45 Days Of CCS, #20: Alex Washburn

Published in the pages of the Fantology anthology, Alex Washburn's serial Clan Zargs works well a solid fantasy story, a romantic serial, and a humorous narrative. There's a frantic energy to it where the plot can take sudden, massive, and unpredictable shifts while never veering from the glue that holds it together: the character relationships. Clan Zargs IV follows the ragtag team of adventurers as they've gotten in way over their heads, captured by the Missionaries of Jahk. One of Clan Zargs, Sasha, has agreed to join the missionaries, but it's part of a plan to break out their fellow clan members. 

Here's what makes this story interesting: Washburn abandons the action of the plot and takes a detour into interpersonal drama for seven pages. As it turns out, Sasha wanted to try something new and genuinely wanted to join the missionaries, though she wanted to free her friends as well. This was such an interesting left turn for the story, as Washburn defied typical fantasy conventions in breaking up a team in this way. The story then takes another sudden turn as the threat of violence arises, only to be quelled by another new character. There's a lot of talking and backstory in this episode, but it never supercedes the emotional narrative that runs through it. Washburn's line is thick and chunky, but you can see the confidence in his drawing increasing episode by episode. That thickness allows for rubbery, exaggerated action, like in Washburn's two-page short, Azzy's Pork Buns. That quality is ideally suited for comedic storytelling, which is true of this story about a side character hunting a pig for a recipe, but it's also true of the main series as well. 

45 Days Of CCS, #19: Annabel Driussi, Tom O'Brien, Ashley Jablonski

When Natalie Norris wrote her sexual assault graphic memoir Dear Mini, she dedicated it to "girls like us." In Dear Natalie, Annabel Driussi tells her own story in epistolary form to Norris, because of how much Dear Mini meant to her. Driussi's mini-comic is very different from Norris' deeply detailed account of the experiences leading up to and after her assault, in that many of the events are alluded to off-panel. The candy-colored hues of the mini and the anecdote about her telling one of her stuffies about her secret masterfully signify that the 14-year-old Driussi was a child when she experienced her own trauma--both literally and emotionally. At the same time, she "hated my childish body" and wanted to look like a woman. She was neither here nor there, and boys took advantage of this. This looks like it was done in crayon, which does much of the narrative heavy lifting, but Driussii's thin and tender line aptly reflects her own vulnerability. 

Ashley Jablonski is mostly doing very short minis these days about their experience teaching art to very young children. They delight in Jablonski as much as Jablonski delights in them, and this is reflected in their Life As An Elementary Ghost mini-comics. Jablonski draws everyone as cute ghosts and essentially relates funny anecdotes, like a kid saying "I made that shot," with an asterisk of "Definitely did not make that shot." Kids ask to spell words like "googleplexian," jump into piles of leaves and encourage Jablonski to do so, and play choose your own adventure. I also quite liked Jablonski's Apples As People, wherein she imagines what Granny Smith, McIntosh, and Baldwin might look like. Here, Jablonski's use of color is especially effective and evocative. 

I hadn't seen anything from Tom O'Brien in a while before I saw him at CAKE. He's working away at an illustrated guide to knives called The Knife Guide, and he gave me a mini of Chapter 4 to look at. This chapter covers different ways to hold a knife and cutting techniques, mostly for the kitchen. As someone who likes to cook but who knows very little about knives, I found it fascinating. It was helpful that he was careful with his image-to-text ratio, keeping the captions in each panel to five lines at a maximum. Anything beyond that would not only be too much text to read and absorb, it likely would have gone beyond the actual illustration in each panel and would have demanded another image anyway. O'Brien uses a six-panel grid as a base, collapsing panels along rows as per needed. The best thing about this was just how particular O'Brien was about illustrating fine details, like precisely how to handle and wield a knife to get a particular kind of cut, be it a mince or a chop. Not being afraid of these details is exactly what a beginner needs to see. The minicomic used grayscale shading but the actual art is in color (see above), which heightens the contrast of the object to its background; however, the constantly shifting color backgrounds are distracting. 

45 Days Of CCS, #18: 666 Comics

The latest iteration of 666 Comics, edited by Ian Richardson has some of the usual CCS names in a fun format: six stories, six pages per comic, six panels per page. Some of the artists take extreme liberties in these restrictions, as what is a "panel" is pushed to the limit at times, but the spirit of the idea is there. As the title would suggest, some kind of deviltry is generally part of the package, but the tone swings wildly from comedy to emo to twisty EC-style horror.

Max Riffner opens up with "Stretch Mark Of The Beast," a Rosemary's Baby/The Omen spoof where a man becomes pregnant by way of his wife after she joins a satanic cult. This is a classic two-track narrative, as the text is a straightforward, sad-sack narrative about being left by his wife then leading to being totally oblivious to the demon inside of him. Meanwhile, Riffner goes all-out with gore and over-the-top images until the final one, which puts the protagonist's stupidity into sharp, ominous relief.

Denis St. John is up to his usual EC Comics-flavored silliness with "Hellarella Pinball Ballyhell,", with his vampy demoness luring a demon to play a pinball version of her. The twist? He becomes the ball when he puts his quarter in! His line, as always, is pleasingly inky and dense, which adds a little weight to the cavalcade of puns mixed with cartoony violence. 

Richardson's "Hell Of A Deal" is the most traditional horror story in the comic. It's about a woman who turns to a psychic because of a deal she made with a demon. The psychic promises to help, but she gets a nasty surprise when the nature of the initial deal is revealed. Richardson's art (and lettering) reminds me a lot of Jack Chick's--naturalistic but with cartoony expressions, and a certain rigidity for effect.

As for the other stories, Jamie Messerman's "The Devil Takes Care Of His Own" is a tender story about a caring demon and someone going through trauma, done in a fairly standard, manga-inspired style. It's an odd fit for this anthology, but then there's usually one outlier in Richardson's collections. Jeff Lorentz's "Root Of All Evil" is a pretty obvious satire where the devil is talking about how humanity has ruined Earth far more than he has. Amanda Kahl's "Superstition" is one of the best stories in the collection, about a midwife in a small town encountering horror in a delivery. Connecting it to the superstitions that are really a manifestation of collective wisdom was a bit of clever storytelling. The use of blacks is especially effective, though the italic font is distracting. Overall, Riffner and Kahl were probably the best of the lot, while Messerman's piece was such a tonal shift (visually and thematically) that it felt out of place. 

45 Days Of CCS, #17: Pat Leonhard

I've been watching Pat Leonhard develop his graphic novel Margo since sitting next to him during a class at CCS when I visited for Industry Day in 2018. Margo is a horror-comedy-fantasy novel that is a cross between "The Monkey's Paw," Shawn Of The Dead, aliens, monsters, ancient civilizations, and much more. Part 1 is the first 70 or so pages of a story that's over 200 pages. Despite the fact that the book turns out to be an epic, at its heart it's the story of the friendship between Margo (a reanimated zombie girl) and Fran (the weird museum-obsessed kid who comes up with a lot of great plans. 

Leonhard loves to create double-takes for readers. The first comes when we meet Margo, and the reader realizes that she's a zombie or ghoul, with part of her face eaten away. She is also a perfectly typical girl. The second comes after she bites her half-sister Becky, and the reader realizes that Margo has accidentally turned her into a flesh-craving zombie. Leonhard unspools the plot slowly so as to focus on mean girl dynamics and to introduce Margo's cruelly buffoonish father Mortimer. It is revealed that Margo's mother is an archeologist who discovered a real-life monkey's paw amid an ancient civilization. Mortimer stupidly uses the paw to make a wish, but the wishes are cursed--Margo dies as a result. He reluctantly brings her back from the dead, but she comes back as the undead, which leads to her mother being able to speak only in an ancient language, which lands her in a mental hospital. 

Leonhard has gone through a lot of permutations in order to make two key segments of the book not only readable, but wildly entertaining. Part of this is his clever use of color. For the segment that reveals the key scenes in the story "The Monkey's Paw," Leonhard uses a sepia tone designed to make the pages look like an old horror comic (except for one page, where he forgets to do this). For the scene where we learn why and how Margo's mother wound up in her situation, Leonhard uses a purple wash in an action-packed segment. Giving the reader a lot of narrative pipe while finding ways to keep it entertaining prevents the story from bogging down until it really blasts off halfway through. There are so many delightful little jokes, easter eggs, and other visual details that enhance what Leonhard is doing. The final version will be an absurd, action-oriented YA fantasy on the level of Mathew New's excellent Billy Johnson book.

45 Days Of CCS, #16: Faith Cox, Penina Gal

Obstructions, Vol 0, by Penina Gal. I've always enjoyed Gal's work, whether it's fantasy, memoir, or comics-as-poetry. This time around, it's graphic medicine, in a zine about their Upper Airway Resistance Disorder (UARS). It's a cousin to the more common sleep apnea, but like many "hidden" disorders, especially for AFAB people, it's often misdiagnosed as a psychiatric disorder. The comic is interesting, as it's an illustrated guide to the symptoms and treatment for the disease, with occasional interjections by Gal as to their experiences. It describes their sleepiness in high school as well as out of breath while running in college. It includes detailed drawings of the orthodontic apparatus that they are currently wearing. This is less a traditional narrative than it is a kind of medical diary, as future updates are promised in this interesting hybrid of diagrams and drawings. 

I Can Feel It All, by Faith Cox. Many comics are howls, raging against pain, trauma, and mental illness. Fewer comics show the breakthroughs, the moments where the fog clears, and the pain subsides. That's what this comic is, as Cox enumerates all of the things they are taking the time to feel: their inner calm, the gardens in her neighborhood, the fruit at the farmer's market, and the summer air. She discusses the feeling of being a "prisoner to yourself," and the central theme of the comic is not taking any of it for granted. Cox's open-page layouts allow the images to breathe in the same way her character is breathing free, and the sketchiness of the drawings gives the whole thing a sense of immediacy.

45 Days Of CCS, #15: Ana Two

Ana Two's Hyperfawnus got an Ignatz nomination, and it was well-earned despite it being so short (just twelve pages of story). There's a neat trick and swerve on the first two pages, where we see a deer and a girl, and we are led to believe that the girl is the narrator, as the narration says "Follow me, little fawn." Instead, it's the Old Man of the Forest who's narrating, which we learn when the girl accidentally shoots the deer with an arrow. The rest of the comic is devoted to the price she must eventually pay after she refuses to fulfill the price of a single drop of blood. It's clear by the way that Two uses color, as well as their themes, that E.M. Carroll is a big influence. However, Two uses Carroll as a launching point for their own themes, interests, stories, and visual expression, rather than directly imitate what Carroll does. This comic is a great example of a story where much is hinted at but little is revealed, other than what is directly needed to resolve the character narrative. Here, that narrative is simply a price that must be paid; all other motivations and world-building remain unspoken. Two's panel design frames the work with unusual shapes, and the concave construction of many of them leads to a feeling of things closing in on the protagonist. 

Their latest project is Darkroom, published by the Shortbox Comics Fair. (Full disclosure: there is a longer version in the works that Fieldmouse might become involved with.) The story follows a vampire named Seraphina, forever in a young body despite her many years. She's in love with a photographer named Lynn, who is obsessed with trying to capture her on film. The story flashes several decades to Seraphina and another lover named Esther who was also obsessed with trying to photograph her. The other member of the cast is a mousy detective named Ira who has found a trail of bodies following Seraphina, and they are closing in.

Ana Two's comics explore a lot of aspects of power relationships and exchange vis-a-vis kink. That's part of what's going on here, but the main thrust of the character narrative is objectification. Seraphina is clearly a monster, but she is capable of love. Feeding for her is like a shark eating its prey; it is an amoral act of survival. Two gives some hints about how Seraphina lives with herself; memory for her is not a linear process, but instead "swimming upstream a river." What she remembers is "blood, tastes, scents." This explains why she doesn't completely recall how the older photographer, Esther, used her in the same way Lynn did. All Seraphina wanted was a connection, no matter how fleeting they all tended to be, but what the photographers wanted was their own version of immortality, through their work, using Seraphina as the means to get there. Ana Two's use of color is brilliant: grayscale wash (with spot color) for modern-day scenes, sepia wash for the older scenes, and a dark red wash for the darkroom. Two's work is thoughtful, subtle, and forceful all at once. 

45 Days Of CCS, #14: Colleen Frakes

One has to admire Colleen Frakes' persistence. One of the original CCS students from the class of 2007, Frakes is one of the few from the class who has continued to do comics since graduating. Knots represents her first book with a big-sandbox publisher after many attempts. It's interesting that it's a quasi-autobiographical book, considering that much of her output throughout her career has been fantasy comics with a feminist edge. The main exception was Island Brat, about spending part of her childhood on a prison island where her parents were guards. I've always loved Frakes' self-caricature, thanks in part to her pen-and-ink mastery and use of gesture. 

With Knots being a book from a big publisher, it's not surprising that it was in full color, which was done by Mercedes Campos López. I've read several comics from López in color that looked great, but the color in this book feel perfunctory at best, and a lot of it drowns out Frakes' linework. Indeed, her line weight feels a tad thinner than in her other work, leading to a sketchy spareness that is ill-served by the color filling up space in the blank backgrounds. Considering that the plot follows a disaster when Frakes' stand-in character dyes her hair, the use of color for hair looks surprisingly flat because of the variety of background color fills. I wish this book had a 2-color wash or used brighter spot colors to emphasize hair. 

That said, Frakes' cartooning was still top-notch and the story was so surprisingly raw. Most middle-grade memoirs tend to focus on friendships and/or romances, but Knots is a story about a family going through a difficult time. Frakes was wise to make this quasi-biographical, because it allowed her to smooth over certain narrative elements to make the story flow well, while still retaining key elements from her own experience. The story follows Norah, entering into sixth grade, who is trying to find ways to express herself. She lives her parents and hellraising younger sister Lark, and it's established that her family has had to move multiple times because they kept getting transferred in their employment as prison guards. 

The plot device of Norah giving herself a bad dye job and wrecking it a few times is the story's visual hook. The real story comes when Norah's mom is transferred yet again, which leads to her parents deciding to split the family up. Her tempestuous mother would take Lark with her to their new city, while Norah would remain with her easygoing father. Frakes completely sidestepped predictable formula work here with a tremendously vulnerable, revealing, and frequently absurd portrayal of a family that was trying to do its best but was struggling. In this portrayal, there are no villains; however, there is a major critique of both parents who don't listen and Norah, who is afraid to speak up and express her needs. 

Frakes does a marvelous job in portraying Norah's anxiety and fears surrounding her parents' jobs working in law-enforcement, often in hilarious ways. At one point, Norah has a nightmare that her teacher calls the cops on her, her parents divorce as a result, and she goes to prison with her quarrelsome younger sister. When she's told it's a spider prison (a huge fear), Norah bolts awake and wonders "What is wrong with my brain?" Norah's awkwardness is as relatable as her wanting to expand her horizons and get out of her comfort zone. The intense loneliness she feels after her mother leaves, with her father working constantly, is portrayed in an almost palpable way. Hooking the narrative into a classmate who was sent to live with his grandparents after a casual admission of neglect in class added another level of very real pain in a way that is unusual for this kind of book. In the end, Norah is able to express herself more clearly when her parents want to move again, and they finally start to listen. That said, she noted that things didn't magically change, either--everyone just tried a little harder, but at least they were together. It's that sense of authenticity, even in a work of (mostly) fiction, that sets Knots apart. 

On top of that, Frakes' catch-up mini So What's New With You? talks about Knots, her husband and daughter, video games, and doing an event with cartoonist Laura Knetzger where she affirms that she plans to continue to self-publish. It certainly provided that pen-and-ink fix I missed in Knots!