31 Days Of CCS, #11: Short Comics from Faith Cox, Ashley Jablonski, August Driussi, Michael Albrecht, Coco Fox, Mercedes Campos Lopez

Some short CCS reviews for some short CCS comics: 

a berry silly Love Letter, by Coco Fox. Fox is really good at cute, pun-based comics, and this tiny comic sealed in a tiny envelope (sealed with wax!) is no exception. The puns here are based on food, and it's reflelctive of the kind of kids' comics that she's best known for, as well as her penchant for art and craft projects. 

Life Is A Hiiighway, by A. Driussi. This is a hilarious mini about how doing a Lightning McQueen drag king act changed his gender identity. Hilariously, it caused him to want to be a car, but he settled on being a man instead. The drawing of Driussi in that drag is completely ridiculous, and the whole thing is a very lighthearted (yet true-to-life) account of deciding to transition. The almost lurid color scheme is what makes it work.

The Long Game, by Mercedes Campos Lopez. The thing I immediately noticed about this short bit of autobio is how much smoother her line has become. This is a story about growing up with two brothers and how they were all obsessed with the game pieces of a Pokemon-themed Monopoly game. Campos Lopez detailed sneakily pillfering them from her brothers until they were missed. The segue into adulthood, where her brothers wondered whatever happened to the pieces, led to a very funny wink by the author at the end. 

Laundry & Marginalia, by Michael Albrecht. Albrecht is another CCSer with enormous promise; all of his longer form comics thus far have been very interesting. These short minis show off his cartooning in different ways. Laundry is about a ghost who goes to a laundromat, washing itself in a machine and then coming home dripping wet, hanging itself on a line to dry. Albrecht's pencil work here is just lovely, all in service of a gag. Marginalia is just that: doodles, scribbles, half-formed ideas, exhortations, and moments of despair. 

Life As An Elementary Ghost #4 & #5, by Ashley Jablonski. I love the genre of teachers writing comics about the ridiculous things their kids say in class, and Jablonski's twist on it is drawing everyone as ghosts. It's a clever idea because it conveys the spirit of the idea with simple, stylized drawings without adding too much identifying detail. 

How to be: Mysterious, by Faith Cox. Cox is another big-time talent, and this purports to be the latest volume of a larger How To Be series. Using a delightful rabbit character (doing this like posing in front of a mirror while saying "I am a sexy enigma"), the illustrations belie the dubious instructions of the "manual" in amusing ways. For a quick one-off gag, this was executed with considerable care. 

45 Days Of CCS, #16: Faith Cox, Penina Gal

Obstructions, Vol 0, by Penina Gal. I've always enjoyed Gal's work, whether it's fantasy, memoir, or comics-as-poetry. This time around, it's graphic medicine, in a zine about their Upper Airway Resistance Disorder (UARS). It's a cousin to the more common sleep apnea, but like many "hidden" disorders, especially for AFAB people, it's often misdiagnosed as a psychiatric disorder. The comic is interesting, as it's an illustrated guide to the symptoms and treatment for the disease, with occasional interjections by Gal as to their experiences. It describes their sleepiness in high school as well as out of breath while running in college. It includes detailed drawings of the orthodontic apparatus that they are currently wearing. This is less a traditional narrative than it is a kind of medical diary, as future updates are promised in this interesting hybrid of diagrams and drawings. 

I Can Feel It All, by Faith Cox. Many comics are howls, raging against pain, trauma, and mental illness. Fewer comics show the breakthroughs, the moments where the fog clears, and the pain subsides. That's what this comic is, as Cox enumerates all of the things they are taking the time to feel: their inner calm, the gardens in her neighborhood, the fruit at the farmer's market, and the summer air. She discusses the feeling of being a "prisoner to yourself," and the central theme of the comic is not taking any of it for granted. Cox's open-page layouts allow the images to breathe in the same way her character is breathing free, and the sketchiness of the drawings gives the whole thing a sense of immediacy.

31 Days Of CCS, #4: Faith Cox

Faith Cox's Singularity is an elegant, beautiful meditation on loneliness. It's a great example of using sci-fi trappings to dramatize particular feelings in a direct, pointed way that would be more difficult in a non-genre setting. This is less a story than it is a mood, as it follows a young woman affected by a "dimensional distortion" in her home. What this amounts to is her seeing the life of a young woman in a parallel dimension in her space. The other woman can't see her in any way, and she's completely intangible. 

At first, this experience is unnerving, because of its casual invasiveness. Soon, however, the narrator not only gets used to her, but she also starts to welcome her presence. Notably, she starts changing the way she thinks about her. At first, she referred to the distortion as an "it." A phenomenon, like a UFO or a ghost. Soon, however, she starts referring to her sort-of roommate as "she," and comes to admire her. When the distortion comes home one night crying, she tries to comfort her. She even moves her bed to the same location as the distortion to create a greater sense of intimacy. When the distortion finally disappears (there's a funny bit of exposition at the beginning that explains the repair process), there's a moment where it seems the distortion acknowledges her presence for a moment before disappearing. 

Cox uses a lot of visual tricks to make the story more effective. The narrator is drawn in black-and-white, but the protagonist is a sort of translucent pink. Cox uses an open-page layout throughout the comic, a technique that's effective because it reflects the blurring of her life and the distortion's life. There's a page where she pulls out a technique from the Richard McGuire/Chris Ware playbook where there are dozens of panels on the page in overlapping layers, once again dramatically displaying their overlapping--but not connected--lives. Cox notes in an afterword that she wrote it during quarantine, a lonely time for many where parasocial relationships on the internet were all the contact that many people had. That anecdote was interesting but unnecessary, as the comic clearly conveys not just loneliness and a longing to connect, but also a sense of wishing she was more like this person. It's an understandable, but not entirely healthy, reaction to her presence, in the same way that social media is something we can allow to disrupt our lives. Cox's cartooning is solid, anchoring the visual tricks she uses by emphasizing gesture and the awkwardness of wanting to relate to another body in space but not being able to. 

31 Days Of CCS, #10: Faith Cox

Faith Cox's comics stroll into comics-as-poetry territory a bit, especially with regard to how she uses prose. In Vermont Comic, she uses single-panel pages to illustrate her frustration with moving, with a lack of having a home space of her own. There's a sense of living hand-to-mouth, of impermanence that's palpable here. The images are sharp and simple and merge well with Cox's hand lettering. It ends on a bit of a gag, but the sentiment is real. 

In Serotinous, Cox ruminates on place and its relationship to identity. She thinks of herself on the east coast, no longer connecting with it or her memories. She describes home as not a place but "a time long gone." Home is a feeling more than a location, and it's obvious the changes she went through and are still going through have left her restless. There's a clever visual metaphor she uses in describing how the term serotiny refers to plants that bloom late. Some trees only bloom after extreme heat, waiting "for a spark to ignite." For Cox, being a late bloomer is like being on fire. But this is a flame of rebirth, of forging something through destruction and heat. Both of these are a metaphor for an illustrator who's just getting started with her career and prove to be an apt metaphor for where she stands in her process as an artist. While she's skilled, these comics are almost a little too slick; you can see the illustrator in her covering up the rough edges. I'd like to see her get more raw on the page and indulge in first-line/best-line, and then return to her professional chops later.