45 Days Of CCS, #39: What The Gnomes Know

What The Gnomes Know is an anthology centered around artists from CCS and the Columbus scene. There's a good mixture of both, and there are a number of artist-writer combos that are somewhat unusual for an alt-comics anthology, but it works to good effect here. What's interesting is that a couple of the collaborations are between partners. It was organized and selected by CCS grads Rainer Kannenstine and Ben Wright-Heuman, both of whom have a lot of different projects they've been involved in, both solo and in terms of collaborative efforts. It was edited and designed by Columbus mainstay Kelci Crawford. 

Writer Ian M. Klesch collaborated with Wright-Heuman on a post-apocalyptic story following an elder gnome navigating a ruined city, looking for parts. This is an elegantly-constructed story using a recording of the gnome's dead son to push the narrative, as we learn just what caused the apocalypse in the first place. Wright-Heuman's art is moody and stylish, but it pushes the frantic action of the second half of the story clearly. It's a great use of world-building to set up a character-driven narrative with a satisfying resolution that still leaves the reader wanting more. 

Catalina Rufin's "Gnome Pizza" was cleverly assigned right after that story, and it's the contrast that make both stories stand out. Using a delicate line and extensive use of watercolors, Rufin establishes an interesting narrative when a woman moves into an apartment that was originally gnome territory, and then turns the plot on its head by turning what could have been a conflict into an appeal for connection from a desperately lonely person. 

Writer C.M. Clemence and artist Kelly Swann offer up what seems to be a typical D&D-inspired quest by two gnomes seeking out their friend. They acquire allies along the way until the rescue, but the swerve at the end that reveals what's really happening is clever. Swann's art shot straight from her scratchy pencils is the highlight here. Eddie J. O'Neill and Kaz G.M. Lukacs collaborated on a story of a group of gnomes adopting a misfit kobold that's cute, but whose use of color feels garish throughout. Angela Boyle took a lot of risks with "Gnoir With A Silent G," a parody of detective tropes featuring a gnome. The big risk was making this illustrated text with a stylized font. There were just enough illustrations (and enough sequential art) to make this work, especially since the art belied the hard-boiled cliches of the lead character. Boyle's drawings are also lovely, with an effective combination of grit and delicate color. 

Alex Washburn's story about humans who can transform into gnomes was a mix of what felt like a personal story of frustration around identity and a ripping fantasy story involving the danger of possibly being turned into stone. Washburn's use of color was way over the top and would have looked better muted, but his expressive characters drawn in a thick line match up with their emotional natures. The collaboration between Erienne McCray and Kannenstine leans into the density of its colors in a deeply expressionistic manner, especially since so much of the story revolves around dark magic. However, it's still essentially a story about a mother and daughter's connection, and that's what ultimately gives the story its real impact in the end. 

The non-CCS stories included a clever entry from Jess Tweed about two friends dealing with dark magic in order to save someone else, and the clever way a seemingly iron-clad contract was dealt with. There's also a text piece written by Jack Wallace with moody illustrations by J.M. Hunter that's nearly unreadable because of its use of stylized text. The illustrations became almost incidental. Overall, it's a fairly strong anthology that could have toned down some of its use of color and has a wide variety of genre types despite revolving around a highly particular genre theme 

31 Days Of CCS, #32: Less Than Secret

I enjoy anthologies that are a true team effort. This is something that's one of the major first-year requirements at CCS, as students are split into teams to make an anthology in a particular style, like Golden Age adventure or romance comics or 90s style Shonen Jump manga work. Because most alternative cartoonists are solo acts, forcing this kind of collaboration can be useful and teach a lot of lessons. Less Than Secret is an anthology from several CCS grads and several other cartoonists. Beyond their contributions in terms of the stories they drew, many of the book's cartoonists had other duties related to publishing. 

CCS grads Rainer Kannenstine and Ben Wright-Heumann served as its publishers. They were there to make sure the book was on schedule, obtain funding and consider distribution. JD Laclede was the editor, working directly with talent and sequencing the stories. Erienne McCray did the design, while Kelci Crawford acted as the crowdfunding manager. Angela Boyle was an anthology consultant, which makes sense considering her years assembling the Awesome Possum anthology. That collective sense of responsibility on what was clearly a labor of love is present and strengthens the overall anthology. 

The theme here is cryptids, or animals that some people claim to exist but whose existence has never been proven. It's fitting that Steve Bissette, the master monster-maker, penned a funny intro explaining his interest in monsters from a young age. Crawford's "A Day In The Life Of Mothman" is played for laughs, as a woman is followed by the legendary creature, whose presence foretells potential disaster. However, she can sense him, and it allows her to prevent a guy from being killed by a car, avoiding a fight at a diner, and preventing her from eating a bad hot dog. Crawford's line is crisp and expressive, with a lot of grayscale shading to add weight to the page. 

McCray's comic about the "Fresno Nightcrawler" (essentially a big baseball with legs) is also played for laughs, as this cryptid is more ridiculous than scary. They added a nice touch having the Loch Ness Monsters as its roommate and Bigfoot taunt it. McCray's line is fluid and a nice match for the kind of dynamic silliness that this ridiculous creature (wearing a fedora, even!) demands. Wright-Heumann is a horror guy, and he did a sort of Western/fantasy fusion with a family of Elves fending off a group of chupacabra mysteriously attacking them. The ending is grimly clever. His scratchy line was appropriate for the subject matter, though the extensive use of grayscale was distracting at times. This was a story that cried out for color. 

I'm not crazy about comics that insert huge blocks of typewritten text, but Angela Boyle's cartooning is so sharp in her story of the odd little elwetritsch that it wasn't too distracting. Moreover, using that text as the main character's interior monologue actually made this a useful device, commenting on the comic set around it. Boyle manages to sneak an entire murder mystery into this little comic with an unassuming old woman and her strange "pet." Ian Klesch and Andrew Small's story about how a lycanthrope used a dating app to fool a woman into being his prey was funny and grisly. The figure drawing was crude at points in a way that was distracting, and some of that was due to over-drawing in an effort to bolster a shaky line. 

Rainer Kannenstine's piece about the Dover Demon went in yet another direction: how messing with weird cryptids is likely to bite you in the ass in horrible ways. It's the story of a bully who attacks the creature in the forest with a ball, then gets his head crushed in revenge. He used some digital effects in interesting ways, including a "syrup brush" for some of the background fills that added to the story's atmosphere. Jess Johnson had perhaps the silliest story in the book, as an emo kid is befriended by his sister's new boyfriend: "JD," or the infamous Jersey Devil. Johnson turned the creature into an actual hockey player and made this a romance/family story where everyone took JD's presence for granted. It's hard not to see Johnson's strong shojo manga influence, giving this a radically different look and feel from the other stories in the anthology. However, it's not a slavish adherence to the style; rather, it's a launching point into Johnson's own style. 

There's plenty of backmatter in the anthology, including full biographies and behind-the-scenes stuff that's somewhat interesting, but at 20 pages (compared to 90 pages for the rest of the book) it feels like a lot of padding. That said, the interviews asking each creator why they chose their cryptid, their creative methods, etc. was at least thoughtfully done. Overall, this is a breezy anthology that I wished had been a bit longer. 

Thirty One Days Of CCS #15: Erienne McCray, Pepita Sandwich

Orange and Definitely Not God, by Erienne McCray. Orange is a testament to how comics can tell a story through color alone. It's about the friendship between two boys named Kyle and Carl, and in particular it's about the way that boys relate to each other and how difficult intimacy can be. McCray's drawings here are loose, even sketchy, but she ties each page together with just the right use of color. That color is as expressive as the drawings themselves, and the result is a pleasant loop where the reader understands what's going on thanks to the relationship between color and line. Each character is immersed in their own color field: Kyle is red, Carl is yellow. Kyle is clearly a loner that Carl reaches out to, inviting him over to his house for dinner. When Carl learns that his father has cancer, Kyle tries to reach out in his own way throughout the rest of the story. It takes a while, but Carl finally opens up emotionally and allows his friend to hug him as he weeps when his father is dying. When they embrace, they combine to form the color orange. It's a simple, powerful technique that underlines the dialogue and the line drawings.

Definitely Not God is clever in a different way. The mini contains selected daily autobio strips (which McCray puts on twitter) that are a conversation between McCray and an unseen presence that can best be described as a self-care conscience. The resulting strips are unique in the daily strip genre, as McCray talks about her moods, her anxiety and her depression all while this distinct voice helps her through, gives her advice and encouragement and the occasional stern word. There's one strip where McCray is surprised at the strong reaction these strips have received, given that they're quickly drawn and aren't her "real" work. However, the looseness of this work is its strength; it reminds me a bit of Jules Feiffer in terms of the way she works the grid with these sketchy lines that nonetheless have a distinctly drawn sense of gesture. Some of the strips are cheerful, where she talks about how much she enjoys hand-inking or a new haircut. Sometimes she works out grief, like with regard to her dying father. As McCray points out in the comic, she's just 23 years old, and it's fascinating to watch her find herself as an artist while working in public.

Brain, Back Wards, Space Girls and Favorite Flavor Day, by Pepita Sandwich. Josefina Guarracino, aka Pepita Sandwich, has some tantalizing potential as a cartoonist. Her authorial voice is distinctive, but her stylized drawings are particularly interesting. She ignores naturalism altogether and instead her comics are in a cartoonish, symbolic universe that's nonetheless rooted in ways in which bodies interact in space and with each other. She's part of a wave of South American cartoonists whose work is cutting edge stuff, mixing the personal, the political and the fantastic.  Space Girls is a four page mini featuring alien girls who happen upon an Earth devoid of human life, its populace having died taking selfies in trash piles. Her striking use of color and open-page format are a nice introduction to her overall style, which serves to both reassure the reader in terms of its approachable graphics and colors and unsettle them with its odd character design and page composition. Backwards is a nice bit of dream logic, as two young women enter a bounce castle and find that it's full of visceral representations of their memories, with items like the "dad shoe river". Every detail is carefully considered to create this world of dream logic, and Sandwich draws heavily on the way her drawings act as drawings, warping arms back to depict motion, for example.

Brain has a few stories, starting with the biographical entry "Women Move Mountains". It's about the explorer and activist Annie Smith Peck, who at the age of 44 decided to start traveling and mountaineering. She later became a member of the suffragist movement. Sandwich used her life as a metaphor for the figurative mountains she had to climb as she struggled against the patriarchal and sexist society she was born into. Sandwich switched back and forth between naturalism and symbolism, and her style made that easy to accept as a reader. Sandwich used map symbols, books, statues and other visual metanyms to reflect how Peck, even in death continues to have a strong influence. There's also a loopy story where she and a friend of hers found the special disco version of the the Rolling Stones' "Miss You" on cassette, only it causes time to stop. Here, Sandwich proves adept at comedic work, as each attempt to make the world a better place fails miserably, in escalating fashion.

Favorite Flavor Day is a work of autobio from her childhood, and the story is as unusual as the presentation. With her beautifully stylized figures, stripped down and cartoonish in an elegant manner, she puts them in a variety of panels: circular highlight panels, open-page layouts, charts and various grid patterns. The hook of this story is a great one: her dad was the owner of a gelato factory when she was growing up. She of course used it as leverage to make friends, but she also wrote about her father working all the time made her resent the delicious sweets he brought home. Indeed, there's a hilarious scene where she rebelled by eating horrible industrial ice cream. There were also scenes of hanging out at the ice cream factory, where she and her brother become expert tasters. This comic is a beautiful mix of processing emotions, tender family memories, and a good dose of humor.