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 his 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 he's even more ambitious in his 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.