31 Days Of CCS, #13: Liz Barker

Liz Barker's first-year CCS comics are both very interesting variations of two time-tested assignments. The first, Fox Chicken Seed Bag, is the Ed Emberley assignment, using simple shapes like squares, triangles, and circles to tell a story. This is a hilarious expansion on the old problem of the farmer who has to take a fox, a chicken, and a bag of seed across a river, but can only take one at a time. The logical piece that Barker adds is the chicken saving the fox in the early part of the story, therefore incurring a life debt. This bit of ridiculousness extends to the chicken owing a life debt to a bag of seed, and a quest ensues that also somehow wraps in the old "one guard lies, one guard tells the truth" trope. What makes the comic work is Barker's talent for dialogue and comedic timing. 

The Rooster And The Maids is a variant of the Aesop's fable assignment. Here, Barker goes heavy on dense pencils in this story of an imperious woman and the three young women she has in her employ as maids. The maids first blame (and kill) the rooster for waking their employer, then realize that she's totally unhinged and apply the same solution to her (the axe). The dense pencil hatching in the margins serves to emphasize the loose expressiveness of Barker's gestural drawings. The whole presentation feels rough in the best possible way--a lot of first line, best line.