31 Days Of CCS, #11: Short Comics from Faith Cox, Ashley Jablonski, August Driussi, Michael Albrecht, Coco Fox, Mercedes Campos Lopez

Some short CCS reviews for some short CCS comics: 

a berry silly Love Letter, by Coco Fox. Fox is really good at cute, pun-based comics, and this tiny comic sealed in a tiny envelope (sealed with wax!) is no exception. The puns here are based on food, and it's reflelctive of the kind of kids' comics that she's best known for, as well as her penchant for art and craft projects. 

Life Is A Hiiighway, by A. Driussi. This is a hilarious mini about how doing a Lightning McQueen drag king act changed his gender identity. Hilariously, it caused him to want to be a car, but he settled on being a man instead. The drawing of Driussi in that drag is completely ridiculous, and the whole thing is a very lighthearted (yet true-to-life) account of deciding to transition. The almost lurid color scheme is what makes it work.

The Long Game, by Mercedes Campos Lopez. The thing I immediately noticed about this short bit of autobio is how much smoother her line has become. This is a story about growing up with two brothers and how they were all obsessed with the game pieces of a Pokemon-themed Monopoly game. Campos Lopez detailed sneakily pillfering them from her brothers until they were missed. The segue into adulthood, where her brothers wondered whatever happened to the pieces, led to a very funny wink by the author at the end. 

Laundry & Marginalia, by Michael Albrecht. Albrecht is another CCSer with enormous promise; all of his longer form comics thus far have been very interesting. These short minis show off his cartooning in different ways. Laundry is about a ghost who goes to a laundromat, washing itself in a machine and then coming home dripping wet, hanging itself on a line to dry. Albrecht's pencil work here is just lovely, all in service of a gag. Marginalia is just that: doodles, scribbles, half-formed ideas, exhortations, and moments of despair. 

Life As An Elementary Ghost #4 & #5, by Ashley Jablonski. I love the genre of teachers writing comics about the ridiculous things their kids say in class, and Jablonski's twist on it is drawing everyone as ghosts. It's a clever idea because it conveys the spirit of the idea with simple, stylized drawings without adding too much identifying detail. 

How to be: Mysterious, by Faith Cox. Cox is another big-time talent, and this purports to be the latest volume of a larger How To Be series. Using a delightful rabbit character (doing this like posing in front of a mirror while saying "I am a sexy enigma"), the illustrations belie the dubious instructions of the "manual" in amusing ways. For a quick one-off gag, this was executed with considerable care. 

45 Days Of CCS, #31: Coco Fox

Coco Fox's middle-grade quasi-memoir Let's Go, Coco! is a delightful breath of fresh air in the genre. It's not a surprise that Harper Alley is the publisher, considering that they also published quirky quasi-memoirs by Jarad Greene and Colleen Frakes. Fox's is interesting because her expressive but super minimalistic style feels like it should be aimed at emerging readers, but the themes of budding pre-adolescent feelings and complex friendship dynamics put it squarely into middle-grade territory.

I actually saw Fox present this when I sat in on a class at CCS six years ago. What's interesting is that while Fox hasn't altered their style that much from when I first saw it as a draftsman, it's clear that their cartooning is so much more confident and sophisticated. The original title of the book, Right To Left, was a much better one than the generic title used here, and much more visually evocative of the plot. The plot follows young Coco into her sixth-grade year, where she will have to face life without her best friend Blair, who moves away from their small town in Indiana. Coco decides to face her anxieties and joins the basketball team.

Fox manages to delineate each of her teammates clearly. Maddie is a sarcastic bully who is talented. Coco has a crush on Tami, the team captain and mastermind. Vera is a nerdy goofball. Zander is a non-binary kid. A crucial aspect of the book is that Fox takes the basketball portions very seriously. She explains it in such a way that a non-fan can understand, but when she started to explain what a pick was very early on, I knew she wasn't going to shrink away from the importance of the actual game. This was a smart move because team politics and team drama became an important part of the plot. When Coco accidentally has her wrist broken by her coaching when attempting to demonstrate how to block a shot, her dominant hand is put in a cast. Being forced to use her left hand forms the majority of the action in the back half of the book and directly relates to how her cheerful and non-confrontational nature was used against her by those willing to exploit it or ignore her other emotions. 

There's a lot to sort out in the narrative as a result of having several important characters, but Fox never loses sight of Coco as a well-meaning protagonist who has a lot of learning to do about asserting herself. Her cartooning is so wonderfully alive and expressive, as she's able to generate a big emotional impact with simply-drawn facial expressions and gestures. It greatly helps that the color is a fairly muted two-tone affair, focusing mostly on light purples and shades of orange. Fox's line is strong and steady throughout and never gets lost in the coloring. I love that the book doesn't shy away from Coco's feelings toward one of her teammates, nor does it treat Zander with anything but respect. These days, that's a bold move for a publisher. There is a sweetness and sincerity in this narrative that was clearly entertaining for me, but I imagine that it will truly resonate with its target audience.

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, #14: Lillie J. Harris and Coco Fox

Coco Fox is the rare cartoonist whose non-cartooning activities I'll mention in a review, because her upbeat authorial persona is 100% accurate in real life as well. As a host of various follies in White River Junction as well as a workshop leader (including one for me at SPX), she truly is a walking ray of sunshine. Beneath that enthusiasm, however, is a sharp intellect carefully guiding a reader, student, or audience member in interesting and intentional ways. Fox also understands how the decorative aspects of art add value and delight in projects with rock-solid foundations.

At SPX, she sold "Little Ghouls Fortune Telling Cards," a sort of all-ages card deck based on Tarot principles. Accompanied by a minicomic that gives the interpretations of each card (the Mouse, the Rockstar, the Snail, the Ghost, the Pencil, the Detective, etc.), Fox cleverly devised an uplifting and affirming series of creative prompts. It recognizes the negative aspect of each creative urge (the Detective out of balance is bored) and how to get back into balance (for the Detective, it's "crack open a book, baby!"). Fox also sold a mini fitting into this gently spooky theme called "Ghost Jokes," which features her delightfully cute and expressive line and some deliberately groan-inducing punchlines. It's all packaged in a sheer bag decorated with suns and moons, tied off with a ribbon. The whole thing is a delightful package aimed at pre-teens, but it's fun to look at for any audience--like the best lit aimed at kids. Fox's cartooning seems highly intuitive; having followed her career, she's wisely focused on gesture and expression instead of the drawings themselves. As a result, she's developed an irresistible style that pares down lines to their essence while retaining an idiosyncratic quality that makes the final results cute without being cloying.

Wilderness, by Lillie J. Harris. This story has had a couple of different iterations, but it's always revolved around a young man named Roscoe (also known as Jemiah), who sees things a little differently. His second sight was more prominently featured in the prologue comic for this story; this version leaves some of the supernatural elements behind in favor focusing on its human elements. In particular, it centers around Roscoe, who is traumatized from a car accident that cost him his arm; Beau, a prizefighter with a secret, and his sister Ronny, a drifter who is on the run. 

Roscoe and Beau strike up an unlikely friendship, as Roscoe is a painter and Beau likes to whittle. Beau is out in the woods when Roscoe finds him and recognizes that his new friend is out looking for roots and herbs to help him with sleep. These are Roscoe's "tinctures," and they both recognize that they have ways of expressing themselves that are private and personal. The big reveal is that both Beau and Ronny are werewolves, and she joins her brother for the full moon and their transformation. At its heart, this is a story about generational trauma. When Beau and Ronny take in a little kid werewolf who has obviously been mistreated by her mother, it triggers a lot of old feelings for both. As Beau has tried to figure out what to say to his mother, Ronny has avoided dealing with her presence in her life, until she's forced to confront it when they meet the kid. Roscoe has his own issues with her preacher father who tries to downplay his memories and trauma, and that's why Roscoe and Beau are kindred souls. Harris' nightmarish splashes of color, silent pages of traumatic memories, and visceral violence all coalesce to tell a story of family trying to survive their pasts and making unlikely new connections. It uses the tropes of horror in clever ways that only enhance the psychological aspects of the story. It also doesn't feel quite finished; or rather, that a sequel seems to be needed to explore these stories a bit further.

31 Days Of CCS, #5: The Ladybroad Ledger #5

The Ladybroad Ledger is a broadsheet anthology by women, femmes, and nonbinary cartoonists in Vermont. So says its back page. The original version of this folded a few years ago after four issues, but three CCS students revived it with a bunch of their fellow students and alumni, along with other local cartoonists. The editors are Violet Kitchen, Annabel Driussi, and Sofia Lesage, and it looks like Kitchen handled the editing and Driussi the design. Kitchen took the cover chores and she came up with a powerful, vivid strip filled with violent reds and oranges that exemplified her anger regarding the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and endangering a woman's right to her own body. It's an eye-catching, righteous bit of fury that demonstrates her considerable skill as a cartoonist. She's got every tool needed to become great. 

One of the fun things about a broadsheet is that cartoonists get to work big. Coco Fox's strip about her struggles with gardening is a 16-panel grid that still has plenty of room to breathe because there's so much room on the page. Her loose, scribbly style and extensive use of decorative flourishes along her panel borders aid in depicting the slightly out-of-control nature of gardening and how difficult it is to control. Kristen Shull's autobio comic addresses the problem of worrying about her readers and audience reactions in general. It also has a lot of interesting visual flourishes that reflect her other cartooning interest of fantasy, and the panel design is chaotic in ways that aid its overall aims. 

A lot of Daryl Seitchik's work involves wide-open spaces, and so working big in her story "How To Become A Mermaid" does a great job of using negative space and black/white contrasts. Masha Zhdanova's comic about summer and falling in love has a nice visual gestalt effect that encapsulates a brief, fleeting feeling. Sofia Lesage's comic about summer goes in a radically different direction: it's a depression journal that's an absolute howl. It's a comic about being trapped in one's own worthless, horrifying mind and body, where the possibility of communication that doesn't poison everyone around you seems impossible. Where one's creative impulses are self-muted and whatever distractions that can be generated are fleeting and foolish. She captures all of these feelings and more in a loose grid that emphasizes body language above all else. 

Leda Zawacki's "29 Miles" suffers from murky grayscale reproduction, marring an otherwise spare, emotionally resonant story about a desperate young woman making a hail Mary play to get a ride. Sarah Woodard's "Open Heart" is a slightly heavy-handed but certainly pointed story about the ways in which the absurdity of racism is highlighted in a medical care facility, with people of all backgrounds providing care and treatment. Driussi's own piece spreads across two pages, depicting the raw, visceral, and erotic experience of experiencing live music. The clashing and clanging images and density of the lettering all play into creating this experience for the reader. 

Sarah Oak's strip about her "Daisy Duke" character grossing out a guy who's hitting on her at work is funny, although her cartooning style is cloyingly stylized. Jen Jolls' piece about someone whining regarding a class has a funny punchline, although the cartooning is all over the place. Keilani Lime and Amy Burns' graphic medicine comic about giving blood (I think; it might be just getting a shot) is funny, reflecting how chronic illness can disrupt any experience. Franky Frances Cannon's full page strip about favorite Vermont bars is cluttered and disorganized, but the drawings are so charming and the actual reviews are so funny that it won me over. Finally, Gabrielle Tinnirello's piece on dresses beautifully uses up the space provided with a host of delicate, decorative elements in a fluid, open page layout. 

There are also essays on why making bad comics is a good thing, how to become a cartoonist, an interview with Kitchen, and a long interview with musician and comics fan Neko Case. Overall, the level of cartooning is superior to the original publication, and more of the cartoonists take advantage of the format to produce work that's outside of their normal comfort zones. 

31 Days Of CCS #19: Brainworm 3-5

Brainworm continues to distinguish itself as part of the continuum of CCS anthologies led by students over the years. So much of the CCS experience encompasses opportunities that are difficult to come by later in one's career, and the ability to easily collaborate is one of them. Having access to one's peers as critics, accountability partners, and creative partners as part of a difficult but rewarding experience is one of the biggest draws of living in White River Junction. There's also often an urge for a creative person when faced with an assignment or deadline to want to work on anything except their assignment. I've always had the sense that being able to blow off steam like that in a creative and productive way is a big reason why there have been so many anthologies at CCS over the years, but I'd also imagine having the opportunity to make something as good as Irene or Sundays presents its own challenge.

Brainworm's editor is Kat Ghastly, a second-year student. One can always tell that Ghastly's got a lot of different gears going, and her ability to wrangle consistently solid and interesting contributions is a credit to her as an editor. Brainworm is also a record of sorts that touches four different graduating classes, giving it its own unique identity regarding a specific period of time. Each issue is themed, and the third issue's theme is "Surprises." There are some fun incidental drawings from Leise Hook and Emily Zea, followed by a cute strip from Erienne McCray. The latter involves an octopus trying to get adopted as a pet, and McCray's line and use of blacks drives the cute factor home. Katz's strip combining the myth of Noah and the Trojan War was absolutely hilarious, especially with regard to the mumbled dialogue.

Cuteness and weirdness are interspersed neatly by the editors throughout the comic. Emma Hunsinger's dryly humorous bit about a skeleton woman who maintains high-fashion status is its own self-reflective commentary. Surprise monster payoffs from A.C. Rooks and Rainer Kannenstine mash that cute/horror dichotomy effectively. There's a long series of drawings from a number of artists for a "Trickster Battle Royal" that looks like it was drawn on post-it notes, but the reproduction was too small to discern most of the details. That's too bad, because there seemed to be a lot of clever ideas here. The two MVPs of the issue are Kristen Shull and Tim Patton. The former's autobio comics are among the most heartfelt and authentic I've read, especially with regard to sex and relationships. This one's about the horrible feeling of knowing that someone is in love with you when you don't feel the same way in a casual relationship. Patton's scrawled pencils start with a cutesy metaphor about a monster eating orange-creatures and then quickly turns the subtext into text by way of narrative captions. The reader is informed that all of his comics are really all about sex, love, and above all else: survival. "Absurdist constraints" are just there to hold into place that essential idea of barely being able to hold it all together, with one's vices both helping and hurting. This is as raw as it gets and Patton goes all the way while using an interesting layout that also harmonizes his text with funny drawings.

The theme for #3 is "Bad Romance," which is a wheelhouse category for a number of these contributors. Issy Manley's story takes the theme and bends it first toward romance comics tropes and then to EC horror comics. Of course, it's all about a relatively mundane event (power going out in winter, neighbor being sent to help) that's ratcheted up in everyone's imaginations to create tension and paranoia. Katz's comic uses a combination of extremely spare cartooning in some parts of its open page layout and then beautifully intricate linework to tell the story of an old woman receiving care from a volunteer. The story grows increasingly strange until the truly bizarre climax. Not surprisingly, Shull's comic on the subject is excellent. This is less about a specific relationship and more about her relationship between herself and her own body as she felt herself aging a little. More to the point, it's about the persona she felt she created in response to her feeling less desirable; it worked so well in attracting friends and lovers that she felt it wasn't ever really "her;" she had become her own shadow. Shull's line is perfectly suited for this kind of story. It's clear and slightly cartoony without being overly stylized.

Catalina Rufin, Jess Johnson, and Liz Young all tell variations of the same story. It's about younger versions of themselves finding themselves in abusive relationships where partners told them what to do, what to like, and what to say. They were demeaned and insulted. For each artist, they had to find their own journey to self-actualization. Johnson's story is interesting because she was so shaken by her experience that she wasn't even sure what she liked anymore, so she undertook a furious self-tutorial to figure it out that culminated in getting a cute Adventure Time-themed dress. There's also a trio of monster/horror -related strips from Rainer Kannenstine, Tim Patton, and William Prentiss. Ghastly's own strip involves a couple going to hell that feels highly autobiographical.

Issue #5's theme is "Doppelgangers." This was the most interesting and consistent issue to date. Zea and Daniel Foulfellow both use variations on doppelgangers pursuing or threatening the original versions with dramatic tension. Ivy Allie takes that idea and turns it on its head in a hilarious way. Lillie J. Harris' story about a brother and his twin is a story I've already reviewed back in her recent entry on High-Low, but I wanted to note how it really anchored the rest of the issue, along with Andi Santagata's "The Time Knife". Johnson and Shull both offer stories about how apparently twin versions of themselves were wandering around town, but Johnson at least met hers in real life while Shull was left wondering if they blacked out and dressed like a banana for a weekend.

Tristan Scilipoti's "What It's Like To Have Sex With Yourself" starts as an "erotic visual essay" but winds up being about dysmorphia and self-loathing. It's an unflinching, raw story. Ghastly's "Horrorshow" is about that feeling of "someone else driving the bus" when feeling disconnected and detached from the world. Patton's "Gemini" strip is a variation on Aristophanes' speech on androgyny from Plato's Symposium (humans being one being split into two). Coco Fox's strip about a murderous doppelganger takes a hilarious turn with a beautifully expressive line. Overall, the balance between horror, comedy, and personal stories made this the most fully-realized issue of Brainworm to date.

Thirty One Days Of CCS #2: Daryl Seitchik, Coco Fox

It's still a bit odd for me to think of Daryl Seitchik as a CCS cartoonist, as I've been reading her work long before she matriculated there. It didn't take long for her to reach a fully-formed style, with a stinging authorial voice and a penchant for reality-bending, dream-influence work. The CCS experience seems to have expanded her range of interests a little as a cartoonist, as well as introduced her to the valuable skill of collaboration. That said, her two most recent comics seem like extensions of past work, with slight tweaks.

Dear Missy (published by Robyn Chapman's Paper Rocket Minicomics) is a continuation of her semi-autobiographical Missy comics. The character design for Missy, and Seitchik's characters in general, is a sort of updated take on kids' comics: big heads, small bodies, and almond-shaped eyes with tiny dots. There is a sort of deliberately rigid quality to her characters, making them look like avatars as much as they are people. Seitchik uses tiny shifts in drawings to express a lot of emotion, but in eschewing a lot of gestural expression, she instead focuses on how tightly wound her main character is. This particular comic is part of Missy's journal, and she at first writes about loving writing. The child's voice she uses is heart-rendingly authentic, as she writes a poem to god about her divorcing parents. The poem has a simple, lovely meter and has the sort of misspellings one would expect from a ten year old. The line "Please don't fail me/It's OK if you do" is especially effective, because it underscores both Missy's essential sadness and her capacity for forgiveness. As opposed to the more direct diary entries that made up the previous Missy comics, this one felt like the sort of grand gesture only a child could make.

Caryatid is a more poetic entry from Seitchik. It's about caryatid columns, which were sculpted to look like women. It's a beautiful comic, written from the perspective of one of the columns, her eyes darting back and forth. Seitchik makes great use of gray scale shading here to create an illusion of light. The statue's imagination wanders from goldfish in a bowl to the fish swimming in the ocean to a rose in a sea of bottles. Here, Seitchik switches to bold red watercolors, emphasizing how the rose's initial appearance is like that of blood. The imagination of the column, as a female energy that is nonetheless constantly objectified, naturally turns to images of trying to be safe. She retreats back into sleep only when she has seen and felt that she is holding fire, imagined a head to be an egg and felt the presence of the rose above her. She was seeking totems and items of protection,

Coco Fox is a second-year student at CCS, and she uses an effectively clear drawing style that emphasizes her storytelling, use of gesture and creates an easy, natural charm in her comics. In Right To Left: A Basketball Memoir, she writes about her sixth grade basketball team. Using a 2 x 3 grid and long, looping lines for her character design, Fox injects the story with a level of detail that's unusual for this kind of reminiscence. This is a story about playing the game that's full of game-related details, as opposed to the game being the background for a more character-oriented narrative. Fox writes about her coach accidentally breaking her wrist when teaching her how to block a shot. During that sequence, Fox deliberately blurs her line to reflect that she had to use her non-dominant hand to draw and play basketball. It's written in a sixth grader's voice, which works well because it gets across her enthusiasm and her living in the moment; this approach goes a long way in charming the reader. There's even a suspenseful climax to the story, and Fox's illustrations are especially funny but well-designed during that segment.

Art Makes Me Feel features a young girl in a museum, looking at various works of art. Each drawing has a caption that starts with "This painting makes me feel like..." and goes from there. Examples include "...like I found loose hummus in my pockets" or "I'm French kissing a picture of myself. " Once again, this comic works because of the tiny, charming image of the girl. Her design is simple: a bow in her hair that seemingly levitates above her head, a dress, a pointy nose and long dark hair. The reader is drawn to her more than the works of art, and the subtle expressive differences from page to page A slightly more refined approach could make Fox an ideal candidate for doing children's  comics.