45 Days Of CCS, #1: Emma Hunsinger

If you're a cartoonist and you're trying to make actual money in the profession, it's been fairly well-established that the only genres that are growing and paying real money are middle-grade and kids' comics. Even the young adult genre was long ago oversaturated in the market, especially as more and more young cartoonists have emerged. As such, while I was happy to see that the very talented Emma Hunsinger got a middle-grade deal with Harper Collins, I was also a bit sad to see her perhaps limited in a genre that has fairly exacting rules. 

I needn't have worried. Her debut How It All Ends is not only one of the most sharply-realized narratives about the middle-school years I've ever read, it actually feels like it's on the same continuum as her CCS thesis project, Chunk. That was a beautifully-cartooned, emotionally complex, and nuanced story about awkward love relationships and friendships at art school. How It All Ends is a similarly layered story about a young girl trying to establish her identity after skipping a grade and going straight to high school. Hunsinger's loving depiction of Tara Gimmel, her sister Isla, and Tara's delightfully overactive imagination is a visual feast and a master class on how to write dialogue. 

Hunsinger's style is a delightfully expressive series of scribbles and scrawls that emphasizes gesture, body language, and the relationship of bodies in space above all else. She avoids a traditional grid in favor of a more fluid open-page layout, but her attention to story flow is impeccable. Her big gimmick for the book is that Tara is a daydreamer, imagining all sorts of fanciful (and sometimes anxiety-inducing) scenarios that allow Hunsinger to really cut loose in fun ways. Tillie Walden did the colors for the book, and Hunsinger wisely used a mostly two-tone scheme. When Tara is engaged with the world, the color wash is a foam-green. When she's off on a flight of fancy, the wash is a variant of red. Happier fantasies are lighter shades of red, but anxiety is closer to brick red. This simple distinction does so much work in the book, both narratively and emotionally. 

Hunsinger gets out of her own way with regard to the plot. She keeps it bare-bones simple, as the narrative is entirely about Tara adjusting to going from 7th grade to 9th grade, and how difficult this process is. Her own anxiety is in the way, but it's less a plot device to be overcome and more a chance for Tara to deeply examine herself. Her older sister Isla (two years ahead) is a crucial character: something of a guide and a mentor, but she's going through her own stuff. The way that Tara relates to her family is joyful, especially being able to play pretend with her toddler brother. Having that loving foundation makes a later conflict with Isla feel raw and real. They fight (physically and otherwise) the way that only siblings can fight. 

Hunsinger's attention to detail with regard to every character allows the book to breathe and develop in a way that feels organic, instead of seeing the Lesson inherent in these sorts of books from a mile away. The rowdy boys in Tara's English class who slowly come to love the material, the put-upon teacher who learns how to respond to the aggressiveness of the boys, Isla's friends interest in Tara's blossoming friend Jessup all give Tara meaningful characters and situations to bounce off of. Isla is a secondary character (albeit an important one), but she is fleshed out in such a specific and delightful way that I would have been perfectly content reading a book entirely about her. 

All of that sets up the most important parts of the book: Isla's crush on a boy named Joel, and Tara's budding friendship with a girl named Libby. It's clear to the reader regarding Isla's crush, but Tara is not only oblivious to it, she's oblivious to her deeper feelings for Libby. Hunsinger depicts this ache in such a beautiful way precisely because these feelings are messy, complicated, and Tara is clearly not ready for them. Much of the book consists of her confronting the idea that she's not ready for high school and not ready to grow up. She vacillates between pretending she's something she's not at times and feeling as though she's doomed, with a level of catastrophization that is frequently hilarious (but also very much a symptom of OCD). Learning to come to terms with her identity along with pumping the breaks on the idea of romance was such a well-suited ending, and I especially liked the way that Hunsinger avoided romantic cliches and plot entanglements. This is a remarkably assured debut that could easily be part of a series, or I could see Hunsinger doing something completely different but equally compelling. 

31 Days Of CCS #10: Emma Hunsinger, Kazimir Lee

Kazimir Lee's soft, chunky, and warm cartooning style is perfect for emotionally intimate comics. As such, this made him a perfect illustrator for Blue Deliquanti's story SCFSX!, a porn novella featuring Miles and his trans partner Honesty. Lee's work is in what I call the Sorese School (after Jeremy Sorese), along with Kevin Czap, Sophia Foster-Dimino and a few others. It emphasizes warmth and fluidity in its figures, which makes it perfect for depicting trans people in particular. This is a funny story about a couple who go to a sex party with a science-fiction theme. Deliquanti truly nails the fundamental nerdiness of much of the swinging/poly community, and Lee grounds it while managing that thin line between campy costumes and geeky behavior and full-out eroticism.

The story follows Miles being shy but game in trying to fulfill Honesty's needs and being surprisingly receptive to the scene. Meanwhile, Honesty panics a bit when she realizes that the public nature of the scene, while a turn-on, triggered some latent anxiety and pre-programmed self-loathing. This was managed in a sensitive yet super-hot scene in a public park that expertly addressed all of the emotional issues in a heartening way. This is a comic where people are heard and seen in the ways they want and deserve, and the communication needed for sex that's both physically and emotionally fulfilling is a crucial part of the narrative. It also is not only explicitly about queer perspectives with regard to sex, it also centers the experience on trans characters in a way that feels completely organic.

Second year student Emma Hunsinger made a splash in the New Yorker with "How To Draw A Horse," a marvelously deadpan and personal bit of storytelling. It's a story about longing and hiding that longing as one tries to gain the attention of someone else. For the narrator, it was trying to get the attention of another girl in class through these horse drawings, which are enormously difficult to do. Hunsinger's scribbly scrawl of a line is fantastically expressive and immediate, reminding me a little of Saul Steinberg.

Her book Chunk delves into a group of students in a sculpture class at art school. Plenty of people have done art school comics, but Hunsinger's is not only one of the best I've ever read with regard to the subject, it's one of the best comics of 2019. It's done in the style of a personal journal or diary of a bushy-haired student named Charlotte. Her narrative appears on the page with ruled lines underneath to give it a quick visual signifier that it is a journal. The book, in many respects, recapitulates the themes of her short story and replays it in several different ways. The theme of the book is Charlotte's quest to understand what makes a person special, because if she became special, she would have the courage to talk to her T.A. in her sculpture class, Crystal. Crystal was cool, went to Yale, and had great hair...which put her out of Charlotte's league in her own view.

That one connective thread leads to her roommate Tanya's eventual romance with another student, Li, whom Tanya dubbed as special. When asked about it, Li notes that she's not special, but that this guy named Darren is. So they track him down, and he is indeed the kind of magical presence who just exudes a sort of manic awesomeness. When Charlotte realizes that his specialness is innate, she just gives up...and gets a big surprise. Hunsinger's pacing, use of negative space, and almost painful verisimilitude with regard to dialogue make each page a special pleasure to read.

Her skill with regard to depicting emotion and exaggeration of movement is particularly noteworthy. There's a sequence where Charlotte sees Tanya working manically on some drawings, surprising her (lots of popped-out eyes here), and seeing that she drew seven pages of having sex with Wonder Woman. It is both hilarious and raw, as so much of this comic is, with regard to people trying to figure themselves out. It's thematically complex, with each character given a unique interior life. It's visually sophisticated, with the composition of each page deceptively simple yet all part of the book's gestalt. Hunsinger's comic is a mixture of restraint and excess as a storyteller, and her ability to dole them out when appropriate is her greatest gift as a storyteller.

31 Days Of CCS #2: Gilmore Girls Fanzine and Doug Catches Up

A time-honored CCS tradition is creating fanzines for favorite TV shows, bands, and other pop culture. It's a very CCS thing to do, as it's collaborative, it's project-oriented, and it provides a fun way to blow off creative steam when not working on one's thesis. Considering that all of the equipment needed to whip out a comic is available at their fingertips in CCS's amazing lab, the urge for a project like this can be satisfied quickly. It also seems like fellow Keren Katz is at the center of a lot of these projects these days, be it comics or wacky dance performances or musicals. One person can mean a lot to a community as a catalyst, and Katz is truly a miraculous walking whirlwind.

Most of the fanzines from CCS have been about shows I don't know. However, the Gilmore Girls Fanzine (edited by Katz and Jess Johnson) is very much in my wheelhouse as a show I both love and love to hate. Of course, living in a small, quirky Northeastern town like White River Junction makes it easy to relate to the small, quirky setting of Stars Hollow in Gilmore Girls, with its vast array of cranks, weirdoes, dreamers, and artists. The heart and soul of this comic is Jess Johnson, who edited it but also provided a lot of interstitial material to bind its stories together. There's a funny segment imagining Lane, the childhood best friend of Rory, one of the main characters in the show, going deep into different kinds of manga to read in the same effortless, encyclopedic way she knows about rock. Johnson even ties this into Lane joining a comics circle in the same way she joined a band in the show.

Natalie Wardlaw zeroes in on Rory's romantic life and all of the horrible men she dated. She turned up the angst and even the undercurrent of physical threat presented by her Stars Hollow boyfriend Dean, based on a scene where he tangled with a bad boy at Rory's private school.  Rachel Ford's funny story digs in on the small character details and makes fun of the way that Lorelai, the mother of Rory, pretends to be humble but secretly revels in her relative glamorousness in town. Julia Alekseyeva talks in all seriousness about how seeing a bookish girl on television was very important to her as a teen, and she longed to have the same kind of relationship with her mother that Rory did with Lorelai. Pop culture and simply having the feeling of being seen can have a powerful effect.

Of course, funny strips by Emma Hunsinger and Kat Ghastly balanced that devotion as they imagined what the show was like, having never watched it. Ghastly imagined that cannibalism eventually would become a plot point. Isabel Manley and Ortal Avraham both get at the heart of the show: that putative protagonists Rory and Lorelai are both self-centered narcissists in the same way that Lorelai's mother Emily is. The tenor of this fanzine is at once loving, devoted, skeptical, and mocking: a perfect description of the Gilmore Girls fanbase. Now, pardon me while I start my essay on why Rory and Lorelai were the real villains of the series...

Kori Michele Handwerker and Pat L's Doug Catches Up is less a fanzine than it is fan-fiction, imagining an older Doug Funnie returning to his old town of Bluffington years after he had moved away. Doug was an interesting cartoon in the way that it addressed pre-teen angst and issues in a direct, honest manner, even if its visuals and details were absurd and cartoony. That's lost a bit in this black and white comic (although the cover preserves it), but the creators otherwise remain true to the spirit of the show. Doug has a long talk with his former bully, Roger, where he reveals that he's bisexual and engaged to another old friend of Doug's named Chalky. The entire comic has a tone of gentle forgiveness, understanding, and self-examination. As Handwerker notes in the afterword, the comic isn't a manifesto about the true nature of the show's characters or about forgiving bullies; rather, it's a logical extrapolation of how some of the kids might have turned out and dealing with issues that are more openly spoken about in today's culture (like coming out, or coming out as trans and using different pronouns). The artists really nail the visual style of the show to such a degree that this could easily serve as an updated version of the show.

Thirty One Days Of CCS #8: Emma Hunsinger, Hachem Reslan, Kat Ghastly

I spent the first week of my CCS reviews mostly looking at the work of old favorites. Now it's time to turn my eye to the classes of 2018, 2019 and 2020.

The Last Mather, by Kat Ghastly. Subtitled "Inherited Karma", this is a short shaggy dog joke of a story about a ragged homeless man (derisively referred to as "the trash king" by a local) having a horrible day. He gets bitten by a wild boar and loses his shoe, he steps on a nail, he gets soaked with a bag of piss, etc. The final scene, where he confronts a famous ancestor, is actually a pretty hilariously complicated reference having to do with the concept of predestination. Ghastly's cartooning is spare but expressive, pointing the reader to every portion of each snowballing misfortune.

Under The Sun, Trickle Down, and Karantina, by Hachem Reslan. These are all short, weird minicomics made by an artist clearly interested in the absurd and horrific. Under The Sun I starts as a story about a lovers' quarrel. The comic is set in a nine panel grid, but there are no panel borders set, giving it an open feel. Reslan uses a number of interesting perspective tricks, like putting a door in the upper right hand of a panel to indicate its distance, but not moving the “camera” closer as a figure approaches it—he gets smaller on the page as he moves further away. It's an effective device for showing the emotional distance between the man and woman having a fight. Then a vampire appears in the woman's room, whom she mistakes for her lover at first. The eventual conflict is told with a series of shifting perspectives, the use of shadow and light, and the eventual collapse of panels on the final page. It's a short, smart comic told with a fine but steady line.

Karantina is about a woman surviving in a war-ravaged area. The comic is all about rituals of survival, focusing on water above all else. When that runs out, she has to move on. She finds a stream but also a dead, decaying dog, which she shoves into the stream in an act of mercy. The comic is about her attempts at not just survival, but dignity, and it's told with that same steady hand. Trickle Down is pure nonsense, as Reslan channels Joe Daly and possibly Cowboy Henk in talking about Ronald Reagan's exploits rolling skating and subsequent disappointments. It's pure absurdity, from the interactions of the main characters to the use of Reagan's image over various other people in the end pages. Reslan's work is imaginative, strange and well-executed.

The Pipe Family, by Emma Hunsinger. This oversized comic (about 12" x 8") is pure, glorious nonsense from beginning to end. Hunsinger's over the top ridiculousness, grotesque cartooning and distorted images form a weird, funny but logically consistent story about the Pipe family moving to "No River Junction". The Pipes have a monopoly on both pipes used for plumbing and smoking, and a couple of curious kids investigate why they've moved to their dusty old town. Hunsinger heightens everything here--dialogue, character design, plotlines--in order to make the narrative particularly silly. There are creepy-eyed children, impossibly large mustaches, non sequiturs, and plot twists to go with hilarious, deadpan dialogue. This comic is raw in the best possible way, as it looks like it just popped fully formed from Hunsinger's head.