 

45 Days Of CCS, #34: Sofia Martin, Ria Garcia, Andy Lindquist

Sofia Martin's Our Days Here is a lovely, scratchily-drawn comic about a tea kettle and a coffee pot who fall in love, dreading the news that they are soon going to move from their house. Martin gives them both personality without going to a fully anthropomorphic approach, and the comic benefits from the slow, languid pacing as they are used and put away, never quite together until after the move. It's a simple comic about trying to find one's place and appreciate who you're with on a day-by-day basis. 

Andy Lindquist's No Thing is an excellent memoir comic (part of Paper Rocket's Mini Memoir Project) about being a teenager and how reading Shakespeare inadvertently led to Lindquist's self-discovery to become a trans man. What I liked about this comic was that apart from it being personal, Lindquist was careful to craft an engaging narrative that had a satisfying ending. Studying Romeo & Juliet, he learned some interesting Shakespearean slang: "thing" meant a penis, and "no thing" or "nothing" meant vagina. The revelation that "Much Ado About Nothing" meant "Much Ado About Pussy" was a hilarious realization for young Lindquist. The narrative follows pre-transition Lindquist slowly piecing together the clues that they did not feel comfortable in their AFAB body, best represented by his body falling apart when he tried to masturbate. When he gets a fake mustache as part of a school skit, that starts him down the path of "I feel something!", ending in a Mercutio and Benvolio fantasy sequence. Lindquist's cartooning is sketchy and effective, with some flights of fancy that only enhance the wish fulfillment aspects of the narrative.

Ria Garcia's HTTRNSBTCHCTY is a companion piece to last year's comic, Dark Piss. That comic used a brutally blunt and satirical text narrative and paired with an abstract visual accompaniment. It was about trans women being subjected to dehumanizing, public punishments using a pornographic lens to amplify its satire. The title of Garcia's new comic ("Hot Trans Bitch City") turns this idea on its head with Garcia's dense, colorful, cityscapes. The comic can be read forwards, backwards or sideways, and each reading offers a different experience. This is a mix of both the disorientation that trans people experience in a hostile society as well as the fluidity and possibilities that being trans provides. Once again, Garcia's ability to confront the reader with an experience that conveys both pain and possibility sets them apart from more naturalistic narratives. 

45 Days Of CCS, #33: Edea Lee Giang, Noah Mease

Edea Lee Giang submitted two comics this year, both of which were very interesting but also kind of raw. Coextinct is an interesting zine that's not really a comic--it's illustrated text. That text is typeset, further distancing it from being a comic. It's a fascinating topic, however, starting out with when the California condor was saved from extinction, the California condor louse was exterminated. Giang brings up the point that exterminating a parasite is not as easy a decision as one might think, largely because historically people have done a terrible job in estimating the impact on an ecosystem after such a decision. He leaves us with an open question of whether only "cute" animals deserve to live and right we have to make this decision. This is well-written and well-composed, but the drawing is really weak. Giang either needed to go more abstract or simplified in his drawing or provided better-realized versions of the things he was trying to draw. 

Turbidity Current is a fantasy action romance comic. The character design is ingenious, as the leads are anthropomorphic sea creatures. Youni is a red sea urchin with a penchant for weaponry who brings requested samples for experiments to Mimi, a bigfin squid who's a scientist. Youni's frustrated because Mimi on the one hand has no time for her, but on the other does very thoughtful things for her. She's a puzzle, but when Youni confronts her, they are attacked by a bizarre assassin. The clever fight scene is tied into their romantic argument in a satisfying way. Once again, it's the basics that are problematic in this comic; the color overwhelms the line on almost every page, and this is the rare instance that a legible font would have been been better by the hard-to-read lettering here. Giang clearly doesn't have the drawing chops to do exactly what they want at the moment, but a comic that emphasized the writing and favored clarity would have been preferable. For example, a simple color wash that didn't kill the linework would have been preferable to what felt like trying to add too many elements.

Noah Mease is a first-year student at CCS who shows a great deal of promise. Hymn To Myrrh is a clever, unfolding pamphlet that opens with six voices extolling the virtue of the substance myyrh. Upon opening the pamphlet up all the way, it turns into an illustrated commercial, where every image is that of a different radio extolling the virtues of myrrh in the patter of a radio ad. This isn't quite a comic, but it is interesting and shows off Mease's design chops. "Where Be Dragons" is a tantalizing showcase of Mease's use of color in an open-page layout with their characters the Nameless Mage and his Deer Friend as they explore a territory filled with dragons who have a certain wisdom to convey. Mease's color sense is sharp and uses negative space in interesting ways, especially in when to drop out line and when to emphasize it. Hermes And The Flies is perhaps the most interesting version of the CCS Aesop's fable assignment I've ever read (at least since Joe Lambert's Turtle Keep It Steady). Printed in landscape, it reminds me a little of Tom Gauld, as Mease uses a minimalist line to zip through several fables, most involving the god Hermes, flies or both. Mease is ambitious in adapting eight separate fables, but they're even more ambitious in their transitions between stories. This is smart cartooning, all-around. 

45 Days Of CCS, #32: Em Sauter

An interesting thing that James Sturm did at CCS was create the concept of "Applied Cartooning." By this, he meant non-narrative cartooning with potential real-world applications in all kinds of fields. He reasoned, why NOT allow comics to help illustrate all kinds of concepts in surprising ways? It's a smart idea, because people respond to the combination of words and images. 

I can't think of a single CCS grad who has embodied this idea better than Em Sauter. She found a very specific niche for her cartooning that is largely outside of traditional comics-reading audiences and combined that with her other expertise to create a hugely popular webcomic and subsequent books. Sauter's expertise? Beer. Sauter isn't just a craft beer enthusiast--she is an Advanced Cicerone and has judged international beer competitions. She co-hosts a podcast called All About Beer. Most importantly, her webcomic Pints and Panels is a mega-success. Her latest book, Pairing Beer With Everything, points to exactly why she's so successful.

Anyone can be a beer nerd and drily recite esoteric facts and figures about beer. Sauter takes that expertise and pairs it with a whimsical sense of humor and sketchy drawing style. For someone who loves beer, this is exactly the kind of you thing you'd pick up on a whim, just so you could match wits with Sauter's picks on all kinds of random, pop culture beer pairings. You want beers for every sports time you can imagine? It's in there. Beer for specific genres and examples of movies? Sauter did it. Beer for holidays? Beer for food from various countries? Sauter did all of this and more, in a format ideally suited for the occasional skim rather than a dedicated read. Brief introductions to each section add a bit of context as to how she makes her choices. This book is not for a general audience, but that doesn't matter. She found her reading group, and Sauter provides a model for other cartoonists in their own side areas of expertise.