45 Days Of CCS, #33: Edea Lee Giang, Noah Mease

Edea Lee Giang submitted two comics this year, both of which were very interesting but also kind of raw. Coextinct is an interesting zine that's not really a comic--it's illustrated text. That text is typeset, further distancing it from being a comic. It's a fascinating topic, however, starting out with when the California condor was saved from extinction, the California condor louse was exterminated. Giang brings up the point that exterminating a parasite is not as easy a decision as one might think, largely because historically people have done a terrible job in estimating the impact on an ecosystem after such a decision. He leaves us with an open question of whether only "cute" animals deserve to live and right we have to make this decision. This is well-written and well-composed, but the drawing is really weak. Giang either needed to go more abstract or simplified in his drawing or provided better-realized versions of the things he was trying to draw. 

Turbidity Current is a fantasy action romance comic. The character design is ingenious, as the leads are anthropomorphic sea creatures. Youni is a red sea urchin with a penchant for weaponry who brings requested samples for experiments to Mimi, a bigfin squid who's a scientist. Youni's frustrated because Mimi on the one hand has no time for her, but on the other does very thoughtful things for her. She's a puzzle, but when Youni confronts her, they are attacked by a bizarre assassin. The clever fight scene is tied into their romantic argument in a satisfying way. Once again, it's the basics that are problematic in this comic; the color overwhelms the line on almost every page, and this is the rare instance that a legible font would have been been better by the hard-to-read lettering here. Giang clearly doesn't have the drawing chops to do exactly what they want at the moment, but a comic that emphasized the writing and favored clarity would have been preferable. For example, a simple color wash that didn't kill the linework would have been preferable to what felt like trying to add too many elements.

Noah Mease is a first-year student at CCS who shows a great deal of promise. Hymn To Myrrh is a clever, unfolding pamphlet that opens with six voices extolling the virtue of the substance myyrh. Upon opening the pamphlet up all the way, it turns into an illustrated commercial, where every image is that of a different radio extolling the virtues of myrrh in the patter of a radio ad. This isn't quite a comic, but it is interesting and shows off Mease's design chops. "Where Be Dragons" is a tantalizing showcase of Mease's use of color in an open-page layout with their characters the Nameless Mage and his Deer Friend as they explore a territory filled with dragons who have a certain wisdom to convey. Mease's color sense is sharp and uses negative space in interesting ways, especially in when to drop out line and when to emphasize it. Hermes And The Flies is perhaps the most interesting version of the CCS Aesop's fable assignment I've ever read (at least since Joe Lambert's Turtle Keep It Steady). Printed in landscape, it reminds me a little of Tom Gauld, as Mease uses a minimalist line to zip through several fables, most involving the god Hermes, flies or both. Mease is ambitious in adapting eight separate fables, but they're even more ambitious in their transitions between stories. This is smart cartooning, all-around. 

45 Days Of CCS, #32: Edea Giang, F.G. Meanie

It's difficult to get a handle on what kind of cartoonist first-year CCS cartoonist F.G. Meanie is at this point from the two comics they submitted for review. What is clear is that Meanie is a talented writer and thinker about the comics page. In Wobbegong, which seems to be the Ed Emberley assignment, this comic printed on purple paper is about a figure (drawn in stick-figure silhouette) about to be executed for treason/heresy who escapes and goes on a long rampage in their escape. The ending reveals that their heresy may not yield the result they had hoped and makes great use of vast amounts of negative space. Meanie definitely knows what they're doing on the page in terms of composition. 

Turtles South Of Vegas was drawn digitally, and it takes place in a car. There are four stacked horizontal panels on each page, and the figures are just barely sketched out in green and red, respectively. The two men here are Mafia hitmen, and one named Carlo gets in the car and is greeted warmly by his old friend Cazzo. Their job is to bury the body of someone who pissed off their boss. Meanie lays the dialogue on a bit thick, although it's understandable since the story depends on it more than the art, which is more of a visual placeholder and rhythm-setter. Once again, there's a nice twist in the story that feels satisfying. This comic is an interesting visual experiment, but this level of abstraction isn't sustainable for a cartoonist largely writing genre stories. I'm interested in what Meanie's actual drawing and cartooning style turns out to be. 

Edea Giang's three minis are all short, but she gets across a lot about what she's about in a brief number of pages. Giang's relationship with science, nature, and biology seem to be the backbone of her comics about transformation and alienation. The unfolding micro-mini Lanternfly, Lanternfly reminds me a lot of John Porcellino's Mosquito Abatement Man stories, as it starts out with the narrator talking about killing these insects that are dangerous to crops and unfolds into a visceral sense of genuine empathy. The mixture of drawing and diagrams is especially clever. 

Decompression Sickness is a narrative that begins with an underwater creature and the extreme & specific depth it thrives in on top of the page and the near-embryonic form of the narrator at the bottom of the page. As the story proceeds, we move further up from the bottom of the ocean and the narrator takes on an ever-more humanoid form until they move past the ocean, above sea level, and even into orbit. It's a fiendishly clever convergence of science and personal narrative with an eye-catching use of color. Finally, Enigma Taxa is about Barnacle seeking aid from bivalves and crustaceans, both of which reject her, because she's being hunted by Finch and is beset by a parasite. Every crazy thing Finch says about Barnacle, including the legend that they spawn geese, is not only historically accurate but also occurs in the story. Giang's ability to turn science into visceral, jaw-dropping action is a gift. There's a lot of cleanup regarding lettering and other compositional issues, of course, but Giang is ready for much more ambitious narratives.