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. 

31 Days Of CCS, #2: Daryl Seitchik & Ellie Liota

Daryl Seitchik has built up an impressive body of work since their first minis over a dozen years ago, and I was especially excited to see another "Missy" comic. These comics are adapted from her childhood diaries, and Seitchik seamlessly works that material into a visual presentation that offers up ironic, funny, cruel, and deeply sad juxtapositions against the original text. As the title suggests, the new Missy 9/11 is Seitchik's impressions of the 9/11 terrorist attack as an 11-year-old in middle school. An entry a few days before the event finds her lamenting her body image and slow going through puberty. The next entry is two days after 9/11, and she's already moved on. The rest of the comic is structured as a news report, starring Daryl as a newscaster clad in a red jacket, first commenting on the school cafeteria's food and then moving on to 9/11 itself. A later story where that particular date had its own family meaning is a fascinating anecdote, and young Seitchik's attempts at creating a sense of gravity with her text are painfully earnest. Seitchik's cartooning, as always, is fluid and assured, and the red, white & blue color palette adds an additional satirical touch. 

Ellie Liota's Foreward is an older comic, done as part of the Ed Emberley assignment at CCS. This assignment calls for students to draw a comic in the style of Emberley: built on circles, squares, and triangles. It's a reduction of line to its basics that asks a cartoonist to focus instead on the cartooning that can be created through this simplicity of form. Liota further constrains things by rendering everything within a six-panel grid. She deliberately plays around with negative space by not introducing any kind of backgrounds--the reader is asked to focus on a tiny figure and what they have to say. Liota essentially turns this into a meta exploration of Emberley's technique, focusing on formal elements as the character brings forth various colorful objects. Later, it becomes meditative, as the figure asks the reader a number of questions. It's playful all the way through, and that sense of play through the motion on the page is the essence of Emberley's work. 

45 Days Of CCS, #9: Ellie Liota, Al Varela and Iona Fox (with Cooper Whittlesey)

Ellie Liota has shown a knack, in her young career for drawing anthropomorphic animals, or animals who are intelligent. Trash Town is a fun little comic that plays up both the comedic elements of a group of animals who are dumpster diving with the grim, visceral realities of what this really means. It's a nice art object as well, with a cover flap of a dumpster revealing the raccoon, opossum, and skunk staring up at the reader. Trash Town is a good example of an effective use of two-track storytelling; the dialogue is free-flowing and light-hearted as the animals dine on their dumpster buffet, but the visuals tell a nastier story. For example, one of the young possums brings their mother a severed human finger. A swarm of maggots is referred to as "disco rice" by Maude the possum rice because of the way they squirm, and their mother Annie the fly yells at the animals for eating her kids. Another great two-track moment is when the raccoon digs through the maggots to find something shocking. The reader thinks it's shock at finding a human corpse, but instead, it's shock at finding wet cat food. Liota manipulates the expectations of anthropomorphism and cleverly creates interesting story beats when the talking animals don't react the way a human would. Her cute character design only helps emphasize this further. 

Al Varela's Young, Dumb & Queer slice-of-life queer romance series is perfectly attuned, josei manga-inspired cartooning. It's colorful and populated by characters with big feelings who aren't afraid to talk about their feelings. The mini Hate My Ex is a good, short example of this, as the characters Tyler and Leslie chat about break-ups from their past. In what is essentially a talking heads comic, Varela keeps the reader's eye occupied with Tyler shooting hoops and then later eating lunch. Leslie is a great character because she recognizes her own self-sabotaging tendencies thanks to her bipolar disorder. Seeing both of their exes dating each other is a hilarious twist that provides a satisfying conclusion for what is just a 12-page comic. Varela's work is much more refined than when I first encountered it a couple of years ago. 

It's been a while since I had seen a comic from Iona Fox, but she's certainly had good reason. She had to deal with advanced-stage rectal cancer and the subsequent quality-of-life issues her survival (happily) entailed. In her funny and frank comic Tough Shit, Fox immediately dives into how the language around cancer is odd and "babyish," perhaps in an effort to talk around a disease that is not only deadly but whose treatments are grueling. Contracting cancer at the same time COVID was at its height, all while negotiating a new relationship, was a tough triple threat for Fox. However, the focus of this short comic is how she dealt with having a colostomy bag after her treatment. It's reflective of cancer treatment in general; there's plenty of attention to the actual treatment, but there's much less concern given to quality of life issues for survivors. A lot of detail (and information) is devoted not only to having a colostomy bag, but also information provided on the kind of underwear that should be worn with, sex, and finally how to discuss it publicly. This is one of the better cancer-related comics I've read, in part because Fox deliberately avoids valorization narratives and treatment-related infodumps in favor of her actual lived experience. 

Fox's line is much more loose and scribbly than I remembered, but it's highly effective and expressive. Abandoning naturalism in favor of crazier scribbles served her narrative well, just as it seems to serve New Thing, a comic she's doing with Cooper Whittlesey. It's about a twitchy man who's going to pick up. a dog at a special dog pound, one with strange rules. This was just four pages from a longer work, but I'm pretty sure Fox is doing all of the drawing here. The slightly grotesque character design fits with the absurdity of the narrative, and I'm excited to see Fox continue this kind of cartooning. 

45 Days Of CCS, #12: Ellie Liota, Clover Ajamie

Clover Ajamie is a CCS student whose comic Bar Back is a lovely little slice-of-life romance featuring queer characters. This isn't so much a story as it is a brief character impression. It follows Cass, a trans man and bartender who's about to go on their shift. Some romantic possibilities are immediately implied, as Cass's partner Andie asks if a cute bartender named Ryan will be there. This is a great example of a comic that uses color to advance the emotional narrative of a story. The base color wash is a coral-pink, and the accents are a lime-green. That's an interesting choice as an accent, because that particular hue tends to be associated with sickly images. Ajamie reimagines it as a sort of loose neon energy (the bar's sign is in this color) that gives emphasis to the romance later in the comic between Ryan and Cass. There's no real tension or story in this book other than romantic tension; nothing bad happens, nor do we learn much about these characters. That's not the point of the story, however; it's a moment in time, the sort of perfect moment that embeds itself in our consciousness, and Ajamie's use of color emphasizes this. 

Ajamie's Fairies, self-described as a work in progress, builds on the romance aspects of Bar Back in the context of a village of fairies that focuses on the teens. The black and white pencils are delicate and almost fragile, using a thin line designed to play up the fabulist qualities of the forest. Ajamie goes back and forth in time, cutting between different characters and winding different stories into each other. It reminds me a bit of Robert Altman-style scene flipping, as Ajamie builds character narrative into the world-building aspects of the story. Every detail we learn about the fairies is part of learning something else about one of the characters. For example, we see one fairy grow angry at her friend for making fun of her grandfather, who builds a device to help him take a shower. The plot focus of this part of the story, a dance for young fairies, is integrated with the embarrassing (to a teen) overattention from a mother, the boasts of fairies as to their attractiveness, and nerves about dancing. Ajamie succeeds by turning the fantastic into the mundane, as the fantasy trappings recede into finding out what makes each character tick.

Ellie Liota's Lamb To Slaughter is the kind of horror comic that at its heart is based on a really nasty gag. The style and boldness of its gore recalls Emily Carroll, but Liota's voice and style are uniquely hers. A big part of that distinction is Liota's immediately establishing this as a story about class as much as it is anything else, and she uses the anthropomorphic animal characters for both literal and metaphorical purposes. It's fiendishly clever, as the story's final, shocking swerve is entirely earned, with any number of clues establishing it along the way. In this story, we see a wolf coming back to her noble family's elaborate and extensive manor house. She's greeted by a rabbit servant and then her mother, who is disappointed by bringing back just two sheep. The reader is then introduced to house intrigue, as the rabbit is the wolf daughter's lover, and they are planning to run away together. However, something is off about the whole thing, even as the wolf mother kills the rabbit after overhearing the conspiracy. That leads the wolf daughter to nearly peel off in fear, until she sees the bust of a ram above the door; with renewed purpose, she trudges back to set up the amazingly clever climax that immediately reveals the title has a double meaning. Liota's cartooning is appropriately visceral, with the soft color tones giving way to the deep red of blood. It's rare that a cartoonist can successfully keep a protagonist's motive hidden for the majority of the story, but Liota pulls it off by shifting the narrative sand with such a fine level of detail that the reader never knows what hits them.