45 Days Of CCS, #40: Hole

It's a tremendous advantage to be a CCS student (or local alum) and have access to their print lab. That allows one the chance to do, for example, an anthology with multiple cut-outs. That's the case with Hole, a ridiculously elaborate anthology that reminds me of the early days of CCS. It's a bit like the old Four Square anthology that would have four artists and a theme or something you'd find on the I Know Joe Kimpel web storefront. 

This anthology features five artists and begins with a series of pages, each with a hole cut in the center concentrically. Holes cut somewhere on the page feature prominently as a formal device in each story, but all for different reasons. In Ben Adkins' "Down In The Hole," the protagonist gets away from the world by digging a hole and living in it. Wondering if he made the right decision, he looks up to the sky from his hole, and sees blue sky in a story that was otherwise black & white. It's a dramatic way for the character to make a major change in how he wants to live his life by rejecting isolation.

Ruby Arnone's "Alligator Pit" is about a delivery person whose job is to throw meat down to gators in a pit in what seems to be a zoo. They then dream about that same pit, but this time the hole expands to see the gators devouring not meat, but people--presumably, the zoo keepers. It's a punchy story that's effective because of the expressive use of colored pencils.

Kate Fairchild's "The Ever-Hole" uses cut-outs more consistently than any other story, and it's all in service to an actual "metaphysical hole" called the Ever-Hole that one character is trying to fill. It's another story about isolation, this time concluding with a hug that represents a lateral solution to filling the hole. Nothing could fill the hole, at least not alone, so the solution was to stop trying and connect. Fairchild's linework is simple but effective, working well with the big formal decision of cutting so much out of each page with the hole.

The most visually ambitious story was Melody Calderon's "Pory." It is quite literally about bubbles: living in a bubble, the bubbles that proliferate on our phones that demand our attention, the bubbles that fog our brains when we're drunk. Calderon takes what is a fairly simple idea and makes it sing with her extensive use of color and the multiple circular cut-outs on so many of the pages. The final story, "Fullness," is an "adapted Sanskrit verse from the Ishavasya Upanishad." Compared to the other stories, this is a very simply designed story that is no less successful for its simplicity, as it gets across its concept of fullness--a concept that cannot be reduced or diminished. The artist, Keena, uses black and white shapes that transform with a single cutout. The anthology as a whole is successful because there's enough variety in terms of formal approaches and storytelling to prevent the kind of stale repetition that sometimes happens in these kinds of anthologies. 

45 Days Of CCS, #29: Michael Albrecht, Ben Adkins

Ben Adkins is a first-year student, and he contributed his two iterations of some time-tested CCS assignments: adapting one of Aesop's fables and doing a comic in the style of Ed Emberley. You can sometimes tell a lot about a cartoonist's future looking at these assignments. In Adkins' case, it's clear that he's a humorist. In The Playful Ass, Adkins introduces the fable with his own characters as narrators, and you know that he had to open with an ass joke of some kind. He has one of his characters condemn the joke as soon as the other introduces it, and this bit of metahumor is effective. Adkins' line is clear and simple, almost deceptively so. He spots blacks very effectively, giving his pages depth and solidity even as his characters are fluid and expressive. In The Tedious Odyssey Of Boring Bob, Adkins uses the Emberley style (all drawings are done with basic squares, triangles, and circles) for another metafictional bit of fun. The story itself is about a boring guy who doesn't look as cool as the other characters (kings with crowns, divers with helmets, etc) he meets. When his boring qualities prove useful, he's made king, which leads him to accidentally trigger a device that reveals that all of the blocky figures are just different versions of himself. It's a fine gag that once again drills into the assignment on a conceptual level. I'm very interested in seeing what Adkins does in his own style.

Michael Albrecht has quickly shown a great deal of promise early in his career, and his most recent minis continue that trend. Rogue is a very funny and surprisingly poignant story about a rogue supercomputer and the security guard who watches it. Nicknamed "Carrot," the guard (unbeknownst to anyone else) secretly boots up the computer to keep her company. Shut down after it murdered its keepers in a bid for world domination, it now sits as a museum piece. The guard, Park, is a hilarious character, as she unreservedly treats Carrot as her friend, including the two roasting each other. There are fascinating twists and turns along with an ambiguous ending that feels like a test of humanity for Carrot. Albrecht's line is wonderfully sketchy, emphasizing gesture for the human character and making the computer feel human. 

Albrecht loves robots, it seems, and Robot Poetry Club goes in a different direction. A computer science student accidentally gives a desktop computer sentience while trying to write a program that counted all the r's in Romeo & Juliet. The computer is very insistent on its own freedom ("Hero's journey and all") and sets out on a rolling cart to seek its destiny. The computer takes the name Jill and a job in an office where they try to figure out the purpose of all of this. They flee, searching for meaning, and come across a "Robot Poetry Club" and a poem read that plunges them into the world of metaphor they had been so desperately seeking. Despite the overall silliness of the comic and its satirical tone, the consistency of the premise leads to a genuinely affecting moment regarding why we make and seek out art. Albrecht's art gets the hell out of the way of the story, enhancing the premise in subtle ways in panel after panel. The inky expressiveness of the final pages, as Jill is finally experiencing real meaning in their life, stands in stark contrast to the functional thin line featured in the rest of the comic.