31 Days Of CCS, #5: The Final Dot

The Final Dot is one of the CCS group anthology projects. This one features Dylan Sparks, Ellie Liota, Michael Albrecht, and Anna Passlick. I was excited to get a copy at SPX, because I've never seen one of these outside of the library at CCS. Looks like the take on the assignment was a take on Harvey Comics characters. The artists, who shared tasks like in an old mainstream comic, chose to do a dark parody of Little Dot. The results, which include multiple pages of fake ads, are absolutely unhinged. Little Dot, for those unfamiliar with the concept, really liked dots and things with dots on them. In the first story, she meets an appaloosa (with speckled "dots"), and it kicks her in the face. In a later story, she accidentally puts her friend Little Lotta in the hospital stirring up a beehive, and her parents take away her dots..

This leads Dot to skin her dalmation, show up to visit Lotta, and realizing that the colors in the strip were actually Ben-Day dots. Dot starts absorbing all of the color dots in a bid to be eternal, but Lotta grabs a shotgun from a hilarious Daisy rifle ad and shoots Dot in the chest. The quartet of artists takes the concept absolutely all the way, using metafictional humor in a way that feels earned by diligently building up not just the basic premise but also the presence of the ancillary material. Some of the line art is a little wobbly here and there, but they otherwise just nail the features of your average Harvey comic before turning it into a sci-fi/horror story. I'm curious as to the division of labor here, especially since I know and like the work of Sparks, Liotta, and Albrecht. 

45 Days Of CCS, #28: Robyn Smith, Dylan Sparks, Kat Ghastly

Kat Ghastly's I Hunger may be short, but she packs a lot of conceptual power into its very silly punchlines. Its central idea--"What upset Cthulhu's tummy?"--is very dopey but also funny, and her gross-out drawings match the grossness of her puns. "Cult chowder," "Peopleroni pizza," and finally "This comic" are all culprits. This is like a wonderful Lovecraftian Garbage Pail Kids set. The sickly green cover is a nice indicator of its contents.

Robyn Smith's Night Fever won an Ignatz award for Outstanding Artist in an issue of the anthology Gladiolus. This is just an eight-page story, but it packs a wallop. Smith is best known for illustrating other people's stories, but she's actually an excellent writer in any number of genres. Her work has an edge that's certainly evident in this story of a group of college friends who drop acid at an outdoor Halloween party. They invite their friend Leanna to come out and meet them, and through a series of chaotic events, something horrible happens: she is dosed without her knowledge by a man she doesn't know. Smith cuts the story off before the inevitable consequences of this (something she's especially adept at--her own writing is filler-free), but the nightmarish visuals tell the reader all they need to know. 

Gallant Valor is Dylan Sparks' senior thesis, and it's one long play on gender and fantasy tropes. It's about a romance between a knight named Serim and an anthropomorphic dragon named Pet. That romance, as we learn in flashbacks, was born out of controlling and abusive relationships. For Pet, it was the king who treated her as more of a thing than someone who belonged in his court. For Serim, it was her devotion to the queen that obliterated boundaries by using her as a sex object. In both examples, it was a case of unequal power relationships taken to extreme levels. For Serim, the queen's need for total devotion led to the knight's death. For Pet, she defied her surrogate father's control and threats that she'd never fit in so she could find her own way. Finding and accepting each other was the key to their own personal transformations, as they started on their goal of marauding through the kingdoms. This was an ambitious comic, and some of the storytelling felt muddled. That includes some of the character design, which was a bit all over the place, but Sparks' line was also inconsistent. That said, Sparks nails the big shocks in this comic, and the romantic (and unsettling!) ending feels entirely earned. 

45 Days Of CCS, #5: Dylan Sparks and Sage Clemmons

Dylan Sparks is a 2024 CCS student whose cartooning occupies the space between love and horror. In particular, their comic Echoed Embrace focuses on body trauma that makes it nearly impossible for the unnamed protagonist to relax and settle into having sex with someone they truly desire. The way Sparks went about this is truly clever. Each attempt at intimacy starts off well, until their being touched summons the physical memory of the hand of a previous abuser/assailant. The protagonist is in black & white, their lover is in pink, and the many disembodied hands from their memories are dark red. Every attempt fails, because when things start to get more intimate and intense, so too does the memory of being held down, squeezed, and even choked. At each failure point, the fantasy respawns like a video game, as the protagonist tries again and again. It's not until the protagonist confronts the memory in a very specific way that things turn out differently. Sparks' line is sketchy and a little rough, but their cartooning is excellent, as they smartly take the tools and tropes of video games and apply them to PTSD. The frustrations and desires expressed are told in an achingly vulnerable but entirely no-nonsense way. 

Tryst is a fantasy story that nonetheless has a lot of similar elements to Echoed Embrace. While it's about a dragon woman who's captured by sadistic men, it's also at heart about a relationship. When the dragon woman's boyfriend shows up, she breaks out of her bonds and brutally kills her captors, all in an effort to show off. However, the narrative follows the boyfriend's thought processes, as he wonders after seeing that she was injured when a captor slapped her if what value he had if he couldn't protect her. It was a perfect moment of male fragility and ego, projecting his own insecurities on her. He does manage to catch himself in the end, but the reversal of gender expectations and roles is clever. The use of what appears to be crayon adds to the fantastical quality of the comic, as crayon tends to make exaggerating the visceral qualities of color much easier. 

Sage Clemmons' Everyone Is Sorry is done in gorgeous green colored pencil. A publication from Parsifal Press (Daryl Seitchik & Dan Nott's new press), this isn't so much a narrative as much as it is a meditation on remorse and what being "sorry" means. It's a sort of comics version of a  tone poem, where on each page, a different person expresses being sorry in a deliberate, downcast manner. There's a tongue-in-cheek quality to the comic as well, like when it's stated that "Your professors are sorry" and on the next page it says, "(very sorry)." It gets more and more abstract, as even tenderness and laughter are sorry. The final image, of a hand offering up a handkerchief, is another hint as to the mix of humor and absurdity with the central, grave concept. Is being sorry feeling remorse? Is it a willingness to offer reparations? Is it grief? Is it self-serving? Clemmons offers no answers, other than going back and reading it again, and enjoying their excellent, naturalistic cartooning.