45 Days Of CCS, #38: April Malig

April Malig is an avid zine-maker whose work varies from hyper-specific narrative comics, to journals revolving around drawing, food & travel; and abstract experiments with color and form. In I Am Trying To Enjoy My Life, Malig shows off one of the favorite things about her as an artist. She's completely unapologetic about every aspect of herself and her art, especially as it impacts her mental health. There's a sense of her having running out of fucks left to give a long time ago, and so she talks about and does things that make her happy: eat, draw, go outside from time to time, travel, and see friends. This zine captures her personality perfectly, and the little decorative details (the drawing on graph paper, the mix of hand lettering and type) only accentuate the pleasure of reading this. The abstract swooshes of color on every other page feel in tune with Malig's descriptions of what each individual day was like. 

The 2022 Sketchbook Drawings zine is another great example of Malig's abstract waves of color, this time gridded out on a monthly calendar on every page. This allows the reader to enjoy each image individually, experience them sequentially, and then perceive each page as a gestalt of bright colors. Malig adds commentary about why drawing every day can be joyful so long as you are in the moment of making marks or creating color. She also added a bunch of Washi tape images to add further detail and complexity to each page, making each its own unique viewing experience. 

The comic I was most interested in here was the third issue of Rotten Roses, Malig's sequential comic about a group of friends obsessed with a particular boys love manga & anime that Malig made up. This includes a dedication to not just the show, but to fanfic writers and artists equally obsessed with the show. Malig captures this subgenre of fans who are so inspired by original source material (and perhaps hyperfixated) that they want to put their own spin on it. There's a hilarious segment where one of the members of the friends group writes a fanfic manifesto that admonishes those who write fanfic that openly ignores what she considers to be canon aspects of characters. It makes sense, because while putting your personal favorites in space or doing a Digimon crossover might make sense, ignoring the fact that one of them hates sweets is going over the line. Malig's character design nicely balances lots of looping lines and a tasteful use of color. The guest artists providing examples of art for imaginary manga or anime shows is another nice touch, as Malig takes great pains to provide verisimilitude for something that does not exist. Malig concludes the issue as the friends start to drift apart; they find other fandoms, stories dry up for this fandom, or real life intrudes. It's a natural part of both friendships (especially those that start off in an extremely intense way) and fandoms, and Malig has captured something special in this series. Even if you have no idea what she's referring to at times, the fandom acts as a gimmick that reveals the enthusiasm and infectious need to discuss the thing they're fixated on with other people 

31 Days Of CCS, #23: Masha Zhdanova & April Malig

April Malig's zines are closer in spirit to classic perzines of the late 80s and 90s than typical diary minicomics, in part because she frequently eschews typical line art in favor of photos heightened with color changes. There's a wonderful, revealing chattiness to these zines, as Malig in the zine Leftovers says "I just made this for fun and to make something pretty (I feel like that shouldn't be such a weird thing to say?)" Indeed not--for Malig, there's no such thing as a guilty pleasure. Malig tends to favor bright and soft colors, taking photos and altering them to emphasize pinks, blues, and purples. A lot of Malig's zines and comics are about travel, especially in Asia, and she has a way of capturing the bustle of other places with both enthusiasm and respect. 

I Didn't Write Enough Postcards is Malig's travel zine about Singapore and Taiwan. It's text followed by a photo on its opposite page, and there's a wonderful breathlessness to Malig's narration. She's unconcerned with typical tourist interests; she's there to eat and buy manga and see friends, and other fun activities along the way (like seeing a Museum of Miniatures) are a byproduct of this point of view. There's an unspoken poignancy to all of this, as it was two months before COVID shut everything down. April's Food Zine #2 is great because it's so intensely local to her in Queens, and the reviews are so quirky, like a coffee shop that sells onigiri with a chatty, dad-like guy running it. You find that Malig doesn't care about "authenticity" in the least even as her palate is quite adventurous. Malig is after delicious food and doesn't care where it comes from, including a 7-11 with some surprising fare. 

Some Tender Nothing is a combo abstract drawing/photo zine that goes into full neon colors, mimicking the night markets and street lighting she sees. All I Do is Play Animal Crossing and Online Shop is a COVID journal that captures what that particular video game did for a lot of people: provide blissful distraction, pleasant interactions with friends, and a brief halt to thinking about grief and death. It's a mix of black & white cartooning and images taken from the game itself, which Malig deliberately blurs with reality. Finally, Rotten Roses 2 continues the story of four friends in a group chat who are obsessed with a particular boys love manga and its various adaptations into other media. There are two things of note here (beyond Malig's sharp character design): the celebration of fan fiction as a creative group exercise, and the ways in which a highly specific set of mutual and obscure interests can create lasting bonds. One tends to reveal oneself through the way one makes art, but fan obsessions can also expose intimate and personal details as well. All of this is somewhat impenetrable to a reader, but the specifics of the fandom are less important than the emotions it invokes. 

Like Malig, Masha Zhdanova's tastes are highly informed by manga, among many other sources. In her micro-mini A Comics Mixtape, Zhdanova offers an unfolding map of how and which comics influenced her over the years, starting with Vera Brosgol's Anya's Ghost, in part because it made her think she could draw her own comics. Zhdanova cleverly takes the reader's eye across the page, including "downstairs" as she continues to descend into her mind. She namechecks manga, webcomics, books, and frames from Soviet cartoons her father used to show her. 

Zhdanova emigrated to the US at age two, something she explores in A Grey Mountainous Curly Wall. This is about a song sung to her as a child and her subsequent feelings of alienation toward her old country. It's not just that she was socialized as an American; the fact that she's queer, Jewish, and progressive meant that she realized she'd never feel welcome. This comic represents an attempt to connect with the music of her childhood, music directly connected to resistance in its own way. 

Lilac, subtitled "A Horror Comic," plays on some of these themes. It's about a Russian girl whose mother forces her to devour 5-sided lilacs, because it will give you good luck on your exams. It's a horror story that's really about a mother denying her child an opportunity to be herself, as the girl (Lena) falls in love with another girl and they promise to go to school away from their small town. As her mother grows sicker and clingier, it's revealed that there's more than luck going on with Lena eating the lilacs. Zhdanova's line is simple, expressive, and harsh, even as she uses soft colors as a way to create emotional dissonance. Zhdanova has a lot of refinement and greater control of her line to work on, but she already possesses a special touch in writing stories about alienation. 

31 Days Of CCS #8: Cuyler Keating, April Malig, Lillie J. Harris

Lillie J. Harris is a first-year CCS student, and their comics to date reveal an interest in working with dense blacks and shadows in particular. Jawbreaker is a short comic that uses what appears to be the image of a roughly-drawn moon in a night sky, until it sinks and the sky and it's revealed that it's a jawbreaker--a kind of chewing gum. The person getting it is horrified when it comes out, it's warm, and it has a face. This is just a little horror warmup of a comic, but it establishes how Harris likes to use light/dark contrasts in order to establish mood. Gemini is another more explicitly horror comic about a boy with an identical twin named Elijah who wore a mask--and his brother was warned never to look at his face. In a manner similar to Nate Powell and Steve Bissette, Harris uses a dense, scribbly line that soaks up light on the page. The visuals heighten tension in such a way that just some hints at Elijah's true form are all that's necessary to reveal the final fate of the narrator.

Harris' Aesop's fable assignment is The Eagle And The Beetle, which they used to counterpoint against the story of the Kennedy family and its many tragedies. Just as the Eagle ignored the Beetle's efforts to protect a hare, so too did Joe Kennedy lobotomize and institutionalize his eldest daughter Rosemary, afraid that her behavior would hurt "his family's political career". Just as the Beetle got revenge by pushing out the Eagle's eggs from its nest, so too did the other Kennedy children suffer all sorts of tragedies. Harris keeps it simple and naturalistic here, relying more on grayscale than shadow. Finally, Maggie Doll is a beautifully-drawn comic with heavy atmosphere about a young woman finding her childhood doll in the attic. All of the memories, good and bad, come rushing back at her, but it's ultimately a positive experience as she reconnects with those memories and her love of the doll. Once again, Harris' use of pacing is sharp and tense, and their more naturalistic figure work is top-notch.

April Malig has mostly been making interesting Risograph zines with commentary on photographs for the last few years, and Near Constant Background Noise continues that trend. It's in many ways a summation of this period, as it directly addresses the frequently nihilistic quality of her musings. She asks the pertinent question if it's a distraction to search for happiness, or if there's a "possibility of a possibility" of hope. The bright, almost garish colors indeed provide both a distraction and an attraction on their own; they are pleasing in and of themselves. Malig's first comic in a few years, Rotten Roses, actually carries on this theme as it's about believing in close friendships. Mixing internet imagery with real-life interactions, Malig knowingly manipulates appearance and reality as part of a sense of personal performance. There's a group of friends living in a house who bond over a particular manga that spawned several adaptations, and their obsession was the lingua franca of their relationships. It was a way of highlighting and protecting the friendships from the ennui and despair of the outside world. Malig's character design is killer and the impact of her use of soft pastels gives the whole experience a gentle touch.

Cuyler Keating's The Attempt is a collection of short, experimental comics. "Jellyfish" goes all-out in presenting the reader with a dizzying array of images and visual approaches. On the first page, there are multiple colors in different panels and a lack of a traditional grid. The second page is a black-and-white splash page, with gray tones giving the pool in the water a double-exposure effect. The next two pages maintain that same shadowy tone, only the water in the pool has been replaced by jellyfish. It's a brief nightmare of a comic. An exquisitely-drawn silent story sees a skeleton in armor coming back from the Crusades, only the entire town consists of skeletons in regular clothes. The naturalism of the story is what brings that feel of death so close to the reader, a death that is only vaguely perceived. "Spaces" is a nice bit of comics-as-poetry, using the rhythm of a four-panel grid to define the physical and emotional spaces between her and her partner on a road trip. Keating's use of color is much sharper and more purposeful here than in her first story. "Full Formed" is about her wish to have been born fully-formed like in mythology, and once again Keating's deft touch brings famous images to life in an animated fashion. There's no stiffness in her line, as subtle soft tones accent her drawings without making them too fuzzy. The open-page layout is extremely clever, with the negative space working to push time forward on the last page in particular, as Keating comes to term with growth.

Thirty One Days Of CCS #6: April Malig, Josh Kramer, Dakota McFadzean

Last Mountain #5: To Know You're Alive, by Dakota McFadzean. This is an interesting departure for McFadzean, who rarely does autobio work. It's a fascinating addition to the burgeoning comics genre I'm calling True Parenting. Anyone who's a parent knows it's both terrible and wonderful, often at the same time. That's especially true of the toddler years, when kids develop agency but they've not yet reached the age of reason. This comic follows McFadzean, a stay-at-home dad, on a day with his toddler son. McFadzean describes his son as "intense" as a counter to his wife's more cute description of him as a "firecracker". ("Mama will come home RIGHT NOW!") The latter description is applicable when his son did things like get excited by green garbage trucks and the trolley on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. The former description applied when his son hit McFadzean in the back of the head as hard as he could with a block. It's an amazingly rendered scene, as visceral as anything McFadzean has ever drawn.

What's most interesting about this comic is McFadzean's understanding of what his son is going through on an intellectual level and actually going through it with him. His son was going through a particularly painful teething process, the result being "he just screams and screams". As a parent, you feel awful. As a human being, it is hard to deal with. How one copes with that fight-or-flight confrontation through tantrums is crucial, and McFadzean feels bad about screaming back at him. There's another scene where he is literally surrounded by his son's screaming word balloons, his own attempts at reason drowned out as he covers his ears, puts his son in front of a screen and crumples into a heap. At the same time, McFadzean reveals his near-instantaneous anxiety over bringing his son into horrible world and compensates by psychologically picking at that wound, seeking out upsetting images. It feels like a way of fighting the everyday anxiety of child-rearing (amplified by a lack of sleep) by distracting oneself from it with actually horrible thoughts and images. The comic coalesces into a bizarre episode (?) of Mr. Rogers on a dark set, with shadowy figures that frightened his son enough to call for his father's help. It was the unknown calling, anxieties swirling for both father and son, as they passed through it. Though Mama came home at last, his son wanted to see the monsters again.

My Dumb Feelings, by April Malig. Malig's comics are a mix of swirling, colorful images (brought to life thanks to a Risograph) and her own pointed, funny and self-deprecatory comments. Lines like "I have a lot of energy, uh, it's just all potential" get at Malig's general discomfort with life. That page has bright orange and pink backgrounds with images of flowers coalescing on the page. It's the ultimate in potential energy. As she talks about on the final page of the comic, there's just a general sense of weariness pervading the comic. She's tired of everything, including herself and her own feelings. She's unsure if she's sad or angry enough about the right things, in the right ways. She has no idea if making something beautiful means anything, and notes that "believing in dumb magic feels as good and valid as believing in anything" else on a gorgeous page filled with colorful talismans. Malig advances no viewpoint other than her own personal uncertainty, which is a statement in itself. Nowhere is there a statement of surrender or inaction; she'll keep right on feeling those dumb feelings and doing meaningless stuff, but she knows she'll never get the Answer to any of her questions. That might make her tired, but at least she's trying, in a comic that can only be described as day-glo existentialism.

The Cartoon Picayune #8, edited by Josh Kramer. Kramer chugged along and published eight issues worth of solid comics journalism, with each reporter out in the field reporting on a story. This is unfortunately the final issue (published in 2016), but it's typically quite good and focuses on a variety of stories. Some are low-key, some are whimsical, and some are a matter of life and death. It's like a comics version of Radiolab or some other unpredictable, informative podcast. This issue features an interview with a man named Tony Burns, who went from homeless (thanks in part to having AIDS) to being the recipient of a government housing program that restored his dignity and autonomy. It's allowed him to become and advocate and assist others in similar situations. Kramer mostly just lets Burns tell his story (the story got a little cramped with tiny lettering at times, and everything about it demanded a bigger page), and it's a testament to putting the lie to the notion that public assistance saps an individual's interest in doing things for themselves. To the contrary, the knowledge that one's basics are at least partly cared for allows an individual to be a contributing member of society. This story fed perfectly into the issue's theme of "Unnoticed". Homeless people are unnoticed and ignored, and it wouldn't take much to help so many people reclaim their sense of dignity.

Laura Brooke Kovac's "Forgotten" is about a scrap-metal dealer who stumbled upon a metal egg that turned out to be one of the lost Fabrege eggs of Russia. What followed was a fascinating history of the eggs, including a note on how much they cost to make for the Tsars and their families relative to the average person's yearly salary. Ellis Rosen's "The Number Stations" is about the cold-war tactic of transmitting codes via short-wave radio to a one-time pad with the corresponding code to relay information. The original messages are available for anyone to tune into, and they continue to be transmitted to this day. The story follows how the public picked up on them, wrote books about and generally pondered their usage. It's an interesting artifact of the Cold War that persists precisely because it's so hard to crack. Finally, Kramer's "Why Grown-Ups Are Playing D&D" is still timely today, as the game continues to explode in popularity. Drawing each person he interviewed as their character as a fun touch, but Kramer gets at the heart of why it's drawing people in. In a world where technology is isolating, the camaraderie and imagination of the game is appealing.

Thirty Days of CCS #24: April Malig

Malig hasn’t done much in the way of comics in recent years, but her collage/photography zines that she Risographs are beautiful and funny. There’s a sense in which these zines are acts of will against depression and entropy. For example, Yuri!!! On Ice Is The Only Thing Keeping My Sanity Together!!! ends with an apology that this was not a fan zine, but rather that in a time when things were and are awful in any number of ways, this anime proved to be “a talisman for tender things” like “stronger friendships, a sense of community” and “a break from the real world”. While not a fan of that show myself, I’ve been witness to the sheer joy and happiness I’ve seen from people who are into it. And that sense of finding a community, of making a connection, are absolutely crucial to one’s mental health, something that’s reinforced again and again in Malig’s work.

That theme is reflected slightly differently in TBH, I’d Rather Live In A Sailormoon Background, as the desire for escape is so great that she imagines literally pushing into a drawing or cartoon and living there for a little while. New Mexico 2016 Zine is about using paper to record beautiful, strange events and times that now seem far away. It’s a way of keeping them alive and real in a way that’s difficult to do with just memory or even a simple photograph; the act of making is a kind of jump-start for reliving those experiences. Again, the candy-colored shades and backgrounds and the simple and sometimes blurred images evince feelings more than specific ideas. Collage Zine 2017 is even more abstract and basic than these other minis in terms of concept but far more complex in terms of the colors, drawing and even hand-constructed nature of the thing. It begins with the text “Like, whatever, fuck it…Do what you want” and goes further down into that paradoxical hole of accepting meaninglessness and fighting it through creating things.

South Korea Scrapbook 2008-2011 is a fantastic mix of confessional autobio, comics, Lonely Planet reviews, photos, and drawings centering around Malig’s experiences moving to South Korea (from California) for three years and how it shaped her. It started as kind of a whim centered around a boy she had just met and turned into a slowly life-affirming experience where she had friends and connections all across town. She had places she knew and loved, food she sought out and enjoyed, and a life lived intentionally. That seemed to be the key to her experience, as the isolation in a foreign country can be so extreme that one is forced to find connections, communities and meaning on an everyday basis. Malig’s sense of humor and the multimedia lens with which she views the world convey this feeling to the reader in a warm, self-deprecatory but ultimately sincere fashion.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #1: April Malig

April Malig is one of the most distinctive stylists to graduate from the Center for Cartoon Studies, and I always look forward to what she's going to come up with when I'm preparing my annual feature on graduates of CCS.

I Didn't Have Instagram When I Lived In Seoul is a series of dizzyingly colorful photographs and a few comics made with a Risograph. What's fascinating about this zine is that the bright photographs and interesting composition of her photos (lots of framing around public structures) are an interesting match for her other comics, which tend to be heavy on saturated colors and poetic language. Shape and color are the most important elements of Malig's comics, as they convey the emotional content of what she's trying to express instead of using narrative and line. This zine is actually an exception in that regard, as the comics here are conventionally drawn and quotidian in their observations: it's as though the experience of living in Seoul was so strange in so many ways that she had to concretize her daily experiences as much as possible: drinking green tea lattes, bundling up to a ridiculous extent during winter, getting big stalks of celery at the supermarket and pretending it was a sword. Those are snapshot moments burned in memory and related as plainly as possible, as opposed to the near-abstraction of the actual snapshots she took of the city. The streets and buildings are recognizable as such, only Malig pushes certain color schemes in such a way as to make them look strange and unfamiliar, like walking through Times Square under the influence of psychedelics. In other words, things do look strange in an objective sense, but the nature of those things is warped by one's own perceptions. It's Malig's way of looking at the world.

Moon Banana carries that way of looking at the world further, as Malig has page after page of Riso-heavy work that's immersive in the best possible way. Malig has a knack for using the brightest of colors, like pinks and yellows, in the most fluid and least lurid manner possible. Instead, there's a beauty in images where she's breathing out colors and the text, integrated with the images, reads "All I want, really, is to breathe out/A tiny piece of me/And have it/Find its way to you". In another strip, this time in a nine-panel grid, she uses color patterns to depict speed and have it segue into its natural state on the page, which is stillness. It's a clever twisting of reader observation and expectation. On other pages, Malig abandons bright colors and instead focuses on light/dark contrasts shifting between positive and negative space, like in the way the leaves and branches of a forest flickered in and out. In another strip, Malig's use of text splayed across the page was the visual focus of the piece, with the sea foam photo underneath underscoring the poem she wrote about identity. Yet another piece is a mix of the bright Riso colors and the extensive use of negative/positive space, with two faceless figures separated by a wall.

Bad Feelings Zine #1 is similar to Moon Banana, only the poetic observations she makes are all on the darker side. Sometimes the observations are directed at the reader, sometimes they are directed to the artist as though from someone else, and sometimes they aren't aimed at anyone in particular, like the one series of overlapping, colored circles within a hand with the captions "Feelings fade,/And all that's left is that familiar relief." Another page is in black and white with a light green background, depicting a sea of hands with the caption "Some days just feel like ones you have to swim through". The sentiments and imagery veer from cynicism to fatalism to an almost bemused kind of hope. The feelings expressed her are certainly personal, but they're more on an existential level than anything else, as they talk about the limits of human perception, the frailty of human sanity and how getting out of the now is so risky because of what might await us. Malig's pitch-black sense of humor prevents these observations from becoming overly morbid or self-indulgent, and her keen design sense makes every page worth looking at.

So, I Fucked Up and I've Watched A Lot of Wong Kar Wai Movies are more recent photocomics from Malig. Malig's clearly hit on something with these photo zines. Once again, the highly saturated and exaggerated use of color for the photos turns them from something that's purely descriptive to something that occupies a kind of in-between space, a space between dream and reality. The first zine details a number of mistakes that start small and unassuming, like sprained fingers and a cataract stemming from embarrassing situations. Then came a far deeper confession, followed by this heartbreaking passage "Misplacing my affection in those that no had desire to hold, to keep, or even acknowledge it." The image is a distorted flower, which was remarkably apt given a flower's symbolic place in love and romance. The second mini is about the kind of relationship one might see in the titular director's movies: vividly depicted but doomed romances. Like the other mini, this one focuses on mistakes made but ultimately ends on a note of redemption, or at least self-affirmation and forgiveness. The photos have a way of externalizing the expression of Malig's emotions that words or even drawings alone could not capture: that sense of living in a larger-than-life, trippy world were things often seem more and less real at the same time.

Thirty Days of CCS, Day 9: Sean Knickerbocker and April Malig

Rust Belt #3, by Sean Knickerbocker. Knickerbocker's comics have always struck me as what happens when the teens from Chuck Forsman's comics grow up and have to deal with real life. The answer is: poorly. Drawing in a style similar to Forsman's emulation of cartoonists like Dik Browne, Rust Belt #3 details a man being confronted in a bar by a friend regarding his drinking. It quickly escalates into the police being called and his long-suffering caretaker sister once again being disappointed by her brother. The story ends with the man recalling his sister always sticking up for him and him always repaying her with selfish behavior. It's a story about patterns repeating, again and again, and the title of the series is indicative of that certain sense of hopelessness and being one of, as Hunter Thompson would say it, The Doomed. Knickerbocker's use of zip-a-tone gives the comic a bit more substance and structure on the page. The back-up story, originally printed in an anthology, is a sort of more extreme version of the idea of being doomed. A couple goes into their house, douse themselves in gasoline, and (with a pentagram revealed on the floor), set themselves on fire. Without a single word and using deep pencil shadings to get across a sense of melancholy, Knickerbocker takes us to the end for this particular couple, who clearly see themselves way past any other solution. While slightly less rooted in reality than the first story, it's simply a warped reflection of how quickly things can go south. Knickerbocker walks the tight rope of empathizing with his down-on-their-luck characters (they are not played up for sport) and excusing their actions.

Bananas 2, by April Malig. Malig's visual approach couldn't be more different from not only Knickerbocker's, but virtually every other CCS grad whose work I've read. Influenced in part by manga, Malig uses swirling lines, distinctive patterns and bright colors in bringing her poetic narratives to life. Her work is highly immersive, like in the opening strip, "Mission Statement", which depicts her breathing out "a tiny piece of me/and have it/find its way to you". That journey across the page and a landscape is beautiful, especially in the way that her use of color is non-naturalistic and frequently counter-intuitive. "Inelegant Structures" reimagines a lost relationship as a series of sound-like waves, a series of circuit boards turned into a maze, and ultimately a last barrier preventing intimacy. Her black and white journal comics perfectly illustrate particular frames of mind, providing the reader with new information rather than simply providing a picture to reiterate a particular set of words. Playing it straight,narratively-speaking, with her "Vampire Princess Cat" story is almost jarring compared to the rest of the comic. It's a cute, whimsical and quite meta story that mixes slice-of-life touches with manga send-ups, all with a narrator and lead character who comment on each other throughout the story. Malig's figure drawing is less interesting than her other types of drawing, and they look flat and awkward at times when interacting. It was interesting to see her flex a different kind of storytelling muscle, however.

Thirty Days of CCS #10: April Malig

April Malig is one of several recent CCS grads whose work uses fantasy and science fiction tropes as a means to get at deeper, more poetic ideas. Malig has a powerful sense of page design and a decorative sense that balances out a sometimes limited character rendering ability. Questions Of Space Travel is a good example of this. Nestled between two beautiful, eye-catching silk-screened covers, Malig narrates the story of a group of space travelers from earth, going about the story from the point of view of why someone would want to leave the earth on a semi-permanent basis. Malig wraps her characters in loops, ribbons, and psychedelic effects that work on both a literal and figurative basis. This comic is at its heart about loneliness (especially in a crowd) and the unsettled feeling of never feeling at home. Malig is careful not to let the comic's decorative aspects overwhelm the actual narrative and flow of character movements, though it's fair to say that the characters are in the constant embrace of those decorative aspects. In the short, cardstock-printed comic It's Funny To Think, Malig takes eight pages to contemplate the hidden nature of heat and its effects on what one sees. Once again, her design elegance and smart use of two-color printing works in concert with a short, poetic observation, creating a new idea where word and image are interdependent.

Then there's the first issue of her new adventure series Magical Bitches (truly, an irresistible title), in which different cities have different gangs of fairies and several of them are drawn to an abandoned hotel to fulfill some mysterious destiny. Character design and gesture are key to making a comic like this work, and Malig stepped up her game in creating a number of interesting, memorable characters. The fairy gangs feel like a cross between Tinkerbell, the Lalaloopsy characters and the Bad Girls Club, and Malig still finds ways to incorporate her weird decorative tendencies as an artist. She fills in gaps with zip-a-tone effects and finds other ways to add weight to character designs that are simple. One senses that this story could go on indefinitely.

Finally, Bananas: Short, Odd Stories, Full of Potassium, features striking shorts in different styles. "Porcelain" is touted as a "dream comic about feelings". This is a color piece that emphasizes just how strong her sense of design is as well as how delicate is her color palette. The color-driven special effects are the catalyst for the narrative, as they deliver key pieces of information to the reader. "Today I..." exaggerates her character design in a monstrous manner, as she uses a thick line weight for her character and then blows it up to fill an entire page with swirling, lines. It's almost like a David B page. Finally, "That's Not Sugar" is a gag strip that nonetheless still uses Malig's trademark swirly lines to emphasize the punchline. Malig is very much an artist who's still experimenting with how to incorporate her personal aesthetic vision into a more cohesive narrative while at the same time retaining her poetic tendencies. These recent comics show that she's certainly on the right track.

New Faces From CCS: Leake, Malig, Onorato, Steinberg, Dukes, Howard, Almendrala

This column gives me the pleasure of examining work by students from the Center for Cartoon Studies from the classes of 2012 and 2013, artists whose work is (mostly) entirely new to me.

All Rumors Are True, by Laurel Lynn Leake.Of all the comics mentioned here, Leake's features my favorite cover. The sneering, lipsticked figure whose hair obscures her eyes issues forth pink, pixelated pronouncements while the title looks like it was drawn in red lipstick.This comic follows Scratch, a "tiny little legend in the local drag scene" who is cast by a "metareligious hallucinogenic radical queerotica" video company Pansexual Pantheon. In a truly inspired idea, Leake posits this outfit as one that casts actors as gods and figures from a variety of religious pantheons from across history and has them fuck each other, all told through the details and history of those belief systems. Scratch is cast as the Shinto goddess Amaterasu and Leake tells the story of her experience through a series of behind-the-scenes clips, internet commentary interspersed as actual narrative, and bits and pieces of the film itself. She jams every panel with cartoony character interaction (her drawings of the zaftig actress who plays the goddess Uzume are especially eye-catching), whirling decorative flourishes, eye-grabbing text that has an almost visceral impact, or some combination thereof. This comic is successful because it's so highly stylized, a pure distillation of glamor, excess and sheer presence.

Stonewall #1, by Sasha Steinberg. This is a work of historical fiction about the famous Stonewall riots that sparked the LGBT movement in the US. Steinberg reminds us that at the start of the movement in particular, there was a strong emphasis on the "T" (trans) portion of the movement that got lost for a long time and has only within the last five to ten years become an accepted part of the overall rights movement (after considerable struggle). Steinberg draws this full-color comic in the style of golden age cartoonist Tarpe Mills, whose Miss Fury strip was very much a mix of drag disguise (for fighting crime) and fashion. It's a genius move to depict trans folk in that glamorous style, and I especially liked Steinberg's notion to create a fictional character (a 14-year-old trans person who called herself Miss Venus--especially clever given her resemblance to the golden age Bill Everett character called Venus) to go along with real figures like Sylvia Rivera. Venus is the sort of innocent new to a scene that allows veterans to play off of, a catalyst that causes the other characters to have something to react to. Steinberg skillfully creates an enormous amount of tension and drama considering that all of the action in this issue takes place in a cramped hotel room. The people in the room, he's careful to depict, were not saints or heroes. There were conflicts, jealousies and a frequent sense that many of them only associated with each other because they were all in the same boat.

The Stonewall riots were born out of frustration above all else, and Steinberg amps up that level of frustration and weariness in the form of people like Rivera, Ivan Valentin and Tammy Novak. Years of random and indiscriminate police raids and persecution made living and expressing themselves acts of boldness, even if being bold was less on their agenda than simply being. Venus represents the power of youth and hope that fuels every movement, the younger generation that has yet to be jaded and demands more. She's the focus of this first issue and so the figures here are representative of how Venus sees the world and the scene: glamorous, tinged with a hint of danger and excitement. Steinberg has really done his research here and transformed facts into a living, breathing story in a clever and innovative manner. Given that this is part one of ten, I'm eager to see how the series proceeds and what other visual representations he chooses to use.

Anything Is Anything, by April Malig. This is a bit of comics-as-poetry that takes the reader through Malig's sensation of falling as she tries to go to sleep and extends that metaphor through a number of experiences in her life, especially those that involve relationships. Malig has a strong sense of composition and design and works hard to make each page a poetic construct of is own and does a nice job of using blacks to create a dizzying sort of dream world. Her figurework is a bit stiff, which renders some of the key scenes lacking the kind of emotional power that I believe Malig intends. In particular, her use of gesture and the way her figures interact is stilted in a way that draws unwelcome attention from the reader's eye. I think this is simply a matter of experience, and that her figures will fit better with the rest of her graphics as she continues to draw, because otherwise it's obvious that she displays a great deal of nuance and emotional sensitivity as a creator. I especially liked her lines about communication, like "Words don't always hold, if they are even caught at all. It's hard not to feel like we're all just thumping glass upon glass". The image here are two people in bubble space helmets, frowning as they try to communicate. If anything, I'd like to see Malig go a bit more abstract on the page, breaking down figures more as shapes and seeing how that works with her strong decorative and design sense.

Chimps In Space #1-3, by Donna Almendrala. These three comics are Almendrala's way of exploring genre stories using the titular chimp characters, mixing extreme silliness with a genuine affection for each genre. The first issue is an outer space story where we eventually learn that the captain of the ship (who is narrating the story) is a complete idiot. It actually is less of a space adventure than a locked-door murder mystery whose resolution is also quite silly, especially when the captain tries to tack on a Star Trek-style moralistic message at the end. The second issue follows two of the crewmembers on a planet where they engage in Western-style hijinx; the beginning of the story is taken from an anthology story Almendrala did a while back. This issue was the most forgettable of the three, as it was really all over the place narratively and in terms of tone. I liked the third issue best, which featured the adventures of a dead crewman in the afterlife who is recruited to join Hermes, Ulysses, Hercules and Achilles to go on an adventure. He is reluctant to join this motley crew, which is why generates both narrative friction and humor. Almendrala really seems in her comfort zone with this comic, easily navigating fine details regarding mythology while reworking them for comedic purposes. There's an easily-detected Ernie Bushmiller influence in her figure drawing and use of spotting blacks, making each page a pleasure to read and giving each image a certain comedic charge. Even before she sets up a single gag, I found myself being amused by the figures themselves. I'd love to see her take on more mythological stories in a comedic tone because of the fluidity of that third issue.

Rockall #1, by Amelia Onorato. This is the first issue of what is shaping up to be a fantasy/romance story set in an island off of Ireland. We meet Tommy Kagan, a young man who has purchased property on the island is rowed out there at the beginning of the story. He quickly discovers two things: like all small communities, the island is a place where your business is everyone's business; and there are two inhabitants in the house he has bought. One is a woman accused of being a "selkie", a seal who takes human form who can be captured by a human who happens to see her dance. She can only be freed if she finds her skin after her human master has stolen it. Onorato wisely plays coy as to whether the woman is actually a selkie, though she is indeed searching for something and is trapped on the island after her husband mysteriously died in a fishing accident. That's an event the islanders blamed on her ("calling up the sea"), sparking mutual distrust and loathing. This is obviously a groundwork-laying issue, but it's one that's well-structured and built in part on a patois that is at once distinctive but not confusing. One gets a real sense of time and place very quickly in this comic. Onorato's line is simple, cartoony and expressive. The comic did cry out for color, however; a light green wash or even some kind of blue-green duotone would have looked much better than the grey wash used on a number of pages. I'm quite curious to see how the story proceeds.

"All Coons Look Alike To Me": The Life of Ernest Hogan, Father of Ragtime, by Luke Howard. In dealing with racism and the realpolitik of exploiting one's race for profit at a price, Howard manages to use a lot of highly emotionally charged images with a thorough degree of sensitivity and context in telling the story of musician Ernest Hogan. This book is told in black and red (two colors that wind up having considerable significance in the story) with single-page panels meant to emulate silent movies, complete with full pages devoted to dialogue or narration. Howard depicts Hogan's tale as one of a devil's bargain in an era where choices were few. There's a sense of joy and triumph early in the story as Hogan first hears and then later develops the musical form that would come to be known as Ragtime: melodic, upbeat, exciting music dependent upon the piano as its driving force. When he finds he can't sell his music to anyone (and white people in particular, because they're the ones with the money), he happens upon a minstrel show and decides to combine ragtime with minstrel show imagery, all in an effort to amuse white audiences.

He writes the title song, which is an immediate smash hit that trades in on white stereotypes about African-Americans, and immediately becomes rich and famous. Of course, this doesn't earn him actual respect from caucasians, who take it upon themselves to repeat and laugh at the racist imagery he celebrates while they're hanging out with him. More to the point, when fellow black folk stare at him with a mixture of disdain and deep disappointment, it causes him to create something more uplifting, "something the next generation can look up to". But it's too late, as he's locked into being a minstrel show man for life. There's a powerful scene where Hogan has trouble getting off the blackface and red lip makeup he uses for shows and has a nightmare that white men wearing minstrel masks chop off his own face and replace it permanently with a grinning mask. The last chapter shows him dying of tuberculosis (the red blood on the white handkerchief showing it all), finding a black man playing piano in a bar and being invited to play with him. Howard sides with Hogan in this question: if someone makes a devil's bargain, do you blame the person for being naive or the devil for being evil? In this case, Hogan got what he wanted--fame, success, money and simply a chance to play a new kind of music. The price he paid was severe, but he could never go back after establishing himself, even though he desperately wanted to. The stereotyped, grinning black imagery that Howard employs here is even more powerful than the hateful words--and Howard doesn't hold back from depicting it exactly as it was, from showing just how white folks saw black folks. It reminds me a of a quote from Kyle Baker's Why I Hate Saturn: "Black music is in, black culture is in, but black people will never be in." It's a phenomenon that while not as nakedly racist as it was in Hogan's day, continues to persist in the overall culture (cf Robert Townsend's film Hollywood Shuffle). Howard is successful in evoking the aesthetics of the day without for a moment indulging in nostalgia in a book that is provocative, intelligent and striking to look at..

Comics Cardigan, by Rachel Dukes. Dukes is no newcomer to comics, after having edited and published a few music-related anthologies (Side A and Side B) as well as operating a small-scale comics distro. Going to CCS, I'm guessing, is a way to settle down and work on her own chops. Her Comics Cardigan package certainly displays her skill as an editor and publisher in terms of packaging and all-around attractiveness as an art object. A cardboard sweater snugly holds all sorts of little treasures. Let's unpack them one by one:

* "Hello Sweetie", a promotional notebook for her new mixtapecomics.com website. There's an attractive, single-tone screenprinted cover.

* A priority mail sticker-stamp with the Mixtape Comics symbol screenprinted on it, with the motto "No worries. just keep drawing."

* An 8 page mini called Adventure Story. Done in the style of Ed Emberley (he of the simple, geometric how-to-draw books), this is a cute story about a cat that goes overseas to try to rescue its beloved teapot, only to find a surprise.

* Frankie's Busy Day, a 32 page full-color mini aimed at kids, about a confused cat unsure of why all her toys were being taken away by her people, until she is taken to a new apartment. The very simple line (drawn on a computer, perhaps?) is nonetheless expressive, and the use of color makes the characters pop off the page.

* A 20-page mini consisting of one-page autobio strips, process pages, and an excerpt from a longer ongoing series that seems to be an intense family/high school drama.

It's easy to tell that Dukes has a strong work ethic and is constantly compelled to not only create nice-looking comics and zines, but to get them out to the public. What is not clear to me is what sort of cartoonist she is at this point. None of this is related to her first-year thesis project, for example, and I get the sense that her "real" work tends to be in the naturalistic style she displays in "Primary", her ongoing series.Reading the Comics Cardigan package certainly made me want to find out more about her cartooning, but I only wish there was something here that I could have really sank my teeth into. That aside, her children's book was really well-done and contained a number of moments of sly humor.