45 Days Of CCS, #41: Fantology 4

The fourth volume of Fantology is probably the weakest volume overall, but there's still plenty of interesting material in there. A lot of it felt strangely rushed; there were numerous spelling errors and the margins were so tight that I couldn't read some of the stuff toward the middle. Some of the pieces were so sloppy that I was surprised they were published, and the sequencing of the stories also felt somewhat off-kilter. That said, the best stories were excellent, and the overall concept remains sound. 

This is an anthology of fantasy stories set in the same world, based around a central map. Some of the stories are continuing serials, and others are one-shots. This volume's theme is "maps," which is a great theme for a fantasy anthology. There are a number of non-CCS folks in here as well, but I'll start with CCS artists first. Whiteley Foster kicks off the book with a 7-page story that simultaneously feels like it's too long and totally insubstantial. It's about two characters arguing about taking a job as surveyors. Her character design is so Disney-cute and exaggerated that it was hard to see them as characters. Alex Washburn's latest Clan Zargs chapter is something I covered earlier in this feature, but suffice it to say that he makes great use of the map to further his narrative, and the focus on surprising character twists added a lot of spice. 

Carl Antonowicz's unsurprisingly downbeat story follows a religious pilgrim and two servants going on a quest in a deadly desert. The attention he lavishes on world-building is actually a clever misdirection, as the quest itself ends in failure. It's the relationship between the characters that's most interesting. I wasn't crazy about his use of a digital font considering how sketchy his linework was. 

Catalina Rufin has another winning entry in her Barbarian Family series. With the burly barbarian dad Brono and his teen daughter Satu going on a map-led quest, Rufin explores family dynamics in a way that transcends the usual limits of the genre. With Brono harshly critical of Satu's ideas, Satu is vulnerable to a deep gnome's sweet words and promise of magic. Rufin asks some tough questions here, and her character design is sharp and expressive. 

Rainer Kannenstine sketchy and cartoony story about a lonely explorer in over his head in a dungeon takes advantage of old-school Dungeons & Dragons map construction to build the narrative. The looseness of the art gives it a lot of energy and helps play up its whimsical, funny aspects. It even has a genuinely emotional end.

It was such a pleasure to see co-editor Kristen Shull return to her serial. It's about a down-on-her-luck mage and her unlikely partnership with a princess whose quest is to assassinate a god to save her people. Even switching over to drawing digitally and working with a surprising lack of detail, Shull shines doing fantasy work in a way she doesn't in other genres. Her pacing, her understanding of how to depict action, her sense of humor, and her flair for the dramatic make each chapter a rousing success. 

As for the rest, there are a few highlights. F.Ostby's story about young rabbits exploring a forest at night for a treasure rachets up the tension but has a delightful payoff, with a pleasant mix of cartoony characters and a naturalistic setting. Niloufar Lari & Soroush Elyasi have perhaps the best-looking strip in the book, and it's about a quest of transformation and the intimacy of dance; only the digital font detracts from its elegance. Emily Claire's short story about a soldier finding his way back to his lover after three years is quietly devastating. PMK's bar crawl story is hilarious and exceptionally well-cartooned, and it embraces the map concept fully. Finally, Stephen Pellnat's story is a masterful piece of narrative misdirection. The cartooning is excellent, and the swerve is set up early on in a way that is easy to ignore. I missed a few serials from previous issues, which likely led to some replacements, but hopefully, they will be followed up on in the next volume. 

45 Days Of CCS, #7: Colleen Frakes, Coco Fox, Mary Shyne, Carl Antonowicz

Today's entry features short reviews of very short minis by a number of creators. Most of them are in the middle of longer projects, and these minis represent something they can have at shows. 

Starting off with Colleen Frakes, she's from the first CCS graduating class and is still at it. Her first major-publisher book, Knots, will be coming out in September of 2024. For SPX 2023, she did a mini called Where Have You Been?, and it's a funny little autobio comic that talks about the past few years. While Frakes usually does variations on fantasy stories, her self-caricature has long been one of my favorite in comics, and I enjoy the exasperated body language in these comics. Frakes flashes back to how the past few years have felt lost for a lot of people. During this period, Frakes had a kid (who is nearing kindergarten age) and had a book dropped from a publisher. There's a hilarious anecdote where an editor told her that the book was dropped not because Frakes got pregnant, but because her "art was bad." Frakes' pen line remains a joy to look at; she has a keen understanding of the in-between spaces in drawing big scenes. 

Another artist working on a longer book is Mary Shyne. Her brief but funny mini Robbing O'Hare's Weed Box features the main characters from her upcoming book, Graduation Day. It's a time loop story involving two best friends in high school on their graduation day. This fragment is about their wanting to rob the Cannabis Amnesty Box in Chicago's O'Hare Airport, and the various shenanigans they get up to in order to do it. Shyne loves crazy page composition, and even here, she uses a page with slanted panel lines (including the rare trapezoidal panel in the middle of a page) and an open page layout. That doesn't detract from her winning character design, because even in the span of these four pages, Shyne gets across a strong sense of self for both of them. 

Coco Fox also has a book coming out titled called Let's Go, Coco! Fox has leveled up as a cartoonist as much as anyone I've ever seen from CCS, and she did a quick mini for SPX called Just Kitten'. It's a beautifully designed mini with a bunch of cat puns that are awful, but Fox milks each joke with an elaborate visual set-up and doubles down on the pun. The one about "Caturday Night Live" is especially well-done, as she layers three levels of puns in the punchline. 

Carl Antonowicz is an artist who is fascinated by multimedia presentations of comics with performance and music. He did a performance of his upcoming book The Ardent (full disclosure: it's coming from Fieldmouse Press and I'm editing it) at SPX in 2023, with a full array of props and sound effects. His brief mini Open Casket Soundsystem: The Great Beast is paired with a set of musical pieces that can be found on Bandcamp or his patreon. It's the usual sort of Antonowicz comic and it continues to follow his extensive interest in cults and how they operate on a psychological level. Here, the cult in a postapocalyptic setting is following the Great Beast, a monstrous creature indifferent to their presence. He is unthinking and unyielding, devouring all of the detritus of a former civilization that's in his path, with his followers eating his waste. It's bleak and once again points out the utter uselessness of rigid belief systems in the face of a nihilistic and uncaring world. Antonowicz's ratty line is perfect for depicting charred, decaying flesh and piles of bones. 

31 Days Of CCS, #7: Gabrielle Tinnirello, Carl Antonowicz & Reilly Hadden

This post will cover a few shorter comics by interesting young CCS cartoonists. 

Gabrielle's Pocket Book, by Gabrielle Tinnirello, is a small (4" x 2.5"), landscape-formatted mini that's an excellent example of her highly decorative style that surrounds all of her drawings. This is a clever meta-assignment for CCS that includes elements of things she was supposed to talk about as well as taking the original instructions and turning them into something different. There is an essential cuteness to this that seems simple on the surface because of the approachable and cheery line, but Tinnirello's integration of word and image is actually quite sophisticated and balanced. This mini feels like a proof of concept for a longer work, and the other comics I've seen from her employ this same mix of dense imagery layered from clear line art and elegant, decorative touches. Eventually, I hope that she works bigger and continues to work in color; it will help her work breathe a bit more without losing its impact. 

Kricket The Cat (Spring-Summer 2022), by Reilly Hadden. Hadden's latest Kricket comics are some of their best. Going the black-and-white route paid off, as the strip got re-energized for this extended story. The right balance for Kricket is providing a satisfying 4-panel punchline on every page while also connecting them for a longer narrative. That's exactly what Hadden achieves here, as the perpetually put-upon Kricket takes a photo of a rare Steahorsus, only to lose his camera to a bird flying to Forbidden Island. Hadden is able to bring a number of recurring characters (apart from Kricket, there's also the hat-wearing Louise and the ingeniously-designed Old Man Catfish) who need no special introductions to understand. There's a clarity of narrative here that allows Hadden to occasionally go off on a tangent, but Kricket's central motivation is a through-line that provides a solid structure for all of the foolishness. If John Porcellino drew a funny-animal series, it would look something like this. 

The Ardent SPX Preview, by Carl Antonowicz. This is the first twenty pages of Antonowicz's next book, and he's added a beautiful blue wash and added much more clarity to his line. Antonowicz likes telling fantasy stories steeped in grubby medieval imagery, meaning that there's a lot of rubble, debris, and decay. Not to mention usually disease and violence to boot. Visually, this has meant a gritty quality that teeters into messiness, but The Ardent features his usual line-up of themes with backgrounds that aren't quite as fussed over. Antonowicz lets his use of color do a lot of the job of adding weight and substance to each page, as well as giving his characters something to work off of. The story is about a devoted monk charged with taking the remains of one of his religion's beloved saints to her final resting place. The contrast between this monk's absolute faith with the rest of the order falling to pieces because the monastery is being sold off is hilarious and fits in nicely with Antonowicz's project of studying true believers in the face of all other evidence. I'm fascinated to see how the rest of the quest goes, especially since it seems the monk is either mute or has taken a vow of silence. 

Antonowicz also submitted Open Casket Soundstyem: Tomb Riddim, an anthology about different kinds of forbidden and foreboding tombs. "Riddim" is a reference to the instrumental portion of reggae and dancehall; or the vernacular version of "rhythm." This is exactly what Antonowicz is doing here: creating a storytelling rhythm with the neat trick of using a hidden protagonist: the tombs, or rather the forces that built each tomb, themselves. One is in a desert, drawing in pilgrims. Another is forgotten, in the center of a city. Another contains the remains of a dying god and is lethal to the living. Another reveals a horrible truth about the inhabitants of its city. And so on. It's akin to Bob Dylan once saying that each of the lines of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" is in itself the first line of its own song. Antonowicz's thinking of comics as performance and music adds a richness to how he tells a story. 

CCS Extra: Carl Antonowicz

In volume one of Buer's Kiss, Carl Antonowicz built a world mired in disease, arbitrary religious and political authority and a total lack of respect for the humanity of others. In volume two, he burns it all down--quite literally, in some cases. The protagonist, Felecia, was thrown out of her village thanks to receiving "Buer's Kiss"--a leprosy-like disease created by a demonic creature. She's surrounded by a number of characters with competing points of view. There's the village doctor, who reveals her plan to get revenge on the church and state by infecting every village. There's the naked chief of the outcast colony, who idiotically embraces his disease. There's the Moor on the colony's edge, decrying heretics of every stripe. Finally, there are the soldiers looking to kill the doctor. One of them is gay and quickly lost his patience by the needling comments of his superior officer and his doltish assistant. Put all these characters together, and you have a volatile situation.

The care with which Antonowicz detailed Felecia's new life in the first volume sets up the horrific events of this book. This is an unpleasant world where compassion is not rewarded. The crux of the second book is Felecia discovering the doctor's plan and trying to stop it before she poisons her old village. At the same time, the soldiers happen across the colony and burn it to the ground after killing the leader. The gay soldier finally has enough of the others and rides off on his own. The climax of the book comes when Felecia comes across the soldier's pass, begging him for help. His response is to push her out of the way. The book's format is the same as the first volume: twelve panel grid that collapses at times, dense hatching and cross hatching, heavy use of blacks with a consistent use of background white for contrast. There's no shading or gray-scaling here, as Antonowicz builds the book around his linework and use of spotting blacks. It's mostly successful, though his line felt a little more wobbly in this volume than the first at times.

This book is about dignity, empathy and agency. Felecia is the only character who possesses all three traits. Her sense of dignity leads her to blaze her own trail and abandon the alms plate she was given. Her agency led her to want to learn the doctor's craft, strike out to save the village, and any number of other acts that displayed her willingness to act. Her empathy led her to show kindness to the Moor, to let down a guy who had a crush on her easily, and to try to save her village despite the way they treated her. The gay soldier has dignity and agency, but his lack of empathy doomed the village. The doctor had the same flaw, as she was consumed by vengeance. The chief lacked dignity and agency, making him a useless mound of flesh. The Moor lacked agency, or rather, it was taken from him. The other soldiers lacked all three qualities, making them callous killers who had no clue as to how to navigate the terrain. In the end, Felecia is stripped of her own agency and dignity as she's forced to become a beggar, making this story a tragic one.

Thirty One Days Of CCS #22: Carl Antonowicz

Buer's Kiss Volume I, by Carl Antonowicz. I only got to see the first few pages of this in minicomics form last year, but there's no question that this is Antonowicz's best, most confident work to date. He was so ambitious that he also created a stage version of this story, which played in a few different locations. Antonowicz is most interested in stories set in a fictional version of the European middle ages, mixing science, religion, magic and superstition. This comic was inspired by the story of a particular leper's colony in the 14th century and it involves the ways in which beliefs become so reified that they supersede reason and observation. That's especially true when the church and state are essentially the same entity.

Stories like this are best old at the individual level, which allows the reader to focus in on the particular affairs of someone while trying to figure out what's going on. Antonowicz starts the story with what seems to be a funeral until we learn that the woman being "buried" is not actually dead, but somehow Unclean. The penalty is to be exiled from the village, with the choice of becoming a beggar or joining a colony of diseased heretics. The woman, Felecia, is a independent cynic with a dark sense of humor, which makes her an ideal protagonist. Far from the Candide-like innocent thrown on the mercies of a cruel world, she's smart and self-possessed despite having no formal education. This is a protagonist with the kind of agency necessary to survive a world like this but also the common sense needed when it came time to compromise.

This is a story about the arbitrary nature of authority. When authority ceases to have a rational reason for being, it simply becomes a matter of maintaining a status quo through the use of naked force. That's especially true when authority trumps human empathy. Antonowicz plays this out in a number of scenarios. First, when Felecia's husband refuses to touch her, she realizes that he chose to let all of their years together be wiped out by the beliefs of the village. Second comes when a soldier on a mission to find the colony of the diseased realizes that his commanding officer is not only incompetent, he's in love with the sound of his own commands. Third is when Felecia meets the colony's doctor and is relieved to hear that the doctor doesn't believe in the proclamations of the diseased leader. Fourth is when Felecia meets a diseased man (who believes in an approximation of Islam) who warns her about everyone's belief system. This volume builds up these conflicts, while I imagine the second volume will bring them to fruition.

The story works because Antonowicz pays close attention to detail. He doesn't skimp on depicting the leprosy-like disease labeled as the titular "kiss", with boils, sores, scabs, missing body parts, etc. He makes great use of negative space throughout the comic, which is crucial since he uses a small twelve-panel grid as his default. There are times parts of the grid are collapsed to become a single, horizontal panel, but Antonowicz keeps things moving using this format. This is a visually striking comic first and foremost, allowing the character and plot to reveal themselves slowly while the reader takes in visual details. I'm eager to see the payoffs for a variety of characters and stories in the next volume.

Thirty Days of CCS #12: Carl Antonowicz

Carl Antonowicz is an artist whose grim and formally challenging takes on horror and death haven't quite clicked because the visuals weren't quite there to suit the story's needs. Like most young cartoonists, he's starting to figure things out by playing to his strengths as a draftsman instead of overrendering. As a result, his comics are now clearer without losing any of their initial complexity. In Until The Blood Runs Black, for example, he varies his grid structure from page to page as a way of reflecting the uneven course of its main characters but keeps the character design itself simple and expressive. The only visual problem with this comic is that the line weights he uses for the characters is so fine at times that when he goes heavy into spotting blacks (which he does often), it can make whole pages look indistinct. Looking at the pages he drew where the main character tells his sidekick how he lost his birthright, meant to look like a scroll (down to the use of faux-calligraphy), it became obvious that Antonowicz's work looks best in a clear-line style The images snapped off those pages vividly.

In terms of the story, Antonowicz goes back to the laugh-filled Crusades. An indolent soldier (Bernard) and his best friend Jean start heading home, with Bernard desiring some kind of relic or treasure to buy his way back into his family. Jean is world-weary, dependable and kind. They talk their way into a Muslim woman's house for a night's rest, but Bernard steals her relic, a holy cloak that a saint used when blessing the diseased. Jean becomes possessed by the cloak, demanding repentance while his skin festers with boils and he starts attracting flies. In the end, literally no good deed goes unpunished in this pitch-black satire.

Turming Chapter 1. Antonowicz starts the story in media res, as a woman visits a nun who is content to confine herself to her room in an old castle. The nun shakes off the designation of "mother", saying "sister" will do, and that's a huge context clue for what's going on in the village. There is a new status quo in the village, as it is surrounded by some sort of malevolent force called the Miasma. It permanently disfigured the woman's (Yulienne) husband, both emotionally and physically. The nuns and families are certainly bound to the whims of the soldiers who visit, though it's obvious that both parties are interested in sex. The second half of this issue finds Yulienne at home after accepting some food from a soldier who's an occasional sexual partner. While the interesting mix of sex, politics, religion and apocalyptic imagery carries the comic, the character design is still a little shaky at times. On the other hand, Antonowicz is great at drawing buildings and depicting atmosphere. The fog that rolls in with the soldiers is drawn so quickly that you could cut it up. Conceptually, this comic and Buer's Kiss immediately made me eager to see more.

Buer's Kiss. Antonowicz dips into his (fictional) Middle Ages one more time in his most recent project. It's by far his most ambitious and assured book, as he manages to keep clarity of image while losing none of the density of his illustrations. He's more sparing in his use of blacks and even uses a lot of negative white space on some pages. This short preview sets up the ambitious larger story, which he's also adapting for the stage at the same time. That will be a "full-length staged reading...with voice actors, live foley effects and projected images". Given the quality and density of the images in the preview, I imagine this will look impressive. The story follows a woman who was given a funeral mass, which was only ceremonial as her real punishment for her sins was banishment from her village. The exact nature of her sin was not stated, but she doesn't exactly take the news with a smile, saving special anger for her husband, who will no longer even hug her goodbye. The lasting image is that of a defiant woman, breaking the crutch and alms pan she was given as she begins her journey. Everything about Antonowicz's character design and characters in action was impressive, even given a relatively small sample size.

Thirty Days of CCS, Day 12: Carl Antonowicz, Matthew New

Ostrich Cycles, by Carl Antonowicz. This is a grim, formally ambitious comic about an elderly doctor who slowly starts to lose his grip on reality and his adoring granddaughter whom he inducts into his demented schemes. His figures are intensely shaded (to the point of what looks like stippling on some of the pages) throughout, even as his character designs are bland to the point of dull. In terms of design, the mini is extremely impressive and disturbing, but the figurework's wobbly naturalism frequently took me out of the story. In one panel where the granddaughter looks up with adoring gratitude that she gets to pick out their next "patient", her face looks stretched and warped and her eyes oversized. I couldn't discern whether this was a deliberate decision or not, but the result broke up the atmosphere of the story. The structure of the story is such that the comics are told from the granddaughter's point of view, slowly revealing what's happening. They alternate with hand-written pages from the grandfather, with the quality of the script becoming increasingly deranged and sloppy as his descent into total lunacy becomes more pronounced. The scrawl goes from being written on blank paper to any loose newsprint laying around, giving it a collage effect. This aspect of the comic's visual works quite well, giving insight into the man's initial and reasonable critiques of society to his paranoid, delusional theories about brains being directly manipulated by the government. The character of the granddaughter has clearly been affected by the manipulations, though by the end it's not clear just how this will affect her long term. There's a coldness to her narrative affect that still indicates that she has her own will and opinions, even as she went along with what her grandfather said. Whether or not she will grow up to be a sociopath or her affection for the titular ostrich, a creature scorned by her grandfather for ignoring reality and by her father for being ugly, is left to the reader's imagination. The comic is an ambitious experiment that doesn't completely click on a visual level.

Billy Johnson and His Duck Are Explorers, by Mathew New. Mixing in equal parts Herge', explorer story tropes and absurdist humor, New's comic is both an affectionate send-up of and tribute to the intrepid explorer story genre. Starting the story in the middle of a chase with an irate gorilla, the titular hero and his talking duck friend, New immediately plunges the reader into the adventure and rightly concerns himself only with the facts at hand: there's a young adventurer with a sword (its name, "Mr Jabbers", immediately reflects how silly all of this is), a duck that talks and a gem-encrusted idol that the monkey wants back. It's deft, exciting and funny storytelling, given some weight by his bright but not garish use of colors. As the adventure proceeds, New slowly provides backstory as to why Billy does what he does: he's trying to impress an explorer's society, he's trying to live up to the example of his dead parents, etc. (We never do find out why the duck is a professor or why he can talk, but that's neither here nor there as it relates to the protagonist's primary narrative.) After a crazy adventure involving secret maps, a lost monkey city, treasure and aliens, Billy winds up with no proof of what he just did. The reveal on the final page as to what Billy really does for a living is surprisingly touching and sad without being maudlin. This comic is well-crafted, breezy and adds some surprising depth; it's a comic that I can now easily being transformed into a young adult comics series.

Thirty Days of CCS #17: Jesse Mead, Carl Antonowicz

Carl Antonowicz's The Black Dog & The Hole At The Heart of the World is a magical realist romance story, only the fantasy elements border on the horrific rather than whimsical. It's the story of a first date between Gabi and Caleb and everything that happens after. It's obvious that Antonowicz has thought long and hard about these characters and the ways in which a couple creates a new narrative when they get together. That is, whatever narrative and characters were present in one's life become inextricably linked to the other person's own sense of continuity and "supporting cast", often creating new, branching storylines. Antonowicz writes this concept large when the two characters indeed have crazy things happen to them, and dealing with these things and revealing them to the reader becomes a central point of each issue.

Gabi lives in an apartment with a giant black hole in the wall; her flatmate, Em, simply sits and stares at the hole all day while she provides some minimal level of care for him. Caleb's secret is that every woman he's ever been with winds up dying, though the causes vary and seem unconnected. Except that Caleb sees a magical black dog following him around, working as a kind of silent avatar of death. Antonowicz has quite an ear for dialogue, especially the sort that buzzes around bars. The level of understanding that he has of his characters allows him to spring new facts about them on the reader with a minimum of clumsy artifice; instead, one gets a real sense that both Gabi and Caleb are lonely and a little desperate but see the possibilities down the road for themselves. What I'm less convinced of is Antonowicz's drawing style. It's a naturalistic style that frequently looks striking, but it lacks panel-to-panel consistency. Some of the drawing is downright sloppy in a way that clashes with things in the comic. Some panels and faces are over-rendered while others look hastily sketched, and the way he over-uses shading and grey-scaling is frequently a distraction. It simply seems to be a matter of learning to trust his line and finding ways to simplify things, allowing the more fantastic images (like the creepy black dog) to pop out even more forcefully on the page.

Jesse Mead is another artist whose comics mix personal and fantasy elements. His art has a shambling, pleasing sketchiness to it, threatening to unspool on the page yet just barely hanging together enough to support his interesting page composition choices and character designs. He also excels at drawing evocative nature scenes using a minimum of lines. The Adventures of Juniper Black is a brief and tantalizing comic that starts with a young girl traveling with a party through a dangerous forest, only to see a beloved companion disappear before her eyes. Mead switches from a blue wash to a dramatic yellow spot color in the second chapter, one dominated by his use of blacks. Here, the hardened, adult version of Juniper is out exploring, when she encounters a blob-like mass that surprises her by speaking. This is smart, dense fantasy storytelling; I could easily see Mead hopping on the Cartozia Tales bandwagon, because his storytelling interests would fit that anthology like a glove.

Mead self-describes Black River as being made solely for his own enjoyment, and it shows. It simply seems full of images that the artist enjoys drawing: forests, monsters, swords, bars, etc. Roughly speaking, it's about a group of friends that somehow winds up in a magical world where "leveling up" in the role playing game/video game sense is a real thing when they kill monsters or do something heroic. Again, the art has a relaxed, ramshackle feel to it as Mead studiously avoids over-rendering and places a clear premium on spontaneity. The story itself is equally as relaxed and even in-jokey at times, as Mead is in no hurry to tell the reader too much of how and why the characters got there, instead preferring to concentrate on character dynamics and an array of clever visual jokes. I normally have a strong aversion to the sort of RPG comics that pollute the web, but this comic feels so personal and the high concept is so clever that it quickly won me over.