31 Days Of CCS, #27: Robyn Smith

Publishing, and comics publishing, in particular, is a funny place. A publisher will reject a work from the margins sometimes, not because of its quality, but because "there's no audience for this." That's especially for true with regard to non-genre comics about women and girls. Once extremely commonplace during comics' first 25 years or so, they were almost completely systematically eliminated by super-hero comics. Those who ran comics deliberately tried to make comics deliberately aimed at boys; if some girls happened to like them, that was an accident. 

It always shocks Hollywood or the publishing world when something explicitly aimed at a Black or Asian audience is a smash hit. It's even more surprising that with something like Black Panther, it was a huge cross-over hit. A lesson that seemingly needs to be re-learned on a near-constant basis is that the more specific a story is with regard to its details, the more universal its appeal. It's a paradox, but it's true because a narrative with exquisitely-detailed specifics (even if it's foreign to one's experience) is more appealing than a narrative aimed at being broadly appealing that's entirely generic. In any genre, "truth" is irrelevant. What is important is the appearance of authenticity, and authenticity is generated by describing the minutia of a situation. Raina Telgemeier's Smile was a story about a middle-school girl, her problems with friendship, and her dental issues. It was aimed at the tween girl audience desperate for this kind of story because no one was aiming work at them that they could relate to. It was also a big hit with boys because while they couldn't relate to the specifics of Raina's narrative, it was so highly detailed that it highlighted universal issues with regard to health and friendship. 

This brings us to Jamila Rowser and Robyn Smith's Wash Day Diaries. Rowser related Toni Morrison's quote ("If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.") in describing her goals as an author: creating (and publishing) books for Black women. In Smith, she has a collaborator who's more than up to the challenge of depicting these stories--especially with regard to hair. Wash Day started as a mini-comic and was expanded into a full-color book precisely because an audience "magically" appeared that was hungry for stories about Black joy and friendship among women. The original mini was about a moment in time about self-care that was highly specific; the expanded book tells interlocking stories that touch on a number of topics. 

The book opens with the "Wash Day" story, featuring a steely young woman named Kimana (nicknamed Kim) coming home from a night out, and then waking up and washing her expansive hair. That initial image of a seemingly unflappable Kim with her keys splayed in her fingers in case she had to defend herself speaks volumes about not just her, but a specific understanding of what it's like to be a woman walking on the street. Much of this story is about Kim dealing with the daily forces that assail her: casual misogyny in catcallers, a man who won't stop texting her, and her local bodega being affected by a rent increase and passing it on to her. For a moment, for a day, time stands still as she buys some milk and breakfast and takes care of her hair in a very specific manner. Smith shines here in the way she draws hair along with the way she draws different kinds of bodies. She's also aces at body language. 

Each chapter follows the story of a different friend. Tanisha relates the hilarious story of being in an inadvertent love triangle and how she gets out of it; it's once again connected to hair as she tells it in a group chat with Kim and her other two ride-or-die friends as she's getting her hair done. An increasingly self-isolating Davene calls Cookie to cornrow her hair because she missed her hair appointment and reveals that she's gripped by depression--something that Cookie doesn't fully understand. Cookie visits her father's mother in a nursing home, a woman who refused to recognize her as her granddaughter because of her father's affair. The final story ties all of these threads together as the friends gather at one of Kim's concerts and chase off the guy who had been harassing her. The whole thing winds up in a sleepover at Kim's house. 

The overlying plot is pretty thin; one gets the sense that it was reverse-engineered to give some small sense of structure to each story, and that was especially true in the final segment. None of that really matters, because it was the small moments in each story that were important. Davene's interactions with Cookie were particularly interesting. Davene revealed to her friend that her career as a social worker wasn't working out, and there was an implicit reference that going into work wearing her natural hair was going to be problematic. While this is a book about Black joy and friendship for this group of women, it doesn't pretend that racism and misogyny don't exist. The threat of violence from Kim's ex-boyfriend, the aforementioned catcalls, and hateful stares from white people on the subway are all part of the backdrop. It's par for the course, with the weight of it affecting each woman in different ways. Davene clearly feels it the hardest as it contributes to her already-present direction, and Cookie's initial attempt to minimize it and rejecting Davene's thoughts of getting on anti-depressants with a crystal reflected a lack of understanding and actual empathy in that moment. Cookie redeemed herself by actually noticing what Davene needed at Kim's concert and pulled her out of there for the sleep-over. 

Again, Rowser set it up, but Smith knocked it down with her unerring depiction of body language that was easy to interpret without being intrusive or ham-fisted. Each story is involved with hair in some way, with each character helping or being helped with hair, an act of profound compassion and intimate connection. It's both emblematic and symbolic of their connections in a tangible way, mixing aesthetics and ethics together at a fundamental level. That's especially true because Rowser goes out of her way to make each character radically different in terms of personality, weaknesses, desires, and ambitions while still sharing crucial connections as friends. Each story is tonally different, from comic relief (mixed with an unvarnished depiction of sexual freedom) to familial drama & pain to the sheer loneliness of mental illness. It's a book that needed to be created, one that will hopefully open up avenues for others like it. 

Sweet Home Miami: Spiny Orb Weaver #1 & Sun And Sand

Modern narratives about Miami are often about drug violence, glitzy nightclubs, and excessive & conspicuous consumption. And that's all true to an extent. I am a rare beast: a native of the Magic City, born when great swathes of unincorporated Dade county were still just strawberry fields. Miami isn't a city that produces anything; it processes things. It is reliant on tourists and suckers. It's where grifts are hatched and schemes are dashed. There are two overarching narratives about Miami that tend to go untold: it's a place where you can easily create a new persona and it's a place that's one major event away from being reclaimed by the swamp. 

If you live in a tropical paradise, who has time to create art? In spite of that, the arts have stubbornly been a part of the city's culture since its inception, especially tied to its historically strong sense of gay culture. One thing Miami has lacked is a strong comics culture. There are reasons for that. Miami is a highly decentralized place. Even former arts enclaves like Coconut Grove succumbed to hipster development that priced out the actual artists long ago. For a big city, Miami is deeply suburban. It's hard to put together a scene in a city when there aren't natural gathering places. Hard, but not impossible.

Thanks in part to Neil Brideau putting intentionality to work in creating pop-up shops with his Radiator Comics publishing concern, as well as various comics-making events, a community has begun to coalesce and publish. The best way to showcase young talent in a city like this is the tried-and-true method of the comics anthology. For Free Comic Book Day in 2020, Radiator Comics teamed with another powerful young publishing force in Miami, Jamila Rowser's Black Josei Press, to put together a free anthology titled Sun And Sand. 

Sure, that's an easy play on Miami's beach culture image, and that culture is certainly real. However, the comics themselves dive much deeper than that. I appreciated that in the credits, the authors were very specific about what part of South Florida they lived in. Miami is laid out as a grid in three different quadrants (the fourth quadrant is in the ocean, essentially), and so it's easy to know where someone lives based on an address or the particular sub-city, like Hialeah, Miami Beach, North Miami, etc. Culturally, there are areas of Miami that are remarkably self-contained; there are huge swathes where all businesses and even media are conducted and expressed in Spanish, for example. The result is that there are many Miamis and thus many potential stories. 

Carina Vo's "Mango Season" amusingly gets at a number of Miami truths. It is exceedingly easy to have your own tropical fruit tree in your yard, although it can be hard to keep track of them when the fruit starts to fall from the tree. Who "owns" the fruit is a matter of little interest to the abundant flora in the area, and Vo's clear line and spot reds amplify this. Jessica "Miss Jaws" Garcia has that big, bulky Johnny Negron/Michael DeForge-style character design in her story debating the superiority of the swimming pool vs the beach, with the potential wildlife in the latter being unnerving. Garcia makes effective use of extreme close-ups in this witty story.

Estrella Vega's story speaks to my earlier reference of Miami being close to returning to swampland, given the right set of events. Her illustrations juxtaposing daily life in Miami with a ghost level of flooding and corresponding invasion of critters is a sobering one. There was a reason why we weren't allowed to play near canals as children. Isai Oviedo's story about purloined croquetas played on the many crime stories set in Miami as well as amusing stereotypes of the sort of people who live there. Oviedo gets across the greasy deliciousness of that particular snack; Cuban food has a particular stick-to-the-bones quality to it. 

I've followed Drew Lerman's career for a while, and his Roy & Dav characters were particularly delightful in this anthology, channelling the golden age of cartooning in terms of their speech patterns and ragged-line. Brideu's "Critters" was interesting to read because for a transplanted Miami like him, the preponderance of fauna not found in other parts of the country can be overwhelming. I miss the friendly gecko lizards, personally. Miriam Rae-Silver's "HOA" speaks to both that fauna, including the invincible, omnipresent gators, as well as Miami's obsession with wealth and appearances. P.C. de la Cruz's fantasy of his uncle being attacked by a python on a fishing trip speaks to a real presence of these snakes who have no natural predators infiltrating the Everglades. 

Horror artist Jorge Lantigua's "Colada" combines his cartoony but menacing line in depicting the bewitching power of this particular Cuban coffee. Jamilla Rowser wrote and Vo drew a lovely story about snorkeling and the astounding worlds that await just below the ocean's surface. It's a lovely capper to an anthology that understands the essence of its city and the people who live there, as opposed to its image.

The Brideau-edited anthology Spiny Orb Weaver #1 plays on his fascination with the local creatures, as this is a spider that spins beautiful, intricate webs. It's a fitting metaphor for cartoonists. There are three features. The first is a long story by Jessica "Miss Jaws" Garcia titled "Just A Walk Around The Block." Her character design is superb, as her female lead has a powerful presence that provides visual irony given how socially anxious she is. The story is a dialogue between her and her dog, who chastises her inability to make friends and allow him to to get to interact with the world. When he later loses control when he sees another dog, he reveals that he was never socialized with other dogs and is afraid of them...much like she is. In the final scene, where she makes friends with someone who pets her dog, Garcia pulls back. After a story full of fairly tight close-ups that illustrated how closed-off her world was, that final scene framed her as part of the larger world. 

Garcia's subsequent interview is revealing, as she discusses her training in illustration and animation and how this led her to comics. It was telling that she revealed that she's from Palm Beach county, which is two hours away from Miami. It's still South Florida and separate from the rest of the state, but it's also different from the wilder aspect of Miami. She also talks a lot about isolation, rejection, and trying to find a local scene. Tana Oshima's illustrated essay on paradise was fascinating as it compared her time living in Miami to living in Japan, bringing up the concept of asking for permission to be in certain spaces. Once again, Oshima is an artist who recognized Miami's almost feral, wild qualities that many people pretend aren't there in favor of luxury. Oshima's use of stark black and white contrasts speaks to the raw contrasts in poverty and luxury in Miami, going neighborhood by neighborhood. Even in the poorest of neighborhoods, however, there is a flowering abundance of hope and imagination. It's Brideau's mission, I believe, to highlight this abundance as an editor, publisher, creator, and enthusiast of comics.