45 Days Of CCS, #23: Riffraff

The Gutter is a substack anthology that mostly publishes very short stories or serials. Of late, they've gotten more serious about things, going to a paid subscription model for comics in 2025 and releasing their first print anthology, Riffraff, in 2024. The anthology also had a digital component, but I'm going to focus on the print edition here. 

It's edited by two CCS alums, Cathy Mayer and King Ray, and there are several CCSers who contributed stories. Emil Wilson opens with "Recycling Husbands," which is fitting since this issue's theme is "Trash." Wilson leans into the concept from the beginning, as a wife puts her "husband on the curb with the recycling. I decided I didn't need a husband anymore." It follows the logic of this statement in an even-handed and slightly dispassionate way, as she finds the husbands are "crushed into compressed blocks." Eventually, some of her friends get recycled husbands. Wilson's art is partly scribbly and partly looks to be inspired by advertising art designed to invoke a 1950s America feel, but the power reversal here is amusing and understated. 

Sofia Lesage's "Digital Wasteland" cleverly uses the short format with a repetitive gag that lands because it's only six pages. The protagonist is beset by a buxom bot begging for her attention while she scours the internet for something else, only the digital wasteland is a real one. This is a rare example where a digital font (for the bot) is an effective storytelling tool. The ending doubles down on all of this, as the protagonist's desperation leads her to make a critical mistake. 

Ana Two once again proves their capacity for innovation with "Throw Your Past Away." Once again, it's a smart use of a limited number of pages, as Two uses the Riso format to create a ghostly, foggy background. The protagonist talks about leaving messages behind on napkins revealing the sensation of wanting to be thrown away, to be drained, to be hollowed out of their depression and turned into something new. It's a striking combination of spectral images and beautifully concrete text. 

Violet Kitchen's "Birdhouse" reveals yet another strong story for the young artist, who has been on an incredible roll. Kitchen's line is scribbly and expressive; it reminds me of a certain kind of cartoony naturalism from artists like Michel Rabagliatti. However, their understanding of composition is incredibly advanced. Here, the open-page layout of hipster friends attending a garage sale transforms into one of them feeling the sincerity of an old woman's joy in the simplicity of her understanding of beauty. Kitchen's ability to subtly evoke emotion through visual cues is extraordinary.

In the other stories, Faye Harnest's "Books" makes interesting use of shapes in discussing how she felt when the books she was forced to dispose of weren't taken by anyone. Stephanie Guralnick's story about dumping out one's heart is less a story than a tone poem. Betsy Hudson's story of an unhoused man building his own tarp castle in the alley next to some friends' apartment was touching, especially with the tender, scribbly line. Abi Inman's story of a robot and a bird feels a little familiar, but it's well-executed. Quinn Stephens' ridiculous "Rick Garbage" short is just the injection of ridiculousness that this otherwise fairly sincere and serious anthology needed. Overall, this is a very well-edited anthology that makes good use of its theme while providing enough variance to prevent things from getting tedious. 

45 Days Of CCS, #6: Go Press Girl!

Today's entry is the initial output of an exciting new publisher, Go Press Girl! Spearheaded by Violet Kitchen (editor) and Rachel Bivens (designer), they already have a lot of publishing experience in resurrecting The Ladybroad Ledger, the broadsheet anthology featuring women and non-binary folks from Vermont. Both of them lean toward poetic comics with strong emotional narratives, and their initial entries here are no exception. 

Ugly Bread is from Bivens and done on a Risograph. It's a beautiful comic about the creative process and te goals that matter most: how it connects to others. What's especially clever is the narrative style: it starts as a kind of narrative recipe before easing into more general commentary on baking as a highly personal craft. The emphasis is on the connections made: the smell of the bread, sharing it, nourishing yourself and others, and above all else--repeating it. It is the repetition that hones craft. It is the intent that creates meaning, even if it is not "perfect." The process is physical and deliberate, and the results of getting better in public as a baker are more important than what the bread looks like. It's a wonderful metaphor for cartooning or any kind of creative process, but Bivens' background as a baker is uniquely suited to executing it. There's a beautiful sequence where flour billowing up is represented by line erasure, an ingenious solution that shows how minimalism can be used so effectively in cartooning. Her cartooning throughout is nuanced and sensitive, with an emphasis on gesture and facial expressions. 

How To Fall In Love. is by Kitchen, and it sees her truly leveling up in terms of the dynamism of her line. Printed in landscape, Kitchen takes advantage of all that left-to-right space using second-person narration, even as she's writing about her own stand-in character. This is a story about how the desperate need to connect can lead to losing one's own self. Writing "you are a space to be occupied," there's a brilliant sequence where the figure turns herself into a welcome mat, desperately seeking the attention of the people who come into her space, even as their presence also revolts her. Later, there's another sequence about being touch-starved, and how they must resist the urge to fall in love with their hairdresser. That segues into another brilliant sequence of an intimate encounter where the stand-in is drawn in red and the other figure is in black, and she can't quite touch him or be touched. The ending is a howl, as the figure ignores the narrator in search of their own solutions, walking into a crimson sea of hands. Kitchen is so clever as a cartoonist, constantly finding new visual solutions to solving the emotional narrative of this story that deeply resonate with the reader. Kitchen's talent has been obvious for a long time, but she's upping her degree of difficulty in a way that doesn't feel ostentatious; instead, she's expanding her visual toolbox in exciting and innovative ways. 

Finally, fellow CCS grad Cathy Mayer's The Last Time I Saw Deborah is also emotionally complex and visually compelling, but she does it in the confines of a more conventional narrative. This one is a slow-burning mystery, and the fact that it's a mystery isn't even apparent until the end. It's about a camping trip to a lake undertaken by two women who are childhood friends. The nameless narrator is clearly worried about her longtime friend Deborah, whom she calls Dee. There are some lighthearted shenanigans surrounding a B&B, swimming, and camping, but there's a lurking darkness underneath. It starts when the narrator asks Dee about her old car, and it's revealed that Dee's malignant husband Ted wrecked it while drunk. Other questions about her life are deflected, even as Dee reflects back on "Bernadette," the playground boat they used to play on that offered infinite possibilities. For Dee, all of those possibilities were clearly whittled down. The central mystery of the story is one that Dee can't confess to her friend, but she finds a number of different ways to clue her in, the final one being giving her the keys to the car to look for something and the narrator opening up the trunk. Mayer's green wash and beautifully sketchy line are wonderfully expressive, and her character design was perfectly evocative of the narrator who was emotionally open and Dee, who was closed off. It's Mayer's use of restraint--the lines she doesn't draw, the character details she doesn't reveal--that make every emotional clue feel so much more potent.