31 Days Of CCS, #8: Cuyler Keating

While Cuyler Keating's comics have fantasy elements, it would be more accurate to say that she's really a medievalist. What that translates out to is a great deal of misery, death, disease, and squalor. That's certainly the case in the first two issues of her series Oblivioun, but Keating takes that a step further. The setting is a world where the empire is in ruin, plagued by a disease that ultimately results in the afflicted losing their memories. This is worse than death for some--the utter obliteration of self and memory. 

Keating centers this around two scavengers: a one-armed former knight named Ollie and his young friend Remy. They pick over battles and gravesites in an effort to get enough metal and jewelry to get food and lodging. Their relationship is familial, with an easy sense of teasing between the two. The first issue sees them finding armor and weapons they can sell, but encounter an armored knight who begs them to tell him what his name is. The second issue finds them selling their scavenged loot, with Ollie attempting to woo the daughter of the smith. 

Keating's line is fluid, with a focus on sharply delineated character work. Ollie is drawing with a rakish grin but also an occasionally hollowed-out stare. Remy is still young and full of hope, but one gets the sense that Ollie sees no future. Indeed, the red-soaked flashbacks, full of violence and past battles, reflect that Ollie welcomes the idea. One gets the sense that Remy is the only thing keeping Ollie tethered to reality and day-to-day survival. It feels like there's a long way to go in this series, and things are only going to get worse. Keating has a strong sense of design on top of everything else, and the decorative aspects of the cover and inside covers adds to the overall aesthetic of the comic. 

31 Days Of CCS #2: Cuyler Keating

Cuyler Keating had two entries for 31 Days of CCS this year. First is an all-color autobiographical mini titled Light Left On. There are three brief stories that dip into comics-as-poetry territory. "March 19th, 2020" is a COVID/lockdown comic, the kind I've seen a lot of in comics form. The clever bit of imagery here was noting that the annual spring infestation of ladybugs was met with apathy. Keating then got a bit too on the nose, talking about the Trump administration and the lockout itself; this was understandable, but jarring, given the way she had set up the strip. 

The other two stories, "Worn Down," and "Room For The Road," get at her overall aesthetic a little more directly. Written after moving into a remote farmhouse in Vermont, these comics mix word and image together seamlessly, vibrantly employing colored pencil to add contours, depth, and weight to the page. They're about a lot of things all at once: the new house, the sense of distance, her husband, and her own attempts at embracing this new, rural lifestyle. This type of comic is a departure for Keating, and it was interesting to see her flex a different kind of comics muscle, even if she's not completely comfortable with it as of yet. 

Returning to her wheelhouse, culturally subversive fantasy comics, Keating also submitted the second issue of Food For Worms. This is an epic about a society of anthropomorphic frogs living in a fearful time as a poisonous "miasma" surrounds their environs. (Even when not writing about the pandemic, Keating is writing about the pandemic.) The wild card here is a young human woman named Margeaux, who was discovered in the forest as a baby and raised by the ruler of the Font, a sort of holy religious order. 

Keating is exploring a particular kind of intersection: an ancient theocracy in its crumbling decline, confronted by an existential threat. Margeaux is in the middle of all this, as she's treated as a curiosity at best and a wage slave at worse. In the second issue, Keating starts to pull some narrative strings together, as Margeaux makes it clear that she wants to learn how to make the perfume that protects people from the toxic air of the miasma. Beyond that, her yearning is an ontological one; she wants to know all of the secrets of the frog people, in part because she has no real idea what she is. "What am I?" is as basic a question as it gets, and Margeaux faces not only opposition in understanding this, but a racist undercurrent that asks if she even deserves to live. It is othering painted with a broad brush, but I sense that Keating is going further than simply exploring that surface-level narrative. 

While the story fairly cries out for color (especially the scenes with stained-glass depictions of religious figures), Keating's use of grayscale-shading is highly effective. Of course, none of that would work without her excellent character design. She truly understands how they frog people look, act, and move on a fundamental level. She's able to render them in an entirely serious way, even if they look cute. This is part of the point, I believe; their own self-perception is utterly grave, because why wouldn't it be? This marked the end of chapter 1 of the larger story, and Keating laid down a great deal of character development and a framework for the world. Now she's going to ask the key question: what does the protagonist want? She wants to make the perfume, and she's stolen a book that will let her do so. The rest of the story will no doubt follow from this, and I'm eager to see how it will play out. 

31 Days Of CCS, #4: Cuyler Keating

A large percentage of CCS grads tend to either specialize in memoir or fantasy comics. In both cases, however, their takes are often revisionist and subvert typical tropes. That's especially true with regard to fantasy, and Cuyler Keating is an exemplar of this approach. In the first issue of her new series, Food For Worms, Keating cleverly builds a world where a society of anthropomorphic frogs is set up with an arbitrary and cruel moral system. It's set against the only human who's part of their society, albeit in a subordinate role that is vicious wage slavery at best and outright slavery at worst.

The human is treated with disdain and abuse, constantly called ugly, lazy, unclean, and "webless." This series of jabs would be too on-the-nose if Keating wasn't careful to make the frogs' world feel so lived-in and desperate. The connections to the global pandemic are there as well, as a plague cutting through their population is something they are constantly aware of--and one merchant pointedly only masks up when the young woman approaches him to do business. Keating builds this world through lively line art backed up by extensive use of grayscale shading. The atmosphere is almost oppressive, even in scenes depicting great beauty.

There's also a lot of Catholic-style imagery in this comic, as the society is clearly a theocracy at least in part. The stained-glass images depicting spiders, foxes, and other creatures are beautiful and alien, giving a glimpse into the psychology of this world. Most of the second half of the book is devoted to the human trying to make her way through the world, internalizing it when people call her lazy or stupid. Like many slaves, she's been forced into devotion of the local religious images and takes it as seriously as anyone, hoping for her own miracle. Keating says a lot by allowing the reader to connect the dots, building on the story's hysteria regarding their plague by following the words and actions of the frog people rather than trying to impose narrative captions on the story. The result is a smart, challenging fantasy story with plenty of moral ambiguity and a lot to chew on. 

31 Days Of CCS #8: Cuyler Keating, April Malig, Lillie J. Harris

Lillie J. Harris is a first-year CCS student, and their comics to date reveal an interest in working with dense blacks and shadows in particular. Jawbreaker is a short comic that uses what appears to be the image of a roughly-drawn moon in a night sky, until it sinks and the sky and it's revealed that it's a jawbreaker--a kind of chewing gum. The person getting it is horrified when it comes out, it's warm, and it has a face. This is just a little horror warmup of a comic, but it establishes how Harris likes to use light/dark contrasts in order to establish mood. Gemini is another more explicitly horror comic about a boy with an identical twin named Elijah who wore a mask--and his brother was warned never to look at his face. In a manner similar to Nate Powell and Steve Bissette, Harris uses a dense, scribbly line that soaks up light on the page. The visuals heighten tension in such a way that just some hints at Elijah's true form are all that's necessary to reveal the final fate of the narrator.

Harris' Aesop's fable assignment is The Eagle And The Beetle, which they used to counterpoint against the story of the Kennedy family and its many tragedies. Just as the Eagle ignored the Beetle's efforts to protect a hare, so too did Joe Kennedy lobotomize and institutionalize his eldest daughter Rosemary, afraid that her behavior would hurt "his family's political career". Just as the Beetle got revenge by pushing out the Eagle's eggs from its nest, so too did the other Kennedy children suffer all sorts of tragedies. Harris keeps it simple and naturalistic here, relying more on grayscale than shadow. Finally, Maggie Doll is a beautifully-drawn comic with heavy atmosphere about a young woman finding her childhood doll in the attic. All of the memories, good and bad, come rushing back at her, but it's ultimately a positive experience as she reconnects with those memories and her love of the doll. Once again, Harris' use of pacing is sharp and tense, and their more naturalistic figure work is top-notch.

April Malig has mostly been making interesting Risograph zines with commentary on photographs for the last few years, and Near Constant Background Noise continues that trend. It's in many ways a summation of this period, as it directly addresses the frequently nihilistic quality of her musings. She asks the pertinent question if it's a distraction to search for happiness, or if there's a "possibility of a possibility" of hope. The bright, almost garish colors indeed provide both a distraction and an attraction on their own; they are pleasing in and of themselves. Malig's first comic in a few years, Rotten Roses, actually carries on this theme as it's about believing in close friendships. Mixing internet imagery with real-life interactions, Malig knowingly manipulates appearance and reality as part of a sense of personal performance. There's a group of friends living in a house who bond over a particular manga that spawned several adaptations, and their obsession was the lingua franca of their relationships. It was a way of highlighting and protecting the friendships from the ennui and despair of the outside world. Malig's character design is killer and the impact of her use of soft pastels gives the whole experience a gentle touch.

Cuyler Keating's The Attempt is a collection of short, experimental comics. "Jellyfish" goes all-out in presenting the reader with a dizzying array of images and visual approaches. On the first page, there are multiple colors in different panels and a lack of a traditional grid. The second page is a black-and-white splash page, with gray tones giving the pool in the water a double-exposure effect. The next two pages maintain that same shadowy tone, only the water in the pool has been replaced by jellyfish. It's a brief nightmare of a comic. An exquisitely-drawn silent story sees a skeleton in armor coming back from the Crusades, only the entire town consists of skeletons in regular clothes. The naturalism of the story is what brings that feel of death so close to the reader, a death that is only vaguely perceived. "Spaces" is a nice bit of comics-as-poetry, using the rhythm of a four-panel grid to define the physical and emotional spaces between her and her partner on a road trip. Keating's use of color is much sharper and more purposeful here than in her first story. "Full Formed" is about her wish to have been born fully-formed like in mythology, and once again Keating's deft touch brings famous images to life in an animated fashion. There's no stiffness in her line, as subtle soft tones accent her drawings without making them too fuzzy. The open-page layout is extremely clever, with the negative space working to push time forward on the last page in particular, as Keating comes to term with growth.