31 Days Of CCS, #17: Aaron Cockle & Bryan Stone

Bugs, by Bryan Stone. Stone is one of the members of CCS's first graduating class, but it's been a while since I've seen his work. This funny mini full of vignettes about bugs is full of sharp storytelling, crisp drawing, and lively cartooning. These are bugs with rich fantasy lives, engaging in awkward cringe humor, and philosophically complex outlooks on lives. They are also bugs who act like bugs, as when a cricket finds himself jumping without much control over their actions. Stone's character design is killer, retaining the anatomy of insects while adding anthropomorphic expressiveness to their eyes and sometimes their movements. His use of hatching and cross-hatching is impeccable, adding depth and weight to the pages in a way that's frequently simply beautiful. Some strips offer more extreme close-ups of the bugs, and Stone shifts to a thick line weight and a simplified design, like in one strip where a bug is teaching their "pet" to fetch, with amusing results. A plot about aliens arriving and a reveal that they wiped out humanity and gave the bugs consciousness is clever but also kept light and irreverent. 

Andalusian Dog, October 2022, by Aaron Cockle. Cockle's back at it with this exploration of a meta-game  in an issue subtitled "The Opposite Of Empathy Is Empathy." The narrative, with a different numbered heading at the top of each page, is about various kinds of tests, including machines testing other machines for empathy and antipathy. It goes into detail about growing up on a moon colony, with images on graph lines, and jagged photos of the moon. There are drug-induced mass emotion experiments during space travel, life back on Earth that includes an appearance on the Dennis Miller Show with Carrot Top, and a film adaptation of an obscure Jack Kirby comic. The intersection between work and art and the concept of work as an immersive, all-encompassing thing that obliterates personal space is a running theme in Cockle's comics, whose visuals continue to become increasingly abstract and sketchy. 

31 Days Of CCS, #9: Robyn Smith and The Mesozine #2

Ding Dong, by Robyn Smith. Noted as a "sketchbook zine," this mini shows off some of the things that Smith does best. Her character design, her understanding of how to draw clothing, her incredible detail with regard to hair are all on display, to be sure. Smith could ditch comics tomorrow and have a successful career as an illustrator, because her style is so lush and attractive. However, Smith never abandons what also makes her a great cartoonist, which is her understanding of gesture, expression, and the relationship between bodies in space. That's true in even the roughest pencils for some of her strips; Smith is especially adept at using a head tilt to convey meaning and affection. There are other drawings that give hints at untapped aspects of her talents, like movement and physical struggle, but Smith is best at drawing highly stylized figures in various states of repose talking to each other. While I've enjoyed Smith's collaborations with other writers, I'm eager to see her write her own material down the line. 

The Mesozine, Issue 2, edited by Denis St. John. St. John loves drawing monsters and dinosaurs, and this zine is a gathering place for his friends to also draw dinosaurs. St. John was in the second graduating class of CCS, and there are a lot of older grads in this mini. It also includes fellow co-workers in the Schulz Studio. the highlights of the mini include a serial from Morgan Pielli (whose bizarre sci-fi comics are greatly missed), drawing a dinosaur combat from three different species, and a thoughtful strip from Ross Wood Studlar (a forest ranger and cartoonist) discussing how the Oviraptor got a bad reputation as an egg thief. There's a wonderful image from Donna Almendrala-Joel and a slightly cartoony story from St. John that adds a touch of Carl Barks cuteness while still maintaining Carl Barks action and movement. This is the story of more dinosaur fights, this time with a mother trying to protect her children from predators. Bryan Stone, another early CCS grad, contributes some pin-ups, as does the legendary Steve Bissette, who was a faculty member at CCS for many years. Non-CCS alum Alena Carnes has a memorable but brief story about being on a dig open to the public, and what it meant for her. Overall, there's something loving and fun about doing this kind of drawing that's at once highly technical in its illustration style but also freeing in terms of the sheer nature of the visceral quality of these animals. Those who love dinosaurs will get a kick out of this zine. 

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.

Funny Aminals Volume 3: Hush

Of the few CCS-related anthologies that have published more than one volume, Jeff Lok and Bryan Stone's Funny Aminals has been the most uneven in terms of production values and content. The third volume, subtitled Hush, is easily the tightest and best-looking edition to date. In part, I think that's because the editors chose from a wider pool of CCS-related artists, including a number of current and recent students. It's a substantial book at 64 pages yet doesn't outstay its welcome, with only a few pieces that might have been omitted. There was a sense that the contributors for the most part tried to bring their "A" material to the table, rather than hurriedly submit something, which is not an unusual occurrence for unpaid, self-published anthologies.

The book takes as inspiration funny animal comic books, a source that gives the artists a lot of latitude as to what kind of stories they chose to tell. Some tell stories in the original spirit of the comics that were once as commonplace as super-hero comics are today, while others take their cue from the underground comics that subverted these tropes. A good example of the latter is Matt Aucoin, whose "Floplins and Fuzzwumps", while silly and scatological, is superbly drawn and paced. This is probably the single best piece I've ever seen from him in terms of both storytelling and draftsmanship. G.P. Bonesteel similarly ups his game with his one-page strip "Chalk", which brings a silly premise to life with lively figure drawing of two lizard creatures. The anthology wisely leads off with Denis St. John's "The Devil's Magic", a hilarious and elegant story about a sinister-seeming anthropomorphic goat magician whose actual magic may be mundane, but still enormously impressive to his audience. It's a great-looking story with a strong undercurrent of humor throughout.

Other strong pieces included Andy Burkholder's "ZZZZZZZZ", a surreal piece filled with sharp and angular imagery; the joyfully loose "Bedtime for Boozy" by Colleen Frakes; Stone's delightful forest farce "One Year"; Jeremiah Piersol's ant vs anteater battle "Ant defEaters" (featuring his thick line deployed in a cartoony manner); Lok's bulbous figures and absurd horror in "Sal's" (the image of a sentient, bouncing pig's head is a hard one to shake); Donna Almendrala's silly Eastwood-as-chimp story "The Good, The Bad and the Chimpanzee" and the inimitable Dane Martin with "The Wise Old Bird's Paranoid Ballet". In his ratty, frantic, claustrophobic style, Martin once again tells a story of someone yearning desperately with the prospect of something wonderful at the end of his journey, only to find a bullet for his troubles. I'm excited that he's doing a series with Chuck Forsman's Oily Comics, because this is an artist whose work needs to be more widely seen. His presence is precisely the sort of change of pace that makes for a good anthology, and while many of the comics in Hush can be described as lightweight, there's a strong level of craft and care at work here that makes it worth a look.