45 Days Of CCS, #21: Crank Case & Iris Gudeon

Iris Gudeon's comics are odd and funny. Using a four-panel grid and a deceptively simple line, Gudeon's storytelling leans into a cute, upbeat aesthetic in order to disguise the sheer weirdness of what she's actually doing. In The Warm (worm farm), for example, the reader meets a farmer who works on the titular worm farm. What Gudeon is doing here is a shaggy dog joke, as the initially cute concept (a worm farm!) gets weirder and weirder. The farmer, desperate for human (or really, non-worm) contact, gets increasingly awkward until it's revealed that EVERYTHING is worms. I laughed out loud at the surprise punchline when I turned the final page. 

One of my favorite CCS assignments is when students are put together in order to collaborate on a particular genre assignment. They divvy up responsibilities like traditional mainstream comics. In the example of Crank Case, the team was Adrienne Adkins, Amelia B.C. Dutton, Fern Pellerin, and Fernanda Nocedal. Adkins did the designs for two of the characters, layouts, and lettering. Dutton did character and style designs, pencils, and the book design. Nocedal designed another character and did character inks. Pellerin was production manager and did background inks. 

The team decided to do "90s style science-fiction shonen manga," and the result is pretty solid. The story is told in a Western style (left-to-right), and it merges futuristic dystopian sci-fi with very familiar fantasy tropes. The story follows Poco, an engineer/scrap-seeker, and their robot dog K-9, as they meet an elven sorceress named Phae who was banished to this realm. Most of the comic is a chase scene, as Poco's competitors chased them down before Phae unleashed a nasty spell. The character design for Poco and Phae was by two different artists, but it was a clever idea to make these characters from completely different genres. It highlighted how weird and alien Phae seemed in Poco's gritty, junk-strewn environment in a dump. The composition was all over the place on every page: dutch angles, two-page spreads, inset panels, and other dizzying, disorienting choices typical of shonen. This was one of the better examples of this kind of collaboration that I've seen.

45 Days Of CCS, #11: Amelia B.C. Dutton (ABCD)

Amelia B.C. Dutton has the awesome pen name of ABCD, and this first-year student has already stacked up a few impressive-looking minis. Leading the way is Arcana Arena (Chapter Zero), the first part of what clearly seems to be her long-form project going forward. Done in what appears to be extremely dense digital color, it follows a character who has been invited to be on a "televised tournament of skill" wherein each participant represents one of the 22 major arcana. The protagonist is the Chariot, and she furtively leaves home under the cover of night on her motorbike Rhonda to travel cross-country in order to participate. This comic essentially sets up the basics: it's a competition of some kind, and the judges are the four Aces (Wands, Swords, Cups, and Pentacles). The Chariot is a little stressed about the competition, and the judges are stressed that one member of the Arcana is missing: the Fool, naturally. Dutton lays character exaggeration and expression on thick, and the project feels like it's heavily influenced by animation. Most of the time this looks interesting, but some of the figures have the stiffness of illustration instead of the fluidity of cartooning. I suspect this will change in future chapters where the contests actually begin. 

Error 404 is a short mini done solely in pencil. It dips once again into Tarot for the cover, and it follows a character whose computer stops working. Taking it to a strange shop for repair, she gets a very nasty surprise from the repairman. It's a shocking end to a 9-page story, as the poor protagonist never has a chance. Dutton's pencil work is expressive and dense, but her sketchy characters have a lot of life. The final mini here is bittercold, which is about a breed of insect called the "bittercold moth" that swarms on trees and carries pathogens that cause depression. This is a beautifully-cartooned comic that is a sort of compromise between the denseness of the first comic and the sketchiness of the second. It's also somewhere between a body horror comic and an emotionally resonant metaphor for mental illness, especially in cold, isolated places. Dutton packed a lot of punch into three short comics, and their ambitious visual storytelling got my attention in each comic.