The CRAM Index

Here's a quick-link index to my six-part feature on CRAM Books.

1. Andrew Alexander's minicomics

2. CRAM #1

3. CRAM #2

4. CRAM #3

5. Allee Errico's Froggie World

6. Angela Fanche's Me & Night

CRAM, Part 6: Angela Fanche's Me & Night

Angela Fanche's Me & Night was actually one of the earliest CRAM publications (2021) and it marks work from the beginning of Fanche's career. The raw, crude quality of the comic reflects that both artist and publisher would go through a great deal of refinement over the years, as Fanche's work has evolved while CRAM's production values would also dramatically improve. That said, this is an impressive debut for both, precisely because it so deftly embraces the raw, crude, and direct qualities of Fanche's drawing and confessional storytelling. 

A diary comic is a good exercise for a young cartoonist trying to establish a drawing practice, as the format forces them to draw without being too precious. It can have diminishing returns after a few months, especially if the artist starts to feel compelled to never miss a day. In Fanche's case, she abandons the daily format after about a month, and that's when the book really starts to get interesting. She talks about abandoning these autobio strips from time to time, but I'm curious to see if she chose not to include particular strips in this collection or simply stopped doing strips for long periods of time. She does allude to not doing them later on, but I don't know if this was the case across the board. 

Regardless, the entries stop being anecdotes about her daily life and start to cohere as a status report on her mental health, which veers from joy to despondency and back again. It's interesting that she ended the collection just a month or two into the quarantine due to the global pandemic, considering that so much of this book is about isolation and connection. The book starts just after Fanche has broken up with her live-in boyfriend, and much of the narrative revolves around her disinterest in getting into another relationship. Even when she depicts herself hooking up with a couple of people, she can't bear to stay overnight. What's more important to Fanche are her friends, her practice as an artist, and her cat. The real conflict in the book is with herself and what she eventually unravels is her depression. Talk therapy doesn't seem to help, but medication eventually helps her dull down her catastrophisizing, spiralling thoughts to something manageable. 

There is a lot of art but very little artifice in these comics. Memoir is usually constructed so as to deliberately paint a specific picture of the artist, whether it's upbeat, self-deprecating, or contemplative. Fanche's art and her thoughts seem to parallel each other: first line = best line and first thought = best thought. What makes the book so compelling is her rock-solid understanding of page and panel composition, even with a frequently scribbly and hasty line. Her use of blacks, her understanding of body language, and the way she arranges characters together in space show a refined, sophisticated conception of cartooning even while many of her characters are barely more than stick figures. That's all in support of Fanche being careful to try to draw interesting events in order to avoid the usual torpor that afflects diary comics, while at the same time spilling a life's worth of frustration, confusion, trauma, excitement, joy, and misery into such a succinct framework. 

CRAM, Part 1: Andrew Alexander

One of the most interesting new publishers is CRAM Books, helmed by Andrew Alexander. To date, he's published three volumes of his CRAM anthology, as well as minis by himself, Angela Fanche, and Allee Errico. These are exciting comics that rework traditional forms like the diary comic into something much more interesting and push the medium in other ways. 

First up are two older diary comic zines from Alexander, DECMBR 2018 and SEVENTH OF MAY 2019.  l liked both of these quite a bit, in part because Alexander immediately starts questioning exactly what he's going after in these comics. DCEMBR 2018 is a traditional daily diary collection done in something resembling the traditional four-panel format. Alexander frequently blurs the composition, as some panels flow into each other in interesting ways. Alexander's drawing is wonderfully raw, grotesque, and expressive, and his character designs are consistently interesting. While there's plenty of written scrawl in most of these strips, it's his drawing that really stands out. He manages to pack a lot of action in these strips with exaggerated perspectives and anatomy, varying line weights to create different expressions, and relating awkward anecdotes where he's in uncomfortable situations, like visiting his family. Alexander does another interesting thing, where his commentary about life starts to tangent away from the actual situations he's drawing, creating some two-track narratives. He's an unreliable narrator and he wants you to know it. 

SEVENTH OF MAY 2019, as one might expect, covers the events of a busy day. It's thankfully not formatted in the style of hourly comics day, but rather simply flows with an introduction that lets the reader know that he's already tired, working a lot at a RISO print shop, trying to draw, and still have a social life. All of this is just a set-up for the real through-line of the first half of the comic: a phone argument with his mother. The argument sees Alexander walking the streets of New York, cutting to his mother driving around. The substance is absurd: his mother is telling him about a friend of hers that she's mad at because her friend was using a holistic trauma healing technique without proper training. Once again, the facial expressions drive everything here, and Alexander manages to add clarity to some text-heavy pages by smartly employing an open-page layout. 

The second half features a weary Alexander delivering a piece and then being cajoled into going out drinking with his client. It's a perfect set of story beats: his friend inviting him out to drinks at a fancy bar over the clear protests of his girlfriend, borrowing a suit in order to fit in, meeting assorted weirdos and posers along the way, and then being met with a big surprise in the form of the bill. It's an interesting set of events on their own, but Alexander's character design once again is his secret weapon, helping add to the sense of absurd momentum that sometimes happens when you're out on the town. Weird things just start to happen around you, and you have to go with it. The final images of Alexander drunk and exhausted on a subway car are the perfect capper to a story that relies on energy derived purely from adrenaline. These two comics are what I would call minor works compared to Alexander's larger project as an editor and publisher, but it shows how his aesthetic as a cartoonist is entirely in line with those he chooses to publish.