Thirty One Days Of CCS #21: Jen Vaughn and Moss Bastille

Goosebumps: Download and Die!, by Jen Vaughn and Michelle Wong. Vaughn is one of a handful of CCS grads working with licensed properties in addition to working on her many other projects. This indefatigable artist always seems to be writing or drawing a comic in addition to running podcasts and other multimedia project. The work she shared with me is a three-issue miniseries collection of an original story she wrote using R.L. Stine's horror-for-kids Goosebumps property. While the villains of the story are all Goosebumps veterans, everything else in this story was her concept. I did miss seeing her do the art for this story, but Wong's more mainstream-friendly work obviously made a lot more sense in this case. Many of the most successful comics for kids are now explicitly aimed at girls, featuring girls as characters and produced by women. It's a fascinating paradigm shift compared to twenty, ten or even five years ago. The fact that it took this long reveals more about publishers and editors who made poor assumptions than it does the women who are producing these successful series.

Vaughn was clearly made for projects like this, as she quickly sells the reader on the friendship of two girls (Mitra and Kyra, both people of color, incidentally) and also sells the reader on Mitra being threatened by a new girl, nicknamed "Flips". It takes exactly five pages to establish the personalities of the three leads, the interpersonal conflict that Mitra feels, and the catalyst for the plot: Mitra's phone being broken. When she mysteriously gets sent a new phone loaded with cutting-edge apps and cool filters, she sets the plot into motion. What makes the story work is that even though the reader knows that the phone is evil, Vaughn still keeps enough details mysterious and keeps the horror elements rooted in the central conflict of the story. Vaughn throws a lot of weird supernatural details at the reader in an effort to keep them off-balance, and it works.

There are evil puppets, menacing skeletons, lizard people trying to infiltrate humanity in order to create more lizard people, and a weird melting kid. The phone makes people sick, allows Mitra to hear the thoughts of others and it makes her paranoid by talking to her. The pacing of the story is a bit wobbly at times, especially with regard to action scenes and the story's climax. While the Goosebumps series is aimed at kids and thus rarely doubles down on its horror elements in a graphic manner, the climax lacks tension amidst its goofiness. The tension that Vaughn builds doesn't quite pay off, and some of that is on Wong. She's great at character interaction, but her panel-to-panel transitions during action scenes aren't especially smooth. That said, Vaughn and Wong stick the landing with the end, which picks up a particular loose end and takes it in a disturbing direction. All told, Vaughn spins a tale that mostly works because of the believability of its cast as well as the existential threat of an all-seeing cell phone.

Speaking of horror, Moss Bastille's comics offer up stylish world building with a look somewhere between Richard Sala and John "JB" Brodowski. The Burning Room, an oversized comic that is stated to be the first chapter of a longer work titled The Obscure Road. It makes a perfectly fine stand-alone comic, dripping with atmosphere and mystery. Bastille sets the mood with a young man approaching a wrecked house but immediately lets the reader know that things are at least slightly weird because of his bizarre, dog-like pet. The man, whose name we later learn is Perigale, narrates the history of the house and one room in particular. Following a specific set of instructions, the heartbroken can enter the room, pin up a photo of the one who broke their heart, sleep in the room, and then forget their beloved forever after.

Having established the rules, Perigale enters the room and proceeds to break all of them. He contacts the trapped spirit in the room and proceeds to make a bargain with it. This comic is very much about rules, trust and protocol, as the spirit's story is a sad one. This comic is all about negative space and gradations of black, white and gray. One can see the intense amount of labor on each page in order to create these effects, but Bastille is careful to give his figures a clear, almost casual and cartoonish look like Sala. The spirit creature is genuinely unsettling, thanks to that mix of contrasts; its form is elongated and unnatural, adding to its unnerving quality. Bastille hit on something engaging with this concept.

Glass Eye #1 is a mini whose visual approach is completely different. It's a panel per page, relying heavily on line and hatching. It's somewhere between horror and poetry, with the big block letters on each page narrating a story about being so haunted by one's past that it causes one to try to forget it and escape it. The inevitable end is to be both victim and victimizer--never forgetting and never escaping. It's nowhere near as visually arresting as the other comic, but its intent is a short burst of bold, disturbing images and ideas as opposed to a more coherent narrative.

Exploring The World of Cartozia Tales

I've read a lot of young adult fiction in going through books for the Eisner awards, and a fair number of them have been fantasy/action-adventure oriented. None have the level of ambition, playfulness, formal daring and fun of the Isaac Cates-edited Cartozia Tales series, which is an issue away from finishing up its initial run of ten. Cates and his artistic partner Mike Wenthe (a long-time friend from before his comics days, in the interest of disclosure) basically made Cartozia Tales a far more aggressive experiment than their work on their old series, Satisfactory Tales. Their interests in comics have always revolved around collaboration, formal experimentation, an almost whimsical sense of play (including plays on words and visual puns), and creating problems to solve. They seemed to really find a groove when they worked on an ambitious fantasy comic together, which perhaps provided the impetus for this series. The central thrust of the series is this: in a set of adjoining land masses dubbed Cartozia (the first of many, many place name puns in the series), the reader would follow all sorts of serialized adventures. Cates divided the map into a nine-panel grid. In each issue, one of the seven permanent creative teams would be assigned a sector and create a story. Each issue would feature two guest artists. In the next issue, the creators would move over one sector, so now they had the option of picking up from the previous artist (in a sort of narrative exquisite corpse game), creating a new character, or some combination thereof.

This approach has led to a crazy level of complexity, especially since some characters were created by one artist but not actually used by them; instead, they were given to another creator to use. And unlike the random approach of a true exquisite corpse, there was careful attention paid to continuity (both narrative and character), especially as each issue drew the overarching narratives of the series tighter and tighter, like a sort of fantasy Raymond Chandler novel. That's how it was supposed to go in theory; in practice, things got a little choppy at times. While the covers for each issue and the overall design have been excellent, it's been obvious (especially in some of the middle issues) that some cartoonists were rushing their entries. There have been a couple of fundraisers for the series, as Cates is paying everyone. Not every guest star has been a perfect match, nor has every narrative maintained a sense of fluidity. Frankly, unless the series is read at once, it can be difficult to remember exactly what was going on with nine different storylines. That said, it's remarkable to see how coherent the book is given the incredibly complicated logistics involved.

It was always obvious that when Cates & Wenthe worked together, they went all-out for the series. With a relatively smooth line and the ability to trade off with each other, that duo turned in some of the denser stories in the anthology, though that density often circled around how many puns and funny visual references they could throw in. Still, their works felt like going back to home base when reading this comic. The two most dependable cartoonists on the roster were Lucy Bellwood and Lupi McGinty. Bellwood works using a slightly thicker line and a looser overall style than McGinty's ligne claire approach, but they both possess a smoothly welcoming style that worked for every character in the series. The series' secret weapon has been Tom Motley, whose scratchy and inky style felt dissonant at first, but whose relentless commitment to formal experimentation (along with a few changes here and there to make his line clearer) makes him a great place in the book to get one's eyes challenged. He also shares the Wenthe/Cates proclivity for whimsy and wordplay, a nice contrast to the more straightforward styles of the other artists. His greatest achievement in the series was his homage to Gustave Verbeek's The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo, a classic comic strip that could be read one way, then turned upside down to continue the story using the same images. Motley's ability to precisely and flawlessly emulate that style within the context of the story itself was astonishing.

The early MVP of the series was Shawn Cheng, whose ultra-thin line and clean storytelling was simply beautiful to behold, but obviously work-intensive. He simplified his style later on, which was still perfectly functional but not quite the same in terms of impact. The other regulars (Jen Vaughn and Sarah Becan (often with Beckie Gautreua)) certainly had their moments. Vaughn created my favorite character/narrative in the series, the "Vagabond" narrative, and was clearly working hard in the early going. She had to skip an issue and some of her later work looks rushed, perhaps because she has a lot of other commitments on her plate. Of the two guest stars per issue, some were remarkably great, like Dylan Horrocks (oh, if he had been in every issue) and sublime work from Luke Pearson, whose young girl scientist Gret was a perfectly-designed character. Jon Lewis was a natural and another great artist to start out the series with, while Carol Lay was an interesting choice for a one-page story. Jon Chad and Chris Wright were fantastic gets in the same issue whose styles contrasted in a visually exciting way (Chad's detailed clear line vs Wright's scratchy and darkly eccentric style). The team of Kelly Sue DeConnick and Ming Doyle was interesting because it resolved a key plot point and did it in a naturalistic style--which was highly unusual for the series. Tom Hart's dreamy, poetic comic also addressed a key narrative concern and Nick Abadzis' strip was formally charming in a series full of formally intriguing comics.

The good news about what will emerge as 400+ pages of interconnected anthology storytelling involving over thirty different artists is that actually really started to tie up loose ends, put characters together and gain some real momentum as it went further. I look forward to the final issue and how it finishes drawing together the various storylines, both grim and silly, enigmatic and simple, and pleasantly ambling and urgent. While the series had its ragged moments, I'm staggered at how much traffic Cates had to direct while still contributing to virtually every issue himself. And while the series had its misfires (the James Kochalka piece felt like it came from another series entirely and changed what had been a promising narrative thread into something that became sillier and sillier), I admired Cates' try-anything style of editing that still had a degree of narrative rigor. I should add that the all-ages character of the book was a key to its success, especially as Cates threw every kind of extra he could think of at younger readers: paper dolls, word searches, mazes, drawing exercises and more. It was clear that Cates was making the kind of comic he would have wanted to read as a child, or perhaps creating one for his own family. That level of sincerity, effort and creativity is a remarkable tonic to the level of cynical, money-making tropes that I see in so much YA fiction.

Maps-As-Comics: Cartozia Tales #1

The ambitious new minicomics series Cartozia Tales is a natural extension of the sort of thing that masterminds Isaac Cates and Mike Wenthe were doing toward the end of their run on their collaborative minicomic Satisfactory Comics. That duo loved the idea of exploring maps and territories as a way of generating stories and then handing off stories in that territory to new collaborators; their Mapjam comic is essentially the forerunner of Cartozia Tales.Of course, that comic stalled for any number of reasons, including the fact that a multi-creator collaborative anthlogy is incredibly hard work. That's why Cates has a kickstarter going on this comic: to get the eight regular artists and two rotating guest artists a decent enough page rate to make this project worth their time. At the moment, it's about 40% funded but has a long way to go. Please consider funding it if you find my review to be of interest.

This is an all-ages fantasy comic wherein each creator is assigned a quadrant of the map of the known world and writes a story involving a place in their quadrant. Each issue, the quadrant assignment will change. Characters designed by one artist will be used by another, creating a true collaborative environment across the board. The regular rotation of artists includes Sarah Becan, Lucy Bellwood, Cates & Wenthe (who collaborate on all their work), Shawn Cheng, Lupi McGinty, Tom Motley and Jen Vaughn. Of this group, I was only unfamiliar with McGinty and Bellwood prior to reading the comic. Cheng seems especially well-suited to this kind of endeavor, adding a pleasingly precise but gritty quality to the series. His story, "Master Cyrus and the Boy: Journey to Owl Rock", was one of my favorites in the issue. This is a simple quest comic, wherein a master magician and his apprentice make a journey to a remote location to perform a mysterious ceremony. The way Cheng arranges his unusually-designed characters on the page and the manner with which he uses varying shades of grey on the page gives the story depth and texture.

The guest artists in this issue, Jon Lewis and Dylan Horrocks, do not disappoint. Both have dipped into fantasy work in the past, and both feel quite at home here. Lewis uses a trembling line to tell a story about a boy's kindness gaining him a special reward. Horrocks' story is about a young girl happening upon a mechanical man who needs to be wound up, as she's on her way to get special wisdom from a magical fish. Horrocks' use of blacks is as lovely as ever, and the simplicity of his figures adds so much to this tale of developing friendship. Simply the way Horrocks draws a night sky or a hillside covered with flowers is poetic and elegant; few artists use negative space as well as he does.

Bellwood and McGinty's comics are the cleanest-looking in terms of the line and character design. I thought Tom Motley's comic, by comparison, was harder to follow; his work stuck out and lacked the clarity of the rest of the contributors. We'll see if his style matches up better in future issues, but his story added a discordant tone to a book that was otherwise quite harmonious in style despite the large number of contributors and complexity of the set-up. Becan and Vaughn obviously really worked hard on their stories, as their art has never looked sharper. Becan's story was also the most clever in the book, giving it a fairy tale flavor that I enjoyed. Cates and Wenthe's story was surprisingly downbeat, revealing that while the book is all-ages and won't have graphic content, not every character necessarily gets a happy ending. These stories are smart, well-drawn and avoid the kind of cliches that plague other fantasy comics that I've read.

CCS Anthologies: Wings For Wheels, Stranger Knights, Irene

Stranger Knights #3, edited by Bill Volk.The latest volume in Volk's quirky, genre-oriented and comic pamphlet-formatted anthology is tighter in focus and all the better for it. Volk's own stories revolve around an institutionalized team of super-heroes called the Stranger Knights, who have their own hierarchies and politics to contend with along with threats. In "The Capsule's Promise", Volk turns around the time-worn theme that an alien crash-landing on earth might be friendly by having one of the Knights try to engage it peacefully, only to discover that when it shouts out "Kill Everything!", it means it. "It Grows Among Us" features the dense but simplistic art of Casey Bohn with Volk's story. This is an on-the-road story featuring the Search and Detrucktive going after a food-stealing thief, only to find things aren't what they seem. Bohn's heavy use of blacks and chunky line remind me a bit of the work of John G. Miller, the Scottish cartoonist. Mary Soper's linework in "Incantrix X" is crude and derivative of mainstream manga, but it also has a certain charm and energy, along with an energetic sense of humor. The most polished piece in the book is Bryan Stone's "The Orb of Shalla", a sort of cross between fantasy, sci-fi and high adventure. As a cat woman and a robot hunt for a priceless artifact in the jungle, they are pursued by a creature who actually wants the horned piglet they've picked up as a pet. Stone caps the story with a funny punchline and keeps the reader interested with clever and clear character design. Stranger Knights is lightweight work to be sure, but Volk is slowly but surely figuring out just what he wants this book to look like and feel like. There's certainly a place for smart and funny genre fiction, but it will take time to sand off some of the rougher edges of the anthology. Volk is already adding clever elements like fake ads and a more thoughtfully considered sense of design to the proceedings, as he and his collaborators are clearly dedicated to getting better in public.

Wings For Wheels, edited by Nomi Kane. This is another lightweight but enjoyable anthology with excellent production values. It's a tribute to Bruce Springsteen and his music, and the cardboard cover plus the comic with painted grooves designed to mimic a 45 are both quite clever. Todd McArthur's "A Clarence Clemons Christmas Carol" was the most inessential story in the book in part because of its nonsensical premise (a ghostly Clarence Clemons, the former sax player for the E Street Band, telling the author to spend money in the form of the Dickens story?). Much better was Josh PM Frees' "The Boss Don't Stop", which is about the experience of being carried away by music in the form of a lunatic at a karaoke bar belting out "Born To Run" despite crashing through a table and losing volume on his microphone. Jen Vaughn's "This Town" tries to connect up a younger girl's taste in music with her mother's in the form of Springsteen in a fairly obvious way. Editor Kane's take on the same idea, "Home Is Where The Boss Is", is a better attempt at getting at the idea of a cross-generational appreciation for Springsteen's form of grassroots-inspired Americana and the ways it extends and deepens into adulthood. Pat Barrett's "Growin' Up" takes on this concept from a different angle, trying to justify his own hard-youth bona fides despite growing up in Connecticut by comparing his upbringing to Springsteen's in New Jersey by trying to lump them all together as the tri-state area. This leads to dueling fantasy Springsteens that his friends bring to life, hilariously personifying the ways in which we attach ourselves to our musical heroes. Finally, Jen May's interstitial drawings were a nice touch, especially the final one which details her history with an iconic (and to her troubling) t-shirt image.

Irene, edited by Dakota McFadzean, DW and Andy Warner. This was a strong anthology mostly from recent grads and current students of CCS. That's an interesting editorial board in that each of the artists has radically different approaches to the comics page. McFadzean uses a cartoony style, DW is a mark-maker in the Fort Thunder tradition, and Warner uses a naturalistic approach. McFadzean's "Skeletons" continues his interest in the intersection between small-town life's stresses and the supernatural, especially with regard to children. This story of a friendship fraying because one family is moving away perfectly captures the ways in which kids interact (especially young boys) while creating an unnerving supernatural subtext. Warner's "Come Into My Heart" is the story of an acid trip shared by two teens, culminating in a confession disclosing abuse by the troubled boy. Warner's page and panel design break up the story nicely, but the story gains its real power by his wordless, tight close-ups on the characters at the end. While there's a crisp precision present in his character design, they're also organic enough to allow the story to flow.

DW's collaboration with cute-figure-drawing Rachel Dukes is demented, hilarious and gripping all at once. It's a spy/assassination story drawn in the style of cute, Pokemon-style critters. Levels of denial and disavowal figure into this story of a Daymaker teaming up with a vicious Kid to take down Death Dude, with the price being some baked goods. DW plays it totally straight, building up an intriguing mythology from the ground up while Duke's loose, simple style is perfectly suited for such a story. Jonathan Fine's "Endswell" and Nate Wootters' "Blueberry" bookend the anthology in more ways than one: it's the gritty reality of the boxing ring versus the horrific fantasy of a father forcing a creature on his son, as well as warmth and trust in the face of adversity vs. abject betrayal. Fine's line is clean and naturalistic, while Wootters employs a more cartoony but densely-hatched approach. They're fit nicely into the anthology's overall themes surrounding family, betrayal, and secrets. I hope to see future volumes.

Anthologies: Lies Grown-Ups Told Me, Cartoon Crier

One of the priorities at the Center for Cartoon Studies that's pounded into its students' heads is the need to publish. Publish minicomics and work on your short-story chops before you can get to that ambitious graphic novel. Better yet, band together and publish anthologies. From the very beginning, CCS students and then alums have been publishing anthologies, many of them themed. Sundays is the best and probably the best known, but there have been a couple of dozen other CCS-related anthologies that have seen print. For the most part, the quality and professionalism of each anthology has improved with each passing year, as alumni continue to improve and the best young students contribute as well. The reader gets a sense that these aren't just filler stories, but rather examples of cartoonists truly putting their best foot forward.

Lies Grown Ups Told Me, edited by Nomi Kane, Caitlin M, and Jen Vaughn, is yet another quality anthology assembled by two CCS alums and the former Schulz Library librarian (Caitlin McGurk, now at Ohio State). Not everyone in the anthology is or was associated with CCS, but it's a good 90% of the book's contents. The anthology's theme is simple, yet proves to be fertile ground for its artists. There's not a single clunker in the whole book, even those strips whose draftsmanship isn't in the same class as the best artists in the books. Some of the very best CCS draftsmen are featured here, including Nomi Kane, Dakota McFadzean and faculty member Jon Chad. All three members of that trio do not disappoint. Kane's story is hilarious, as she repeats as a matter of fact that pregnant women shouldn't swim with dolphins because their sonar can detect the gestating baby, leading them to corner the women and kidnap the babies to raise them as their own. Until she says this out loud to her friend, she believes it to be true. Kane's figure work is pure eye-candy: expressive, amusing and packed with clever details. Speaking of detail, McFadzean's story about his grandfather's claims of being able to draw the best Donald Duck is both warm and wry, bringing past and present together in a simple satisfying manner. There's a clean elegance to his line that nonetheless always conveys warmth and emotions just below the surface. Chad's story about his parents inadvertently realizing that a television show that signaled bedtime meant putting him to bed whenever they wanted is a pretty simple one by his visually lush standards, though he still manages to throw in some clever flourishes.

Most of the contributors play the theme for laughs, and the sheer variety of lies they later discovered makes for a lively book. Some are a bit more sobering than others, like Tom Casteel discovering that hard work and dedication doesn't always pay off in "Patrol Boy of the Year", or Cody Pickrodt wondering why on earth he thought his dad thought it would be funny to pretend that he died after a rough-housing session with his two young children and no other adults around. Saying things to scare kids is another running theme, as Beth Hetland's sister freaks her out with tales of the "The Undertoad" living in the ocean, Bryan Stone's grandmother keeps him from exploring the forest by telling him that "Red Eyes" lives there and will eat his dog, and (worst of all), Andrew Greenstone's parents keep him in line by telling him of his "other brother" Igor whom they killed and buried in the backyard because he was a naughty boy. Ben Horak's "Sweet Trap" was along those lines but even better because the threat was silent. He and his brother kept raiding the cookie jar, and his frustrated mother put up a bunch of wires and other junk on it, saying "Now I have to do something drastic!"  There's a hilarious two page spread of Horak and his brother imagining what kind of trap their mother might have set, when the reality is that it was just a hoax.

Overall, the tone of the book is breezy and affectionate. That's best encapsulated by Lena Chandhok's "Earth Girls Are Easy", an account of watching that movie as a preteen with her grandfather and younger sister. It's a lovely story because it captures the moment when Chandhok realized that she was suddenly on the other side of the divide of adult and child, knowing something that her younger sister didn't. I liked that the editors reached out to plenty of non-CCS artists as well, like letterer/caricaturist Rick Parker's illustrated story about being accused of cutting up a garden hose, Jesse Lonergan's hilarious account of being duped as to the origin of broccoli, and the superb Scottish artist Lorna Miller chiming on in on the reasons why she was told not to pick dandelions as a child. The editors do a nice job of alternating the truly silly stories with the slightly more contemplative or serious ones, though the tone throughout is fairly lighthearted. 

Another CCS anthology with precisely the opposite tact is The Cartoon Crier, edited by Cole Closser, James Sturm and R.Sikoryak. This is a free, 36-page comics broadsheet that's a collaboration between the National Cartoonist's Society and CCS, with the theme being sadness and crying. This is a fascinating snapshot of contemporary newspaper cartooning and the next young wave of cartoonists, as the editors plumb the depths of veterans like Mort Walker to find those strips that defy conventional punchlines in the service of expressing misery. I imagine this project owes much to the Comics Editor of King Features Syndicate, Brendan Burford, who is also a small-press cartoonist. He contributes a strip theorizing how cartoonists transformed from garrulous men-about-town in the early part of the 20th century to the more introverted and downbeat characters of recent years, and guesses that the influence of Charles Schulz had the biggest impact. It's obvious that the hand of Schulz can be felt in many of the modern strips when they do turn away from gags.

Consider Lynn Johnston, whose series of strips regarding the death of a family dog is absolutely shattering. Like Schulz, the strips have the rhythm of a comedic strip, but she eschews punchlines in some for portents, while the punchlines in other strips later take a dark turn. Sturm provides an example of a brutal strip by the Family Circus' Bil Keane that technically contains a gag but only in the bleakest of terms. In general, the strips by the CCS cartoonists are more interesting and daring than the NCS strips, which is understandable given the total freedom they have. While there a few CCS veterans and some other outside artists, most of the contributors to this comic are either current students or 2012 graduates, and they give a fine accounting for themselves given this format. April Malig's simply-drawn strip about her difficulty controlling her tendency to cry is clever, especially given her solution. Sophie Goldstein's full-page "Potato Baby" is hilariously depressing as it doucments the ridiculous travails of the tile character. Rachel Dukes' slickly-drawn "Lucky Dog" is even more over the top, as it addresses the side issue of the lonely life of the cartoonist. Closser's own "Little Tommy Lost" and his activity page are evocative of classic newspaper cartooning. The former is an homage to Milt Caniff-style adventure strips, while the latter goofs on being maudlin. Donna Almendrala's Nancy pastiche is hilarious, expertly evoking the cadence of that strip while staying on theme. (She also had a strong strip in Lies Grown Ups Told Me.) Max Riffner and Dakota McFadzean are two cartoonists whose slick draftsmanship is clearly strong enough for syndicate work, even as their strips here both take enormously dark turns.

The lineup of veteran cartoonists, CCS alumni and CCS fellows here is killer. Sturm's autobiographical strip about getting older, drawn in the form of a superhero comic, is thoughtful and smart. Sikoryak, the comics/literary mashup master, this time around puts together Dilbert and Herman Melvile's Bartleby The Scrivener, an inspired pairing given that both address workplace ennui and forms of rebellion. Scribbly autobio specialist David Libens contributes a marvelous strip about a kid visiting the grave of his dead pet and telling her a secret: that he no longer uses a potty seat. It's a strong use of detail, as Libens has a knack for translating how little kids talk into comics form. Melissa Mendes has a typically strong but understated story about a girl who sees her dog die in an accident, with the last panel showing her back to the reader as she processes the grief by drawing pictures of her beloved pet. Jon Chad goes literal with an ingenious, thin-lined strip about a "scientist" who takes us through a series of background sight gags about how and why humans cry. Joe Lambert's "Retainer" is yet another example of the artist's increasing complexity and maturity, even as he continues to explore the dynamics of children and teens. Ariel Bourdeaux, the 90s comics veteran who recently graduated from CCS, contributes a funny strip about crying listening to children sing, and the embarrassing feeling of being spotted in public in a bright room, crying uncontrollably. Laura Park's story about someone recalling their mother being sent away before their fifth birthday because of mental illness is all the more heartbreaking when the final panel reveals that she was glad because she knew that she'd get the biggest slice of cake. Robyn Chapman's story about a woman who is unable to cry after a childhood as a crybaby is restrained yet powerful.

The broadsheet also contains commentary by Shaenon Garrity on the saddest comics she's ever read, while Andrew Farago compiles the results of a survey of cartoonists about the same question. Overall, The Cartoon Crier isn't necessarily a compelling read from page to page and strip to strip, as many of the syndicated strips are still rather banal. This comic is better read like a regular newspaper section--with some brilliant strips, some reliable favorites, some interesting discoveries, and a good deal of dross. Its goal of comparing and contrasting two entirely different worlds of cartooning and finding common ground was an interesting one, especially since Schulz is an influence on nearly every cartoonist. What's most impressive about it is that the youngest cartoonists really took this assignment seriously and did their best work. It's not unusual to be impressed with CCS cartoonists after reading an anthology, but it's rare that every contributor does their best work. It's this group that's the true backbone of this anthology.

Some CCS Minis: Forsman, Barrett, Bohn, McFadzean, Vaughn

The advent of SPX has once again brought a bounty of minicomics to review. Here's a quintet of minis from assorted students and alums of the Center for Cartoon Studies.

The End of the Fucking World #1, by Chuck Forsman. One of Forsman's specialties has become the depiction of losers, creeps and the generally alienated. This mini concerns an extreme example of such a person, a nameless teen who at a very young age has an awareness of being a psychopath. That manifests in his inability to laugh or feel, leading him to extreme behavior in an effort to generate some kind of emotion or sensation. The result is a lot of dead animals, two of his fingers mangled by a garbage disposal and contemplating the murder of someone who more or less pushed her way into being his girlfriend. The issue ends with him slugging his father and stealing his car. Forsman's line continues to grow simpler and more economical as he evolves as an artist. He still adds a lot of hatching and cross-hatching in the corners of his strips, an effect that rounds the tops of his images and contributes an air of gloom and dread. He also has a knack for depicting kids with long hair with just a few lines. This is an intriguing little comic and I'm eager to see just where Forsman will take this story.


Dental Damned!!, by Pat Barrett. This is the fourth issue of Barrett's one-man anthology series, Oak & Linden, done in a completely different format. This is a 7x3" comic (landscape, essentially) done entirely in color, and it looks like it may have been drawn on a computer. The color is more than a little garish as Barrett is trying to emulate animated features moreso than comic books. Another clue in that direction (other than the Looney Toons tribute on the inside front cover) is the way his characters move: in fits, spasms and jerks. The story concerns a Barrett stand-in character on his way to the dentist to fix a tooth that's been knocked out. Along the way, he spins fanciful reasons as to how the tooth got knocked out (fencing match, orgy, dance party) until the merciless dentist makes him tell the truth. What I liked about this story is that Barrett takes standard autobio tropes (a story about a medical problem) and spins it into an exaggerated series of gags. In terms of images, the panel where one sees a huge penis juxtaposed against Barrett's cute drawing style was especially funny, as was the naturalistically-drawn close-up of the rot & gore in his mouth. This is not Barrett's best comic, in part because it doesn't flatter his most significant skills as a draftsman, but it's an interesting experiment nonetheless.


After The Future, by Casey Bohn. Some artists come into CCS without a real style to call their own. That is not the case with Bohn, who uses a simple line predicated on chunky figures and the dominant use of black to emphasize backgrounds and deemphasize figures. His line has a somewhat creepy quality, as his figures resemble something like 1950s clip art or advertising art. It lends his comic a weird, artificial quality, as though it was an object that was found instead of drawn. That sense of disorientation is an apt match for this comic about an inventor alienated from his magnate father who transfers his consciousness into robot form. The ending is somewhat anticlimactic and makes the issue feel more like an origin story than a one-off, but the quirkiness of Bohn's style is enough of a draw to make this a worthwhile reading experienced.


Ghost Rabbit, by Dakota McFadzean. McFadzean is one of the most accomplished draftsmen I've seen from CCS, and it's clear that his storytelling instincts are also well-refined. Despite his obvious skill, there's a sense of restraint in his storytelling that elevates his work above its basic visual appeal. This story features the parallel narrative of a young girl growing up in a house where her mother struggles with her own mentally decaying mother along with an anthropomorphic rabbit haunted by the titular ghost rabbit. The lingering images of memory loom large in this story and they're elegantly portrayed by McFadzean, starting with the vellum cover featuring the ghost rabbit and an intact country house that transforms into a house ravaged by age when the page is turned. McFadzean implies that the anthropomorphic rabbit's narrative is a product of the girl's imagination as she processes the repeated phone conversations her mother has with her grandmother, until she actually sees a rabbit in the wild. Initially, that real-life meeting leads to a joyous fantasy sequence (featuring two pages of the characters dancing with each other excitedly) but the ghost lingers further when she understands that the rabbit is sick and soon dies. We see that small ghost hop after her when she comes inside after covering the dead rabbit with leaves, as the girl has acquired the same sort of ghost that she imagines her mother is burdened with. This is a simple, elegant and poetic comic by a highly promising young artist.


Heavy Flow, by Jen Vaughn. This is the third in a series of Vaughn's hilarious and frank "Menstruation Station" comics, this time focusing (in minute detail) on the mechanics of the menstrual cup and why it's a superior alternative to tampons and pads. Vaughn has always been ambitious and creative in her page design and panel composition, adding elements of diagrams, instructional manuals and decorative illustrations in an effort to create a narrative around her campaign for alternative menstrual cycle care. Vaughn also makes a number of interesting side points related to gender with a helping of wit, but she doesn't soften her rhetoric while doing so. For example, she refers to tampons and pads as "yet one more tax for being a woman" and includes things like birth control and ibuprofen but also adds "unicorn figures" and "creepy hair removal products" to the list, with an asterisk that notes "some items optional". What's disappointing about this mini is that while Vaughn has a definitive and powerful voice as a writer and designer, her line simply doesn't live up to the material. Vaughn's line is in a limbo state between naturalistic and cartoony, a state not uncommon for artists who are trying to draw something very specific but simply don't have the chops to draw it effectively. Part of Vaughn's problem is that she rarely varies her line weight (except when lettering). Another problem is that her attempts at hatching and cross-hatching seem rushed and sloppy. As a result, some images create distraction instead of imparting information and telling a story. Vaughn does have a nice knack for body language and gesture, and the pages that feature two characters interacting with each other are her most successful. I get the sense that Vaughn will simply improve over time, but I hope that she one day redraws these minis when she's ready to collect them.

TCJ Post #8: Jen Vaughn & Morgan Pielli

In his first CCS review catch-up column, Rob considers the work of Jen Vaughn and Morgan Pielli.