45 Days Of CCS, #9: Ellie Liota, Al Varela and Iona Fox (with Cooper Whittlesey)

Ellie Liota has shown a knack, in her young career for drawing anthropomorphic animals, or animals who are intelligent. Trash Town is a fun little comic that plays up both the comedic elements of a group of animals who are dumpster diving with the grim, visceral realities of what this really means. It's a nice art object as well, with a cover flap of a dumpster revealing the raccoon, opossum, and skunk staring up at the reader. Trash Town is a good example of an effective use of two-track storytelling; the dialogue is free-flowing and light-hearted as the animals dine on their dumpster buffet, but the visuals tell a nastier story. For example, one of the young possums brings their mother a severed human finger. A swarm of maggots is referred to as "disco rice" by Maude the possum rice because of the way they squirm, and their mother Annie the fly yells at the animals for eating her kids. Another great two-track moment is when the raccoon digs through the maggots to find something shocking. The reader thinks it's shock at finding a human corpse, but instead, it's shock at finding wet cat food. Liota manipulates the expectations of anthropomorphism and cleverly creates interesting story beats when the talking animals don't react the way a human would. Her cute character design only helps emphasize this further. 

Al Varela's Young, Dumb & Queer slice-of-life queer romance series is perfectly attuned, josei manga-inspired cartooning. It's colorful and populated by characters with big feelings who aren't afraid to talk about their feelings. The mini Hate My Ex is a good, short example of this, as the characters Tyler and Leslie chat about break-ups from their past. In what is essentially a talking heads comic, Varela keeps the reader's eye occupied with Tyler shooting hoops and then later eating lunch. Leslie is a great character because she recognizes her own self-sabotaging tendencies thanks to her bipolar disorder. Seeing both of their exes dating each other is a hilarious twist that provides a satisfying conclusion for what is just a 12-page comic. Varela's work is much more refined than when I first encountered it a couple of years ago. 

It's been a while since I had seen a comic from Iona Fox, but she's certainly had good reason. She had to deal with advanced-stage rectal cancer and the subsequent quality-of-life issues her survival (happily) entailed. In her funny and frank comic Tough Shit, Fox immediately dives into how the language around cancer is odd and "babyish," perhaps in an effort to talk around a disease that is not only deadly but whose treatments are grueling. Contracting cancer at the same time COVID was at its height, all while negotiating a new relationship, was a tough triple threat for Fox. However, the focus of this short comic is how she dealt with having a colostomy bag after her treatment. It's reflective of cancer treatment in general; there's plenty of attention to the actual treatment, but there's much less concern given to quality of life issues for survivors. A lot of detail (and information) is devoted not only to having a colostomy bag, but also information provided on the kind of underwear that should be worn with, sex, and finally how to discuss it publicly. This is one of the better cancer-related comics I've read, in part because Fox deliberately avoids valorization narratives and treatment-related infodumps in favor of her actual lived experience. 

Fox's line is much more loose and scribbly than I remembered, but it's highly effective and expressive. Abandoning naturalism in favor of crazier scribbles served her narrative well, just as it seems to serve New Thing, a comic she's doing with Cooper Whittlesey. It's about a twitchy man who's going to pick up. a dog at a special dog pound, one with strange rules. This was just four pages from a longer work, but I'm pretty sure Fox is doing all of the drawing here. The slightly grotesque character design fits with the absurdity of the narrative, and I'm excited to see Fox continue this kind of cartooning. 

45 Days Of CCS, #4: Gabrielle Tinnirello and Al Varela

Al Varela's style features big-eyed characters, bright colors, and hearts worn on sleeves. It has a deeply humanistic quality to it, as it's clear that Varela loves all of their characters, whatever their flaws. Skate With Me, Baby! is a mini featuring teens Sandra and Mandy. Sandra is a new employee at a roller rink, and purple-haired Mandy is a frequent customer. What unfolds are the opening moments of a sweet romance that clearly presages a deeper summer relationship. Varela has a way of getting at those opening butterflies and sparks of attraction, especially when someone like Sandra is so shy and awkward. The more aggressive Mandy is nonetheless sweet and patient, and the scene where Mandy teaches Sandra how to skate is both tender and filled with sexual tension. This is less a story than it is a quick character study. The background details of the rink (cheap toys from game tickets, crying kids, an indifferent boss) all add to the magic of the central relationship. Varela's understanding of the relationship between bodies in space and gesture provide the reader with all they really need to know about the story. 

Gabrielle Tinnirello's career thus far has been interesting in terms of the minis I've seen from her. She seems more interested in a sort of narrative collage style of storytelling than traditional comics. That's certainly true with 27, a birthday zine celebrating her 27th birthday. The way she arranges her collage elements and then fills in with decorative drawings around them exudes warmth, and in many ways these comics feel like she's trying to put a certain kind of energy into her work. In drawing different playing cards for different people, she's aware of tarot and other divination techniques in terms of setting intentions for them. This whole mini seems to be about setting intentions after her birthday, and they include finding love and working collaboratively with others. I'm hoping to see something resembling even a further veering into comics-as-poetry given her decorative style or a more conventional narrative with lots of visual bells-and-whistles.

31 Days Of CCS, #23: Al Varela

Al Varela's work is different from a lot of their classmates, but in many respects is representative of comics at large, especially with regard to webcomics. This mini, Love Game, is part of a larger series called Young, Dumb & Queer (an all-time great title!). The art style is clear manga-influenced, and the character design is clear, consistent, and highly expressive. While it's full color, the color doesn't overwhelm the line art and things like gesture and body language. 

From a technical standpoint, I just wished it was bigger. The art felt cramped. The text overwhelmed the art in a lot of panels, in part because in a character study like this, there was a lot of dialogue that needed to be used. I often speak of a rough 2:1 rule in panels and on pages: Two-thirds of your panel should be an image, and no more than one-third should be text. This is a rough rule that can be worked around, but when the text overwhelms the art on multiple pages (especially if it's a talking heads story), it leads to feeling cramped. I also appreciated Varela hand-lettering the whole thing, but their lettering suffered from the same cramped quality. They'd probably benefit from using an Ames guide to letter, in addition to alloting more space to the art.

As for the story, Varela effortlessly weaves multiple relationships in multiple states for a group of young queers who are trying to figure things out. The aspect of the story that I found most interesting was that there were heroes or villains in this story--only people trying to figure things out as best they could, often while trying to combat their own limitations and mental illness. For example, Leslie is a character who hurt Maggie. Maggie was concerned when she spotted Leslie making out with Faith, both because she was worried that Leslie might hurt faith but also that her lovesick friend Pearl would freak out, because she was into Faith. Leslie does and says a lot of insensitive things in this comic, but she's not a villain. Her self-loathing has painted her into a corner where she feels "bad" and hence does "bad" things, but those are ultimately her own choice and ineffective as behavior. The story explores the limits of each of the characters as they ultimately share empathy and work things out, with some funny and awkward steps along the way. Varela has a keen understanding of character dynamics that's enhanced by their skilled use of gesture and an understanding of how bodies interact in space. In other words, their storytelling is quite good; it's just some of the details that need to be cleaned up.