Thirty Days of CCS #26: Awesome Sound, Can't Lose, Stranger Knights 4

Awesome Sound is an anthology published by Sean Knickerbocker. The low-fi cover belies the beautiful contents within, which look like they were printed on a risograph. DW's endpapers, which forcefully push both text and image to the point of violent distortion, are fitting for a comic that's so visceral and unsettling. Dan Rinylo's "Beast" is told with an Ernie Bushmiller-style simplicity, as the young boy's face here is two big black dots for eyes, a black line for a nose and a mouth that goes from black line to black oval, depending on his emotions. Using a nine-panel grid after an initial splash page that establishes the boy at the edge of a forest, each page is interesting because the central panel is almost always a scene of stillness: we see the boy looking, see him smiling, see him in the middle of walking and then see him running from right to left when wild dogs start chasing him. That sets the story from amusing to frenetic, but the final middle panel is an image of an empty street--right before a wild dog who is chasing the boy is run over by a car. It's both dark and comedic, given the x over the dog's eye and the generally cartoony nature of the story, but the bright red blood on a page that's mostly black and white adds a level of terror to the proceedings.

Knickerbocker's "Do You Still Feel Alone?" begins with a brother and sister in the woods, on the run from something unseen. The way he throws the reader right into a chase scene propels the story right along, heightening its tension from the very beginning. That tension is ramped up when they are assaulted by a nude man, who is stabbed to death by the sister. Knickerbocker pulls back further, revealing that this is an island where a plane has crashed, its inhabitants reduced to life-and-death struggle. It's a brutal, unforgiving little tableau that has no pat ending, and the fact that it's drawn in that cartoony style reminiscent of Chuck Forsman and Sammy Harkham makes it all the more unsettling. Indeed, the later story where a young couple sets themselves on fire in a house (revealing a pentagram on the floor) is a sort of cousin to the sort of thing Forsman did in The End Of The Fucking World. Finally, Juan Fernadez's red ink two-pager is a perfect fit, as his scribbled-out faces go through a progression of consumption. This mini is short but every image packs a punch.

Can't Lose is an old-fashioned fanzine dedicated to the TV show Friday Night Lights. It's everything a fanzine should be: in-jokey, craft-conscious, and gently mocking in a reverent manner. "Coached" by superfan Melissa Mendes, this zine has an interesting sprinkling of well-known cartoonists. Popular topics include the Christian speed-metal band that the character Landry starts ("Crucifictorious"), the comically awful Billy, younger brother of lead character Tim (Henry Eudy does a fine job of pointing out just how weaselly he is while Nomi Kane posits a magical night the two share in the desert), and how doubters often come around to becoming obsessed with the show. Jon Shaw's "Friday Nightlife" speaks to this, as a character who mocks a couple mourning the last episode starts to watch it and eventually enters his own weird world of living out other, self-imagined seasons. Sam Spina actually made me laugh out loud in a strip where he and his wife are asked why South Carolinians are buying Texas beer, and they reply in unison "Texas forever". My favorite strips were Dan Zettwoch's hilarious story about Dillon getting routed because Saracen used photocopies from the playbook to hang up Crucifictorious flyers (lovingly designed and drawn by Zettwoch, of course) and Jeff Lok's tale of escalating terrible behavior being excused "They're good kids". Can't Lose even has a cut-out Tim Riggins paper doll. While bits of it might me mystifying to those in the dark, the premise is laid out clearly enough for the jokes to land.

Stranger Knights 4 was published, as always by Bill Volk. This light-hearted fantasy/sci-fi/superhero anthology has always been on the uneven and amateurish side. This issue is the first to look good from cover-to-cover, and each story is funny to boot. Volk's "Brega and Snurrd" sees him use a cleaned-up, simplified version of his line that emphasizes character expressiveness above all else. The story follows familiar Dungeons & Dragons/fantasy tropes, but it's really about the relationship between a mother and her teenaged daughter. Of course, the mother here is a bearded dwarf and her daughter is trying to pass as human at her wizarding school. When the mother demands the presence of her daughter for an adventure (ie, bonding session), tension arises in an amusing manner. This is a crisply-paced story that actually gets across real feelings in its fantasy context. I'd love to see more from these characters and their world. The Volk-written "Thousand Year Grudge" (drawn by Bryan Stone) is a denser, grittier story involving anthropomorphic animals, thievery, romances gone bad and multiple double-crosses. The thickness of Stone's line is coupled with cross-hatching, lots of spotted blacks and other noir visual effects to counter the funny animals and the wonderfully ludicrous character of Maggie, the young bird who decides to be a thief. Ann Lewis' "Headless" is a bit on the cruder side in terms of rendering, but her use of humorous body language in telling a story about an empty but animated suit of armor sells it effectively. Finally, the Volk-Mary Soper continuing collaboration "Incantrix X" continues to be a reliably amusing story with idiosyncratic character design and odd design choices.

CCS Anthologies: Wings For Wheels, Stranger Knights, Irene

Stranger Knights #3, edited by Bill Volk.The latest volume in Volk's quirky, genre-oriented and comic pamphlet-formatted anthology is tighter in focus and all the better for it. Volk's own stories revolve around an institutionalized team of super-heroes called the Stranger Knights, who have their own hierarchies and politics to contend with along with threats. In "The Capsule's Promise", Volk turns around the time-worn theme that an alien crash-landing on earth might be friendly by having one of the Knights try to engage it peacefully, only to discover that when it shouts out "Kill Everything!", it means it. "It Grows Among Us" features the dense but simplistic art of Casey Bohn with Volk's story. This is an on-the-road story featuring the Search and Detrucktive going after a food-stealing thief, only to find things aren't what they seem. Bohn's heavy use of blacks and chunky line remind me a bit of the work of John G. Miller, the Scottish cartoonist. Mary Soper's linework in "Incantrix X" is crude and derivative of mainstream manga, but it also has a certain charm and energy, along with an energetic sense of humor. The most polished piece in the book is Bryan Stone's "The Orb of Shalla", a sort of cross between fantasy, sci-fi and high adventure. As a cat woman and a robot hunt for a priceless artifact in the jungle, they are pursued by a creature who actually wants the horned piglet they've picked up as a pet. Stone caps the story with a funny punchline and keeps the reader interested with clever and clear character design. Stranger Knights is lightweight work to be sure, but Volk is slowly but surely figuring out just what he wants this book to look like and feel like. There's certainly a place for smart and funny genre fiction, but it will take time to sand off some of the rougher edges of the anthology. Volk is already adding clever elements like fake ads and a more thoughtfully considered sense of design to the proceedings, as he and his collaborators are clearly dedicated to getting better in public.

Wings For Wheels, edited by Nomi Kane. This is another lightweight but enjoyable anthology with excellent production values. It's a tribute to Bruce Springsteen and his music, and the cardboard cover plus the comic with painted grooves designed to mimic a 45 are both quite clever. Todd McArthur's "A Clarence Clemons Christmas Carol" was the most inessential story in the book in part because of its nonsensical premise (a ghostly Clarence Clemons, the former sax player for the E Street Band, telling the author to spend money in the form of the Dickens story?). Much better was Josh PM Frees' "The Boss Don't Stop", which is about the experience of being carried away by music in the form of a lunatic at a karaoke bar belting out "Born To Run" despite crashing through a table and losing volume on his microphone. Jen Vaughn's "This Town" tries to connect up a younger girl's taste in music with her mother's in the form of Springsteen in a fairly obvious way. Editor Kane's take on the same idea, "Home Is Where The Boss Is", is a better attempt at getting at the idea of a cross-generational appreciation for Springsteen's form of grassroots-inspired Americana and the ways it extends and deepens into adulthood. Pat Barrett's "Growin' Up" takes on this concept from a different angle, trying to justify his own hard-youth bona fides despite growing up in Connecticut by comparing his upbringing to Springsteen's in New Jersey by trying to lump them all together as the tri-state area. This leads to dueling fantasy Springsteens that his friends bring to life, hilariously personifying the ways in which we attach ourselves to our musical heroes. Finally, Jen May's interstitial drawings were a nice touch, especially the final one which details her history with an iconic (and to her troubling) t-shirt image.

Irene, edited by Dakota McFadzean, DW and Andy Warner. This was a strong anthology mostly from recent grads and current students of CCS. That's an interesting editorial board in that each of the artists has radically different approaches to the comics page. McFadzean uses a cartoony style, DW is a mark-maker in the Fort Thunder tradition, and Warner uses a naturalistic approach. McFadzean's "Skeletons" continues his interest in the intersection between small-town life's stresses and the supernatural, especially with regard to children. This story of a friendship fraying because one family is moving away perfectly captures the ways in which kids interact (especially young boys) while creating an unnerving supernatural subtext. Warner's "Come Into My Heart" is the story of an acid trip shared by two teens, culminating in a confession disclosing abuse by the troubled boy. Warner's page and panel design break up the story nicely, but the story gains its real power by his wordless, tight close-ups on the characters at the end. While there's a crisp precision present in his character design, they're also organic enough to allow the story to flow.

DW's collaboration with cute-figure-drawing Rachel Dukes is demented, hilarious and gripping all at once. It's a spy/assassination story drawn in the style of cute, Pokemon-style critters. Levels of denial and disavowal figure into this story of a Daymaker teaming up with a vicious Kid to take down Death Dude, with the price being some baked goods. DW plays it totally straight, building up an intriguing mythology from the ground up while Duke's loose, simple style is perfectly suited for such a story. Jonathan Fine's "Endswell" and Nate Wootters' "Blueberry" bookend the anthology in more ways than one: it's the gritty reality of the boxing ring versus the horrific fantasy of a father forcing a creature on his son, as well as warmth and trust in the face of adversity vs. abject betrayal. Fine's line is clean and naturalistic, while Wootters employs a more cartoony but densely-hatched approach. They're fit nicely into the anthology's overall themes surrounding family, betrayal, and secrets. I hope to see future volumes.

The Comics Journalism of Josh Kramer

Cartoon Picayune #2 by Josh Kramer. Kramer, like Dan Archer before him, had journalism on his mind when he went to the Center for Cartoon Studies. Unlike Archer, whose comics have a political bent, Kramer seems to prefer human interest stories. The second issue of his journalistic anthology series finds him including other correspondents, but all of them are subject to his rigid rules regarding sourcing and quotes. Even if the stories are drawn as a narrative with dialogue, Kramer makes a point of making the reader understand that his stories are "rigorously reported". The Cartoon Picayune reminds me most of Brendan Burford's Syncopated anthology, which features similar first and second person reporting styles. Unsurprisingly, Kramer's reach is a local one, with stories about a local high school ski jumping team, a gubernatorial primary, a day camp for rock, and the evolution of a local brewing company.

"Fly By Night" is hampered by being the second part of a story about that ski jumping team. The angles he was approaching did become quickly evident, however, like the young rookie girl and the team's star who was trying to beat the best jumper in the state. When Kramer is drawing diagrams or depicts motion, his art is certainly up to the task of getting across his ideas. His major flaw as an artist is depicting different faces. In this story that features so many different characters, this is a significant problem. I think Kramer is cognizant enough of this problem to get around it by emphasizing emotion through using lettering and body language. Kramer is admirable in that he doesn't try goosing the results of his story to make it more dramatic, which is especially unusual for a sports-related story. Instead, Kramer is more interested in the mechanics of the sport, how the kids got into it, and the minutiae of how a ski jump meet is conducted. In terms of the action, Kramer is best at drawing sharp angles, which made him perfect for depicting the actual jumps.


"School's In For Summer" sees Kramer change some of his approach a bit, giving his characters tiny white circles for eyes. There are still some awkward drawings of characters in some panels, but there's generally a better balance between character and background. The story itself is a quick but thorough examination of a "school of rock" summer program, going through the program's goals and interviewing some of the kids. Kramer also did a separate mini called One Place, One Cheese, which details the process two local cheesemakers go through in creating their product, as well as providing other details about their lives. In each of his stories, Kramer has a way of letting his subjects speak for themselves without adding his own editorializing as to why they're interesting or significant. The simple choice he makes to write about them indicates that he thinks they're worth of reportage.

Bill Volk's story about the history of Iron City Beer in Pittsburgh, "'arn", suffers a little from letting the new CEO talk at length without really challenging any of his premises. Volk's cartooning is quite lively, however, and the slightly grotesque touch he added to his character designs was an interesting choice. The folksy reporting style of James Sturm and the delicate character drawings of Katherine Roy were a perfect match in the depiction of a day in the life of a candidate for the governorship of Vermont, "Honk and Wave". Given that this was a story consisting entirely of talking heads, it was to Roy's credit that she made it so interesting to look at. Kramer certainly did a nice job as an editor, balancing three different kinds of stories in the sort of anthology that's quite rare. Kramer's rock-solid standards as a journalist and his editorial eye are a great foundation for his work; it will simply take time and experience as a cartoonist to bring that aspect of his work up to the rest of his standards.

CCS: The Eddie Campbell Experience

This is a companion piece to my article "Cartoonists Leading Cartoonists", which will appear in the epic issue #301 of The Comics Journal. I interviewed nearly three dozen students, alumni, mentors and faculty from the Center For Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT regarding how the mentoring process works for second-year students. These students spend the year working on their thesis, turning to their advisors for guidance, suggestions, and critique. The nature of that relationship differed from student to student and advisor to advisor. I didn't have room to include every interesting response in my article, so I will be publishing some bonus material here at High-Low to supplement that article. This Q&A will focus on one advisor whom everyone spoke of in glowing terms: Eddie Campbell.

Eddie Campbell

TCJ: Why did you choose Eddie Campbell as your advisor?

Al B Wesolowsky: I’ve long admired his autobiographical work, its introspective nature, his delineation of characters, and his sense of inviting one to experience his life.

Bill Volk: I chose Eddie because he was a thesis advisor for previous classes, and they all had nothing but praise for him. More specifically, I chose him from among the previous positively-reviewed advisors because I wanted someone who was thoughtful and literate.


TCJ: Before you started working with your advisor, what was your understanding of what the thesis process would be like?

ABW: From earlier academic work in the liberal arts, I understood that the thesis was to be a demonstration of one’s ability to produce work that showed one’s assimilation of the curriculum, earlier assignments, to work on an individual project, to plan and budget one’s time and resources, and to end up with a finished comic that one had written, designed, drew, lettered, did digital prepress, printed, and bound. The thesis is not intended to be a masterwork, but simply the best work of which one is capable at this stage of one’s career.

The first year at CCS we produced a lot of shorter comics; the thesis was to be a longer work, although minimum page-counts were not specified. The sense among students that the thesis was expected to be at least 40 to 60 pages long.


TCJ: What was the process of working with Campbell like? How hands-on was he?

ABW: For being in Australia, and me in New England, Eddie was uncannily quick with responses via e-mail. I sent him my earlier work from CCS and he provided quick, helpful observations. As I progressed into writing, thumbnailing, and drawing the thesis, I would ship segments to him and he would respond. In my case, he did not need to be hands-on (I was 62 years old at the time and knew how to plan my work); but had I requested a more hands-on approach, I think that he would have obliged.

Bill Volk

TCJ: How much of an influence do you feel they have had on you as an artist, and in what ways?

ABW: A profound influence, ranking with Alison Bechdel and Joe Sacco among current comickers. As we corresponded, I became aware of Eddie’s lively wit and easy communication skills. Also his intellectual curiosity.

BV: Since I started working with him, I've been more conscious of spatial cues in my art. According to his suggestions, I've been moving my "camera" less to provide more of a frame of reference for subtle character actions. Though he hasn't mentioned it, there's a good rule attributed to him that says that you should show feet somewhere in every page. I've also been making pages with more panels in them.

Art copyright Bill Volk

TCJ: What was the most valuable thing you learned from your advisor?

ABW: To look at what I was doing. Really look at it. And to work at word balloons, their shape and size, with regard to the amount of text within them, and to try to integrate the balloons as part of the page design. I think I improved a bit with balloons, but have a long way to go.


TCJ: What was the most frustrating aspect of working with Campbell?

ABW: That I couldn’t just sit down with him and say “look at these thumbnails/roughs/etc. and tell me what you think.” Distance precluded such, and I’d have to scan work to send to him, a time-consuming process. I would have enjoyed more spontaneity had I been able to meet with him in person.

BV: Sometimes the long distance between us caused a little frustration. I also felt extremely self-conscious about staying on schedule, which often made me avoid contact with him until I'd caught up. That was a mistake.


TCJ: Was the experience all that you had hoped it would be?

ABW: I really had no idea of what working with Eddie would be like, but I was eminently satisfied and was happy when I could send him a printed copy of the thesis via the posts. I learned a lot from him (although it does not show yet) and the experience was most worthwhile. We continue to stay in touch, so he must not be too disgusted with me.


TCJ: What advice would you give to future CCS cartoonists on how to navigate the experience?

ABW: Choose an advisor who does work that you like, to which you respond, who tackles some of the same issues and stories that you want to do, and be prepared for some candid remarks. Judge the rate of communication by the timing and nature of the responses from the advisor, so you don’t overwhelm them or appear to be grudging with output. If they suggest something that you don’t think will help, try it---if it doesn’t help, tell the advisor.

And if the relationship isn’t working out, tell CCS and see if you can be assigned someone else. Advisors and students are not all created equal, and you cannot tell how things will work out. Don’t go running to CCS with minor quibbles, though, just for when the relationship is not working.

Suffice it to say that Eddie was the ideal of an advisor.

My impression is that most students had positive experiences with their advisors. There were a few occasions where, for one reason or another, the match proved not helpful, but CCS was quick to work out arrangements with another advisor for those students.

BV: Your thesis advisor is not a ghostwriter, nor is he a supernatural saviour. He is just another pair of eyes, to help you point out things you may not notice when your nose is buried deep in the work. The work is still all up to you.

New Post: Minis from Laura Terry, Ross Wood Studlar, Bill Volk & Sean Ford

Here are some recent minicomics by alumni from the Center for Cartoon Studies.

Stranger Knights, by Bill Volk, Mary Soper & Casey Bohn. This is a slight but amusing anthology edited by Volk, an artist who seems drawn to a grungy and unglamorous version of folklore and myth-making. All three feature smart-ass and off-kilter superhero stories. Volk uses a clear and clean line in depicting the adventures of Shamash, the Mesopotamian god of justice. Midway through, the story takes a left turn as he must go home to ask a favor of his grandfather, Enlil, who insists that he try some potato chips. Despite the story's whimsical trappings, it has the tight plot of a Silver Age Marvel story, right down to the interpersonal squabbling of Shamash's superhero teammates in the "Stranger Knights". That light touch, combined with just a touch of angst, continues in the Volk-written, Soper-drawn story of Incantrix X. This is a sci-fi superhero story about a character who uses her mind-clouding abilities to defeat alien dinosaur men but is given a prophecy about turning evil in the future. Soper's line is expressive and exceedingly fine, which gives the whole story a breezy feel. Bohn's work is similarly quirky, as he depicts the adventures of a superhero who uses an electric guitar to fight evil. His art is crude, not unlike a Golden Age cartoonist who had a week to crank out a nine page story, but it has a primitive energy and stays remarkably clear. I wouldn't say that Stranger Knights is a remarkable comic, given the scores of fusion-light superhero comics that have emerged from the alt-comics scene in recent years. I will say that it's one of the more enjoyable comics of its kind that I've encountered, especially in the way that it kept its mood light while being entirely aware of the sort of story it was telling. This looks like it will be the first issue in a series, and I'd like to see what Volk can do in future issues.



Only Skin #7, by Sean Ford. This is the final issue of this storyline, one that will be collected by Secret Acres in 2012. That publisher has released minicomics collections from several CCS cartoonists, including Sam Gaskin, Joseph Lambert and (tangentially) Ken Dahl. Ford says in this issue's notes that the series will continue with a new story. I won't say much about the actual story given that this is the last chapter, but this is very much a denouement to the explosive events of the previous issue. It's a line-dividing issue that very much has the feel of a monster or zombie film where the heroes didn't quite win and are lucky to get out alive. What's interesting is that ultimately the most destructive, (literally) society-obliterating elements of the story turn out to be human ones. Ford makes this issue a mirror of the first one, where there was page after page of bleak, full-page shots of the desolate setting. In this issue, we see that environment burned down in page after page, with Ford's distinctive smeared pencils creating an eerie, shifting environment. This series has been quite an opening salvo in Ford's young career, one that has seen him refine his line while creating beautifully composed and balanced pages.



Morning Song and b.f.f by Laura Terry. Terry has always been a strong storyteller with a distinctive voice, but these two minis demonstrate a newfound devotion to craft and detail. They're both what I refer to as "convention minis"; that is, minicomics that are art objects as well as comics. They generally tend to be slightly flashier and more gimmicky than a standard mini. What makes these minis by Terry stand out is the way she manages to fold in function along with form. The gimmick of each mini serves the actual story (slight as it is) well, and the story would not be able to function well if it didn't appear in this particular form. Morning Song, for example, is an eight-panel comic. It's about a young man whose fiddle playing gently nuzzles the wildlife from sleep to wakefulness. It's tucked into a cute cardboard rodent head. When you pull the comic out, we then read the first two pages, as we see the song bringing dawn. The reader then unfold the comic up to reveal the next four panels, as we meet the musician. Finally, we unfold the comic one more time to its full 11 x 17" length to see the final scene. Reading this wordless comic takes less then thirty seconds, but the physical experience of folding and unfolding it is a clever way of making the reader understand the passage of time.

b.f.f. has a clever wrap-around cardstock cover featuring two girls in a tree; opening up the right front flap changes the picture so that only the girl on the left is present. This story reveals just how much Terry's overall chops have improved. Her line is thinner and more confident at the same time. One of Terry's strengths has always been the depiction of movement, and this mini sees her using some interesting techniques to depict movement by moving the reader's eye across the page in a zig-zag fashion. The story is semi-auto-bio, based on a childhood experience where she had her heart broken by a girl. What I liked best about it is the way it resolves; rather than end on a self-pitying note or a cheer-up platitude, it instead unites "Laura" and her anthropomorphic heart by having them engage in "petty revenge". Terry seems ready for a next-level jump, and so I will be quite interested in seeing her tackle a long form work or short story collection.



Avian Tales From Crater Lake, by Ross Wood Studlar. Studlar is a park ranger who also happened to attend "cartoon school". Unsurprisingly, his subject tends to be nature. In terms of his drawing, this comic is a step forward from the previous comic I reviewed of his, The Raven And The Crayfish. His line is no longer quite as labored; drawing directly from nature is a nice match for the looseness of his line. This eight-page comic is a collection of small observations of birds at Crater Lake, from young eagles' leaps out of their aerie to the way diving ducks plowed several dozen feet into the crystal-clear lake in order to devour fish. Studlar also has a prose piece connecting mythology and folklore to the unpredictable and threatening nature of storms on the lake. This is a slight comic at best, one that hints at many more interesting anecdotes and observations to come. Studlar is clearly still trying to figure out just what it is he wants to do as a cartoonist, and his eye and interests are so different from that of the average cartoonist that he has the potential to do some interesting work. A book full of these stories and observations, linked together with prudent editing, could produce a unique comics artifact. As long as he continues to use a more restrained line for both his true life and mythological interests, that book could be a compelling read.

Minicomics Round-Up: Smith, Cagle, Mitchell, Stafford, Pasty Anthology, Volk, Candy Or Medicine, McAndrew

Time to take a look at the latest batch of minicomics that have come to my attention. Included are minis by Bill Volk, Phil McAndrew, Susie Cagle, Brian John Mitchell, Ryan Cecil Smith and Tyler Stafford, as well as anthologies Candy or Medicine and the Pasty Anthology.

TWO EYES OF THE BEAUTIFUL and UN PETIT CARNET DE VOYAGE II, by Ryan Cecil Smith. Smith is the first of the Closed Caption Comics group that I've had a chance to read, and I was impressed by both of these minis. TWO EYES OF THE BEAUTIFUL is an adaptation of Umezuo Kazuo's "Blood Baptism", billed as "a grotesque horror manga". It's an over-the-top, jam-packed story about an actress with a disfiguring facial disease and a mysterious doctor who compels her to do all sorts of horrible things for a potential cure. Smith throws the kitchen sink at the reader visually, with zip-a-tone, photorealist panels, and heavily rounded Tezuka-like figures. The highlight for me was a witty four-page sequence where the actress is trying to tie up an innocent girl for hideous purposes--with nothing but zip-a-tone and sound effects representing the dark room. Smith cleverly captures the crazed nature of J-horror, mixing warped humor and genuinely disturbing images.

UN PETIT CARNET DE VOYAGE is a travelogue in the tradition of French comics, showing off Smith's lush brushwork. He is currently teaching english in Japan, and so made the trip from Osaka to Hiroshima, ostensibly for a sake festival. He notes with some delight that he feels like he's learning to draw trees, and they are indeed some of the most striking images in this minicomic. It's interesting seeing him mix Japanese imagery (especially with regards to trees and buildings) with a more French style of line with regard to his figures. This is one of the most beautiful minicomic sketchbooks I've ever seen, and I only wish it was printed bigger. It's obvious that Smith has tremendous tools as an artist, and I'll be eager to see how his time in Japan continues to influence his work.



THIS AND THAT #3, ARE YOU MAN ENOUGH?, THE SECRET THOUGHTS OF HAROLD LAWRENCE WINDCRAMPE, and PEARLY WHITES, by Phil McAndrew. McAndrew is all about character and caricature in these comics. SECRET THOUGHTS... is a Jules Feifferesque mini about an ineffectual guy who whines about not having a girlfriend and then spies a perfect candidate...only to lose her to an alpha male. It's nicely drawn but with a predictable ending, though he did get off a great joke in the middle ("Lola is too picky" after rattling off a capricious list of reasons why all the girls he knew weren't good enough for him). THIS AND THAT sees the artist collecting a variety of sketches, gags, and short stories in a variety of styles. He seems most comfortable drawing slightly grotesque caricatures with lots of angles, bushy eyebrows, stubbly facial hair and bulbous noses.

Speaking of facial hair, ARE YOU MAN ENOUGH? was the funniest of these entries. He combined his scratchy line, pointy noses and exaggerated character design with an excellent gag: a wimpy suitor impressing his girl's hyper-masculine father with an "awesome drum solo" so powerful that the father's moustache flies off of his lip and on to the suitor. He rides away with his lover with a motorcycle summoned by his moustache. PEARLY WHITES features another grotesque, scribbly, hyperemotional figure who regrets a lost love. McAndrew backs up a good final gag involving a creature sending him back in time in exchange for his teeth with a series of funny drawings. McAndrew is leaning heavily on his chops at the moment and still seems to be finding his way with regard to story structure. Of course, his control over his line is pretty remarkable at this stage. With his skills, it's likely that he will improve from story to story, as he continues to develop and refine his style and story interests.



O WOE! and DOMESDAY by Bill Volk. The first effort I read from this Center for Cartoon Studies student was a 24-hour comic (THE DEWEY DECIMAL SYSTEM IS DECADENT AND DEPRAVED). While that mini was rough in presentation, one could see a witty voice emerging. O WOE! is an account of the creation myth and apocalypse of a civilization that rose out of the remains of a giant space sperm. It's a clever idea with some funny and even disturbing bits (like a society that fell because of "doubling", wherein the rich made duplicates of all their possessions, up to and including cities--only to leave them unused), but Volk's chops weren't quite up to making their society as vivid as it needed to be. I'd love to see Volk redraw this comic at some point.

On the other hand, DOMESDAY is a comic that plays to Volk's strengths as an artist: character design, gesture and exaggeration. The story's about William the Conqueror's rule over England, and follows a young man following the king's decree of counting the possessions of every man in the country. The young man, of Norman descent, is terrified of the savage English, and Volk gets a lot of mileage out of the young man fearing for his life and begging god for mercy. The superdeformed looking character design is clever, giving this historical account a certain playfulness. Historical fiction, especially of an obscure nature, may well be Volk's forte, and I'll be interested in seeing how he continues to develop.



FOLK #3 by Tyler Stafford. This is a 24-hour comic by this intriguing cartoonist who works in the Brian Ralph/Mat Brinkman tradition. The best thing about the comic, other than a surprisingly well-defined plot, is the delightfully loony character design. The story follows an escaped prisoner on an alien world who is captured after breaking out and returned to his cell. Stafford then takes the story in a weird direction, as the jewel on the alien's head pops out and it magically rescues them all...with some unforseen complications at the very end. The way Stafford manipulates the shapes of his characters is what appeals to me the most: the oval-headed heroes, villains with bullet heads and creatures with heads that look like light switches, the weird Vaughn Bode-like helmet of the female leader and the toy-like proportions of the spaceship. This is a goof of a comic that does what Stafford does best: put funny-looking characters in motion.



NINE GALLONS by Susie Cagle. Cagle cleverly mixes the personal, the political and a keen eye for caricature in this account of her time with Food Not Bombs. This mini was the first part of a longer work related to this subject, and is unusual for a story with a strong political point of view in that it's not a polemic. Instead, it's a warts 'n all love letter to the various people she met when she was helping feed the homeless of San Francisco. Cagle takes aim at herself as much as anyone as she encounters, depicting herself as hemming and hawing and having trouble asserting herself. The story she relates is equal parts ambivalence and affection, given the friable and flaky people she encountered in the organization, like the group leader who always passes on cooking duties and urges her to go faster when she's chopping potatoes. Her most affectionate portraits are reserved for the people she helped feed--even the ones who screamed at her. There's a freshness to Cagle's point of view and a lot of verve to her line, making her an artist to seek out for those interested in political cartooning and comics journalism.



JUST A MAN, WORMS #4, XO #5 and LOST KISSES #9 & #10, by Brian John Mitchell, et al. These are tiny micro-mini comics, measuring about 2x2", and range from 16-40 pages each. Mitchell is the writer for all of them and is also the (stick-figure) artist of LOST KISSES. Most of these are parts of a series, all of which are easy to pick up on as Mitchell hops from genre to genre. JUST A MAN, drawn by Andrew White, is a sort of hard-bitten western, stripped of glory. A farmer sees his house burned down, his infant son killed and his wife disappear. He's pretty sure he knows who did it, and hunts them down, one by one. I liked the voice Mitchell used for the character, but he overwrote this story. That's not unusual for a writer collaborating with an artist, but the story would have had a bit more power if the first-person narrative had been sparer and he let the visuals carry the story.

WORMS and XO fall into the realms of sci-fi/horror and crime noir, respectively. WORMS had a zippy pace to it and appealingly minimalist art by Kimberlee Traub that fit the story nicely, one that featured a young woman who witnessed the death of her father and was the subject of an experiment in a lab. This issue found her gaining power through some strange worms, subduing her tormentor, and escaping. The single panel per page format fit with Traub's striking and hallucinatory imagery. XO had a similarly snappy pace to it but was let down by Melissa Spence Gardners art. It was competent, but it didn't fit the story's mood or add anything to Mitchell's narrative, which needed a moodier style.

The stand-outs in this set were Mitchell's issues of LOST KISSES. These stick-figure comics were first-person, meandering observations about human behavior and the narrator's own misanthropy. What's clever about these strips is precisely the same thing that hamstrung JUST A MAN: there's a narrative caption working against the image and dialogue on each page (it's a panel per page for all of these comics). However, in this comic, there's a comedic tension that arises as a result of that juxtaposition. Issue #10 was especially amusing, as it was a takedown of the concept of love and those who insist on expressing it, with the author worrying about falling for that fallacy himself. I love how unassuming and direct these comics are; there are no frills or pretensions here--just a writer and artists who are experimenting with a variety of means of expression.

CANDY OR MEDICINE 4-7 and LUNARCY, edited by Josh Blair. Blair's modest little anthology continues to roll on. Each issue is 16 pages long (including covers) and is just a dollar. The focus is on up-and-coming creators, though virtually issue has work by at least one reasonably well-published cartoonist. The highlights of #4 are a great gag strip by Blair and Ray N (punning on "Love Is Blind" in clever fashion) and Kevin Richardson's strip about a loveline DJ who gets his heart broken in a bar. His character design and use of gesture carry the strip.

Issue five has a couple of Shannon Smith strips later reprinted in his own minis, a "missed connections" strip by Ed Moorman that had a certain sweet wistfulness to it, and a cleverly-designed strip about a sleepwalker meeting a series of horrible fates. The sixth issue's highlights center around gags, featuring up-and-coming cartoonist Lydia Conklin with a couple of surprisingly silly punchlines, Jason Viola contributing a typically cartoony strip about a playground lawyer, and Patrick Morgan selling a character named Blobby for all that he's worth ("Do you dance?" "I shimmy..."). The latest issue's best story was from Tyler Stafford, who contributed a typically quirky tale of a tiny space creature that winds up popping a hole in a giant space whale.

LUNARCY is a comic filled with silent-beat gags involving the moon hanging in the sky, eventually making absurd or witty declarations. Blair is a crude draftsman but I admire the level of devotion he has to his gags as well as his sense of timing. In general, CANDY OR MEDICINE is an interesting if uneven sampler of new voices in comics from across the world, from an editor who is clearly devoted to creating a showcase for these voices. Many of the comics in this anthology aren't very polished, but I admire the diversity of styles and aesthetic choices featured here.


THE PASTY ANTHOLOGY, edited by Rob Jackson. This is anthology devoted to the glories of the British baked goods known as pasties, a quirky and geographically specific theme that was somehow delightfully conveyed. The stories range from Steve Butler's cautionary tale of why being a health nut (and denying oneself a tasty pasty) can be hazardous to one's health to Dave Hughes' pasty-obsessed character studies to Jackson's absurd history of the importance of pasties throughout history.

What I found surprising about this anthology was how much witty cartooning there was to be found. Jim Medway's calendar comic featuring anthropomorphic animals buying food at a pastry shop was a clever talking head strip with surprisingly expressive characters. Francesa Cassavetti's account of being scared as a girl because she swallowed chewing gum (leading to her ignoring pain that would turn out to be an appendectomy) was my favorite strip in the book, thanks to her loose character design and appealingly sketchy line. Even the text pieces in the book fit into the uncompromisingly provincial nature of the anthology. Jackson's hand as an editor is quite evident here, given each artist's total commitment to absurd ideas and seeing them through as seriously as possible.

Another Wave From CCS

Rob reviews the latest batch of comic from students and alumni from the Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS). Reviewed are comics from Penina Gal, Chuck Forsman, Caitlin Plovnick, Colleen Frakes, JP Coovert, Alexis Frederick-Frost, Bill Volk, Denis St. John and Alex Kim.


Time for another peek at some recent comics from the Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS).

THE FIRE MESSENGER 1, by Penina Gal. This first issue of what promises to be an extended fantasy series is most notable for its gorgeous use of color and the way Gal plops us into a fantasy world with no information given to the reader. We meet two boys named Aiden and Nik. We quickly learn that Aiden has the power to control fire, but that the friends were trapped in a big fire that Aiden couldn't quite control and somehow wound up in an unfamiliar forest. As they wander through the forest and desperately try to survive, we are slowly given clues through their dialogue about their lives. They both go to a school in a world where everyone has some kind of special magical gift, but Aiden's abilities make him a teacher's pet. The unfamiliar world they wind up in turns out to be our Earth, and the realization that they're no longer on the right world chills our heroes.

The way the story begins reminds me a bit of Phillip Pullman's HIS DARK MATERIALS novels, where we're thrown into a magical world with no context and are expected to figure things out through context. It's an effective strategy, because it forces us to concentrate fully on the characters instead of on the way the world is built. Gal favors pastels for both the color of her paper and the actual panels themselves, giving the book a fairy-tale look. The main problem with this approach is that the color fairly overwhelms her line throughout much of the issue. Her line is deliberately simple and basic and the emotions of the story are mostly conveyed through color, but a slightly bolder line would make the story's figures stand out a bit more. The thinner line led to a blurred, bleeding effect, especially between foreground and background. Still, her use of color is expressionistic and ambitious, and I'm curious to see where the story goes from here.


DEAD AIR #1, by Caitlin Plovnick. This minicomic miniseries about a group of 20-something slacker guys with a band is modest in scope and ambition. The story is a familiar one: directionless young men sitting around getting stoned, listening to music, going to dead-end jobs (or laying on couches all day), etc. What makes this comic worthwhile is the pitch and tone of Plovnick's treatment of her characters. That tone is equal parts mockery and affection, made effective by the pitch-perfect dialogue. The lazy guy who doesn't even want to get off the couch because "it's all gloomy out", the convenience store clerk whose smartassery gets thrown in his face by activists, the record store clerk whose passion for music is chewed up by retail are all examples of characters that could have been cliches. Instead, there's a respect for the way they interact (especially with regard to music) but also an understanding of how pathetic their lives are. The strip on the back cover shows of Plovnick's wit, which she uses in a restrained manner in her comic. The themes and characters we see in this book are certainly nothing groundbreaking, but Plovnick's developing skill as a storyteller made me want to see more. If anything, I'd like to see Plovnick simplify her line. She overrenders a few scenes that would have benefited from a clearer line, which gets in the way of the expressiveness of her characters.


3AM and A SMALL STORY OF LOVE AND DEATH, by Alex Kim. Kim's comics always have an open-ended and ambiguous quality. His stories rarely provide much in the way of exposition. The reader is thrown into a situation and forced to figure out how the characters he's introduced are interacting and why. 3AM is a comics adaptation of a poem written by Jessica Abston, an ode to those magical late night hours spent in diners where reality seems a little more fluid somehow. Kim's use of silhouette to depict the blankness of the narrator in all this was a clever move. A SMALL STORY... opens with a typical Kim setting: a conversation in a bar. A person tells a story about watching two rats living near a subway line rail and understanding that they were mates. He is drawn to their lives in ways he can't articulate and is shattered when he sees that one of the rats is dead and the other essentially commits suicide by waiting for a train to hit it. Of course, the friend he tells the story to is baffled by his obsession, and even the sympathetic bartender thought he was crazy.

This comic is not about the story of the rats, but that the man needs to tell this story. It reflects a deeper crisis in the main character that is just hinted at but never hammered at, and that emotional restraint is a hallmark of Kim's work. As always, Kim uses a wavy-line approach in his characters' clothing, giving them a rumpled look. I wish he had taken a different approach with the character design in this comic, because the main character needed to stand out a bit more from the others. That said, his use of panel-to-panel transitions was quite clever and resonant, especially when the protagonist has just witnessed the rat killing itself.


DAFFY, by Chuck Forsman. The SNAKE OIL artist presents a collection of shorter works here, mostly humor strips and other odds and ends. The bulk of the mini is a reprint of the "Jimmy Draws Cats" series of strips originally published in SUNDAYS. This was Forsman's best early effort, drawn with the feel of a classic comic strip with Forsman's own brand of absurdity. The scenes where young Jimmy is sent to "Art Skool", depicted as the most desolate and vicious place imaginable, still make me laugh. The book's first strip, featuring two characters hanging on a gallows, creates an absurd situation by contrasting the dialogue and the grimness of the situation. Drawing the characters as stick figures heightens the tension and humor even more.

The last pages of the book are devoted to what seems to be an attempt at doing a series about the life of Jim Thorpe's latter years. I'm not sure if this is a work in progress or a work abandoned, but it seemed intriguing. You can see Forsman's line developing in some of these earlier strips, where he didn't have quite the same control over his line that he does now. At the same time, it's clear that he has always tried to maintain a spontaneity of approach, and that organic quality of his comics is perhaps their greatest appeal.


WOMAN KING preview, by Colleen Frakes. I've always found Frakes' bold but spare line and composition to be her greatest strengths as an artist. There's a bleakness to her work that I also find appealing as she tells her own version of myths and folktales. This brief preview is no exception, a story told in another format in the NO! anthology that I reviewed elsewhere. Frakes' composition is bold and exciting in this story of a girl chosen to lead a clan of bears against a human village, but some of the rendering seems a bit rushed here. That's especially true of the girl herself; it seemed as though Frakes was trying to get at an iconic depiction of her but couldn't quite pull it off without adding some more detail. On the other hand, the way she constructs her bears embodied that bold simplicity perfectly. Given the way she altered her final version of the story she told in her Tragic Relief book, redrawing much of it, I wouldn't be surprised to see this mini as simply another draft. In any event, the prospect of a long-form work by Frakes is an exciting one.


INSIDES, by JP Coovert. This short, striking comic plays to Coovert's strengths: an understanding of how to create and solve visual puzzles on each page. He doesn't do this with a lot of formal pyrotechnics, but rather a thoughtful and clever approach on how to use images to tell a story on several levels. This comic is a great case in point, as it's literally about a man (presumably Coovert himself) purging and vomiting up everything that's touched, moved or inspired him. Whether this purging is at some level voluntary (it would seem not), there's a sense that, like any purging, one feels better afterward. That feeling faded quickly as the character whimpers that he needs the final person her purged: an important significant other. The realization that getting rid of everything inside is only helpful up to a point--especially when we're trying to purge memories, influences and feelings. Because of the strong specificity of the images purged but a lack of detail given regarding their meaning, it's easy for a reader to project their own memories and feelings onto these images. That particular tact was risky on Coovert's part, but the way his images from specific to general was impressively conveyed.


3 STORIES and MARIA OF MONTMARTRE, by Alexis Frederick-Frost. 3 STORIES is a cleverly designed mini that shows off a few different approaches from Frederick-Frost. His comics combine a looseness of figure with an almost diagrammatic approach. Those figures have a sharpness to them, as Frederick-Frost composes them mostly out of triangles and rectangles. The simplicity of form combined with the expressive sweep of what appears to be a brush makes one pause to admire each page before even reading it. "Letter" is the most clever of the stories, a circular narrative where the lovelorn protagonist meets a horrible fate due to coincidence. His love going up in flames becomes both literal and figurative. The simplified character design makes the backgrounds every bit as important to look at as the characters themselves. That gestalt of background and foreground established throughout the story makes the final panels all the more effective. "Haunt" is more conventionally designed, with a visual conceit that lacks subtlety. The reader understands right away that the protagonist is haunted by the ills of the modern world and can't do anything about it, but the on-the-nose depiction of this on page after page dulls the point. On the other hand, "Hunt" almost dips into abstraction in this story of a hunter in a forest. The way Frederick-Frost worked the hunter into an almost abstract forest of angles and jutting lines was quite striking, and the literally explosive climax continued to make use of this interesting visual approach.

MARIA OF MONTMARTRE is Frederick-Frost's second long-form work. It's based on the life of a model-turned-painter in Impressionist-era France. This is only the first volume of what would seem to be a much longer work. Compared to his first long-form comic, LA PRIMAVERA, Frederick-Frost's figures were much more expressive here. While maintaining his simplicity of character design, he was able to add just a few more flourishes to bring the likes of Toulouse-Latrec and Aristide to life. While his use of greyscale shading was effective in adding texture and weight to his panels and figures, I'm guessing that the eventual collected work will be one or two toned. This chapter is simply and leisurely told with few surprises, but it's the loving details of how Frederick-Frost imagined the life of Paris in the late 19th century that give this comic life. The idea of a story talking about the tension between artist and model and the muse seeking her own form of expression is a clever one, and I'm guessing the the eventual finished piece will be Frederick-Frost's most impressive output to date and really announce his arrival.


THE DEWEY DECIMAL SYSTEM IS DECADENT AND DEPRAVED, by Bill Volk. This is a 24-hour comic, one with an impressive level of compositional and drafting skill for such an exercise. There are certainly a number of rough spots, of course, but the cleverness of the artist and spontaneity of his approach makes up for the raggedness of his line and occasional clutter. The story is about Volk working at a library and wondering why the Dewey Decimal system files some comics all together, but others (like MAUS) in completely different portions of the library. This leads him on an amusing fever dream quest where he confronts Melvil Dewey, Art Spiegelman and dame Fortune herself and concludes that there's nothing wrong with MAUS being filed under World War II/Holocaust books, and that in fact all comics should be scattered "unto the four winds". Visual flourishes like Volk's fever-dream self morphing into an anthropomorphic dog to talk to Spiegelman's famous anthropomorphic mouse caricature was clever. A comic not just about comics but about how comics are shelved is a bit meta, but that can be forgiven, I think, for a student entering the comics boot-camp that is CCS. I'll be curious to see more work from Volk drawn under more ideal conditions.

MONSTERS & GIRLS: AMELIA, by Denis St. John. There's so much going on in this comic that it's difficult to know where to begin. First and foremost, it's a high-concept horror comic. It's about a girl in her early 20s who has a magic object (a box with a creepy, ornate eye symbol) and is seeking out two other objects that are related to it somehow, knowing that she needs to complete the set. That particular bit of high concept unifies all of the other weirdness in this comic and gives it a sturdy structure to rest upon. Second, the tone of the comic slips between laugh-out loud absurdity back to horrific, sometimes in the same panel. Third, sex is a key and visceral component of this story, and St. John blends in eroticism with humor and horror--again, sometimes in the same panel.

There's a scene early in the comic where the protagonist, Amelia, is seducing a much older man so as to steal his magic object (a writing tablet). The way she moves her body around so as to avoid the disgusting prospect of seeing his facial expression, only to be scared witless at a pair of eyes staring at her out of the darkness, and watching her body twist around on top of his, was squirm-inducingly funny. Later, when she confronts her younger brother, acting remarkably casual for someone who was in the room at the same time and seemingly in cahoots with the older man, she blurts out "Why do you look like a Nosferatu?" The weirdness and laughs never take the reader out of the story, because this is in no way a parody. Everything that happens here makes sense in the context of this world, and the reader is asked to immerse oneself in it.
St. John is ambitious in the way he uses expression, gesture and mood. He doesn't quite have the chops to pull it off on every page and in every panel. Amelia's big eyes are one of the book's foci; there are some panels where her face, given a greater focus by St. John's line, looks slightly raggedly drawn. There's a density to his cross-hatching that's sometimes at odds with his figures. At times, there's also an awkwardness in the way his figures interact. Some of that is intentional, I'm guessing, but some of it is distracting on the page. On the other hand, St. John's use of black/white contrast is quite clever, as is the way he renders the repeated skull motif. His greatest skill is his ability to render humor, discomfort and desire in the same panel, and that blend is what makes this such an intriguing comic. I've never seen a comic that blended all three and still managed to tell an engaging narrative, and it seems that St. John is well on his way to creating a significant long-form work.