Three New Comics by Iris Yan

I usually do all of my Center for Cartoon Studies reviews all at once, but I'm making some exceptions with the recent batch I've received. It's always a pleasure to get new comics from Iris Yan, whose dry but blunt sense of humor always delivers. Yan is extremely prolific, for good and ill, but when she takes her time, her anthropomorphic figures add a lot to her storytelling.

She also frequently just has a great concept. In Taxi Driver: Wisdom On Wheels, for example, she takes what is low-hanging fruit (stories about cabbies) and focuses on details and her own withering observations to create variations on a set-up that still offers up funny surprises. What's also interesting about this comic is that Yan's whole project has been one long memoir mediated through various gimmicks and devices: her experience having cancer, dating, teaching English, and more. This mini explores Yan's career as a consultant, a lucrative but stressful profession that meant dealing with a lot of weird personalities. Yan wisely approaches this time of her life from different, bite-sized angles with their own narrative hook, like having to take taxis to work. Ultimately, Yan noted that she just wanted to get home safely, which meant humoring some weirdos. 

Yan goes much deeper in her two Studying Traditional Chinese Medicine diaries. Hilariously, she decided to take up TCM after some acupressure helped him with a medical issue, because it seemed like witchcraft and "I've always wanted to be a witch." She was living in Taiwan at the time, and the courses were in China, so off she went. Yan is really adept at breaking down the inherent social absurdities of hierarchical institutions of schools and businesses, bringing the eccentric personalities she encounters to the forefront. Whether it's rigid teachers, flighty students, and concepts in TCM that she can't quite absorb, Yan goes into a great deal of depth with regard to her experience living in a dorm as a woman over forty years old. It's also interesting to see Yan struggle to learn the nuances of the TCM organs, which, while having familiar names like "lung" and "kidney," don't quite match up with their Western equivalents. 

The second volume begins with Yan returning to Taiwan for spring break in 2020, which coincidentally marked the beginning of the global pandemic. Her program was completely unprepared for zoom-style instruction, and so what it took to pass courses became much easier, with lots of open-book exams. As a result, Yan felt she didn't retain much information, except those things that involved children's urine or squirrel feces as part of their makeup. In the end, Yan took a leave while dealing with colon cancer. Each diary issue is close to 100 pages, and the episodic quality of each vignette made this a more uneven reading experience. Yan tried to vary the lessons she learned with bits about her classmates and teachers, but the narrative structure felt a bit overstuffed, as diaries often do. Yan's art and lettering were also uneven, looking rushed at times. The line weight for figures and especially lettering noticeably varied, as it felt like Yan was trying to get this down as quickly as possible. Yan works in a deliberately simple, stripped-down style with anthropomorphic figures because it gives her a lot of freedom to depict sensitive topics. However, I've seen her do this in a much more polished way in earlier comics. Happily, Yan's wit and timing remain as sharp as ever, and that is the main calling card for these comics. 

Eric Haven's Damned #1

Eric Haven's comics exist in this weird liminal state between EC horror comics, 1970s Marvel monster/science-fiction epics, John Stanley comedy, and otherwise uncategorizable pulp fiction. Dating back to his Tales To Demolish days with Sparkplug Comic Books, his publishers have clearly always understood how his comics work on multiple levels and have an appreciation for their pulp aspects. 

There's often an autobiographical component to all of this weirdness, as a lot of his comics feature himself as a bespectacled, stoic observer of the absurd. In his latest comic for Fantagraphics, Damned #1, there are three separate but connected storylines, all told with Haven's trademark unsettling, deadpan style. The first, "Meg Tempera," is a strange romance-style comic featuring the reluctant title character fending off the advances of the cartoonish buffoon Ned (a highly warped version of Haven) who won't take no for an answer and is obsessed with ham. 

The second feature is titled "Deathika," who is a very Golden Age-coded hero who's chasing down an assortment of monsters who yell out "Protective the Collective!" The olive-and-purple hooded outfit is right out of a four-color comic, and the total lack of an explanation (other than killing monsters, of course) is part of the fun. The third story, "Modern Boating," features that oaf Ned somehow driving a high-tech boat, a ham next to him. ("The cured meat, silent, lies beside him on the seat.") This draws the attention of the "Lake Patrol's Elite Killer Shrike Unit," who start shooting at him. Finally, in "Worlds In Collision," Meg discusses her nightmares of being Deathika with a friend, Ned barges in with a ham, and Meg's friend starts going in on a theory about how we need a modern-day figure to "protect the collective." Things are connected but don't entirely make sense. It ends on a non sequitur. There are more questions than answers. There's no guarantee that there will even be a Damned #2. It's all part of the continuing Eric Haven project whose visual appeal is halfway between deliberately stiff and fluidly exciting. You can see Haven deliberately emulating the same kind of flat but curiously compelling 50s art that Dan Clowes does, only Haven genuinely loves playing in this sandbox. The exchange about Ned buying Meg's Micronauts toys but professing that he's really a "Shogun Warriors guy" is hilarious to those who have the same cultural touchstones, but they resonate as absurd even to those who resonate with those references. This comic is a perfect little dose of absurdity. 

Catching Up With Carol Lay: Murderburg and My Time Machine

It's not an exaggeration to say that Carol Lay has had one of the weirder careers in comics that I can recall. She started her career at the dawn of the Alternative Comics era, doing shorts for Weirdo and Wimmen's Comics as well as commercial work for DC & Western. In between working in animation and doing storyboards for Hollywood, she was one of the more successful cartoonists in the alt-weekly newspaper industry with Story Minute (later WayLay). Her Irene Van Der Camp strips in Fantagraphics' Good Girls comic were later collected, as well as her short strips. She did a memoir about weight loss, did Simpsons strips for Bongo Comics, and self-published a number of short comics. While she does a lot of comedic work, she's not strictly a humorist. In fact, I'd say her defining characteristic is that it's hard to define her work.

Her Murderburg (originally Murderville) comics were originally published as individual issues via Kickstarter, and Fantagraphics Underground published a collection of them. These are in the vein of her "Irene" strips: funny, highly stylized, weird, and violent. While Lay's introduction details the publishing history of the Scazzo family, there's nothing that actually explains the presence, making the first couple of stories confusing. The diminutive, fire hydrant-shaped family patriarch Leo Scazzo, with his purple suit and pencil mustache, feels like a tribute (if not a direct reference to) Gomez Addams. Indeed, with the three children and Leo's willowy spouse Antonia, along with assorted references to violence and mayhem, it seemed obvious that this was a Charles Addams pastiche.

Except it's not. This is a goof on mob cliches, with Leo Scazzo being a semi-retired mob boss who has become mayor of Muderburg, a small Maine island community. Everyone on the island has their own shady behavior that they're up to, but things are kept in the family, so to speak. Lay mashes up the island weirdo cliche with mob tropes for humorous effect, even as the personalities of the main characters do have a lot of Addams tendencies. While Leo, Antonia, and their "normal" daughter Isabella are somewhat amusing (if limited) characters, the real fun is in the weirdness of the island itself. Whether it's a mysterious, all-devouring fog, a phony artist, assorted assassins, or the annoying snobs on a nearby island who drop their garbage on Muderburg via hot air balloon, Lay excels at coming up with absurd comedic premises. The characters themselves are all rather static, which is fine because they exist to provide a structure to hang jokes on. The episodic quality of the stories makes it feel like a demented, modern version of a Harvey comic, which isn't surprising for someone who worked on the Simpsons comics. Lay's character design befits the comedic nature of the strip, and her pen-and-ink compositions are so sharp that I wish the whole thing had been in black & white. Her lettering has always been a strong point of her work as well; it's dynamic, crisp, and clear.

Lay's newest work is technically her first original graphic novel. Entitled My Time Machine, it's a genre-bending story. It's technically a sequel of sorts to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, but it's also a memoir of sorts, and it's also a polemic. The protagonist is Lay herself, who tries to duplicate and expand upon the adventures of Wells' nameless Time Traveler in a world where the book depicted true events. Lay is an artist whose history of primarily doing short stories means that she's used to getting to the point with some alacrity, so it's interesting to see such a languid sense of pacing in this book. The plot follows Lay volunteering to pilot a time machine invented by her ex, in hopes that she could see just how bad global warming has become, so she could alert the present. Set in 2019, it already feels strangely dated in terms of how much crazy stuff has happened.

There is a remarkable amount of detail regarding not only the time machine and how it works, but minutia like the suit she wore and her log of the things she saw. While she didn't encounter Wells' Eloi or Morlocks, she did see the evolution of electronic drones that gained sentience and came armed with lasers. There's also a surprisingly affecting set of encounters Lay has in 2030 with her ex, who details a lot of the world's problems at that time. The result is just strange, as Lay maintains Wells' obsession with detail that tends to supersede character narratives, but it's all laid over how she'd imagine encountering these things in person. It's a fictional story that feels strangely personal and intimate, touching on Lay's own feelings about mortality. 

Lay's art is typically crisp but much more restrained and less stylized than usual when it comes to the character work. That's because she saves the weird stuff for her character's encounter with swarms of drones and a giant octopus creature in the far future. The whole book does have a curiously flat quality to it, in part because Lay's character is somewhat passive. She's just sort of there for the ride and to record things, as she skims her way through time. It's not unpleasant to pass the time with her (so to speak), but like much of Wells' work, it's not as interesting as the premise suggests. 

Catching Up With Jason Martin

Jason Martin is often hailed as one of the best writers in his sphere of comics, which is autobiographical & poetic observations. Indeed, I first became aware of him thanks to Papercutter #17, an issue of the dearly missed anthology that featured a number of different artists interpreting Martin's stories. However, I also greatly admire the spare economy of his line. He's an excellent example of someone with limited talent as a draftsman who nonetheless manages to maximize this with an assured understanding of cartooning itself. His use of gesture and ability to create atmosphere using a simple line make spending time with his gentle, thoughtful, and often amusing observations not only a pleasure, but even nourishing for the reader. 

John Porcellino is an obvious touchstone and influence for Martin, and he acknowledges this fact in one of his stories. However, Martin's Laterborn series is different from Porcellino's King-Cat Comics & Stories, because Martin is a different kind of writer and artist. Porcellino's line is distilled so far down to its essence that it borders on abstraction, yet it doesn't lose any of its expressive power. Martin's line is more rudimentary and earnest, but there's also something pleasant about the way he creates shapes. There's a consistency and intentionality in his visual language that complements his subject matter. While both artists delve into the poetic qualities of anecdotes, Porcellino's writing is often as spare as his line. Martin's eager effusiveness for living informs even the most quotidian of his anecdotes.

Life Lines is his second collection, drawing mostly from his zine series Laterborn and Black Tea. The latter series, he noted in his introduction, was started as a more spontaneous, sloppier attempt at making stories left over from Laterborn. It's a clever way of retaining a certain freshness and liveliness in one's line after the labor of crafting something more elaborate. (Julia Wertz does something similar.) Martin's approach to narrative is interesting, because he retrofits a new narrative onto previously unconnected stories with a unifying theme. The themes are simple, like "Cedar Street," which clearly all seem to take place during the same time period, living in a particular place. No one anecdote stands out, but there's a warmth to them tinged with a slightly bittersweet feeling in retrospect. Some of them are more cohesive narratives, like "First Tour Comix," a document of a tour of a two-man band on the West Coast. Playing live, traveling, meeting other musicians, and trying to find a place to stay are all recalled with fondness. 

The second section, "Changing Gears," is probably the most ambitious set of stories in terms of scope. There's a story about Carolyn Cassady and her old San Francisco house, a touchstone for him given that her book got him into her husband Neal's famous Beat adventures. Another is about visiting a friend at a zen center and the aftermath, and several others are about work encounters with surprising personal outcome. Above all else, Martin seems most interested in stories about connection. The third section hits on stories from his childhood, from being born deaf in one ear to early attempts at making art with others. There's a chapter dedicated to Portland, a city that means as much to him as San Francisco, that includes convention tabling stories, friendships, and the overall vibe of the city. The rest of the book focuses on finely-tuned portraits of people he met, small but meaningful moments, and other places that had significance in his life. There are moments of playful, almost silly humor, but what sets Martin's comics apart is his sense of wonder. 

Martin also included the latest issue of Black Tea (#7), which once again featured stories that both dovetailed into singular & memorable moments and pleasantly emphasized the small joys experienced along the way to those moments. The best was a story about his childhood devotion to Late Night With Conan O'Brien, which eventually led to him getting a last-second seat at a taping. Another story about being a page turner for a piano player for a musical. Here, Martin's attention to the smallest of details in this most minor anecdote is what brought it to life. While the longer collection of his work was enjoyable, Martin's comics are best enjoyed in smaller doses like this, especially with the mix of longer stories and one-page anecdotes and gags. 

Finally, Covers #2 is a comic featuring stories about musicians. What these stories displayed was Martin's ability to distill information into a compelling narrative, even if it's the smallest of anecdotes. In three short stories, Martin zipped off compelling accounts of playing a birthday party gig for Keanu Reeves, one of the band members nearly getting killed during 9/11, and how a legendary guitar brought bandmates Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore together. These moments had little to do with music but everything to do with the life of a musician, and it's understanding that process that makes Martin unique. The same was true in adapting some stories from Mike Watt, especially one about a friend who went to great lengths to help him. The final story, involving an anecdote about an unusual song by Neil Young, was all about music and the process of creation in particular. Martin strips away the glitz and ego and gets down to the art and relationships, and this is emblematic of his work as a whole. 

Elise Dietrich's Kill Your Idols, Part 1

Many of Elise Dietrich's autobiographical comics have been in the form of travelogues, but Kill Your Idols follows a different journey: one into the musical idols of her past. This is mostly about Dietrich as a teenager, "a mostly unformed mass of anxiety and passion." Music and art can often provide both an outlet and a template for teens, as well as a parasocial relationship that can inform their path and decisions. 

Unsurprisingly, Dietrich details that she first started becoming a fan of alternative rock in the late 80s and 90s, as an older boyfriend shared a lot of different bands with her. While the boyfriend didn't last (although the regrets did), the musical obsession did. For Dietrich, it centered around Perry Farrell of Jane's Addiction and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. With the ostentatious Farrell, it was the kind of devoted desire given to a magnetic cult leader. With the cool and reserved Gordon, it was the urgent desire of having a role model. Dietrich points out that their identities became fantasies that she wove in her own head, especially when any significant investigation into Farrell's life and aesthetic revealed a great deal of pretentiousness--and not even original pretentiousness. Gordon at least gave Dietrich a creative direction as a musician and an artist. 

Dietrich explores whole-cloth adaptation of another artist's aesthetic and perspective as a way of cycling through influences in order to find one's own voice. The next part of the story will include Dietrich's present-day evaluation of her idols. In this issue Dietrich uses a mostly open-page layout to her advantage, which allowed her to adapt the imagery and album art of her favorites. It's a quick and easy way to show how they influenced her own aesthetics. Dietrich does her best to express not just what each artist meant to her, but why their songs and visual presentation were so important. There were two essential problems here, however. The first is that the comic doesn't convey much in terms of why the sonic qualities of the music was compelling. It's a difficult ask for any comic, but one that is predicated on music falls flat without it. The second problem is that Dietrich's teenage self is barely a character. This is partly by design, as she presents her teenage self as inchoate, but the result feels more like an extended book report more than a narrative. Hopefully, the second part will help connect the dots with a more pointed critique and deeper self-reflection.

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.