Thirty Days of CCS #23: Sasha Steinberg

Sasha Steinberg, during his time at CCS, was one of the most ambitious, talented and cerebral of its students. His Stonewall series, taking on the famous riot that launched the gay rights movement in the USA from a variety of different points of view. During his time at CCS, he also began experimenting with drag performance as Sasha Velour. An early showcase came at the Ignatz awards at SPX, when she presented an award, along with her partner Johnny. (Steinberg tends to flip between pronouns, and for the purposes of the article, I will refer to Steinberg as she when in the Velour persona and he otherwise). Of course, Sasha Velour has become a worldwide star thanks to her winning Season 9 of the television show RuPaul’s Drag Race. She won it using the same persona she presents as a cartoonist: a playful intellectual whose work is deeply informed by and a tribute to a number of historical influences.

Even before her success on the show, Velour was self-publishing a full-color, the first issue of which was titled Vym, but has since been simply retitled Velour. The third issue is fairly light on comics and heavy on both photography and especially collage. It’s also light on the thoughtful, philosophical essays from the first issue, or at least, they manifested in the form of interviews and photo commentary. The emphasis on both collage and performance reminds me of the sort of the thing that was produced in Weimar Germany, also harkening back to collage artists like Hannah Hoch.

The result is a colorful, beautiful comic that emphasizes the sense of community and kindness in drag culture rather than the shade that’s thrown on TV. Indeed, the theme of the issue was “Sisters”. There was a photo/collage piece where a pair of drag queens used similar materials to decorate photos of the other, and this turned out to be the most striking photo essay in the magazine. A tight-knit Brooklyn drag group (The House of Aja) receives a similar kind of photo-collage treatment, with each member getting a page of their own glory. Velour’s conception of drag has always emphasized inclusivity, especially with regard to people of size, people of color, people of different faiths and trans women, and the “That’s My Sister” article speaks to the incredibly wide array of manifestations of what drag means to people. (I thought Patti Spliff was an especially clever persona.)

Circling back to CCS contributors, Jose-Luis Olivares contributed drawings of five of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, along with commentary. This is a group that Olivares is listed as a “novice” of, and Olivares’ painterly qualities are on full display. April Malig collaborated with Untitled Queen on what could have been a fantastic risographed zine as well as an article in this magazine. Titled “the spectacularly sad surreptitious spinster snake sister survival spellbook”, it’s a clever, funny and deeply emotional blueprint for establishing and nourishing friendships with one’s sisters. Their mutual Filipino background contributed to the dessert portion of the piece, a layered concoction called Halo-Halo.

Velour herself contributed a collage of photos of her fellow stars from Drag Race, putting them in fantastical settings befitting their personae. Velour was the subject (along with her Drag Race collaborator, Shea Coulee’) of a photo essay emphasizing their “Naughty Nightie” piece on the show and taking it to another level. Finally, in a comic by Laurel Lynn Leake titled “Afters”, she depicts some moments of rest after a drag show, with each of the performers doing their own post-mortem. When Yessica Mente wonders why one of her tributes went down so poorly, her friends note that her tribute to an African-American artist (recently departed), including use of a racial slur. Yessica, not being African-American, is unsure and defensive about this, and tensions rise.

Leake takes a long look at the kind of simmering tensions that can arise and nods toward the fact that it was women of color (and trans women of color of that) who were the key figures of Stonewall. Leake is another artist who is sensitive and aware of the complexities that surround drag while being enormously sympathetic toward them. The end, which includes apologies but also a sense of realizing that certain issues couldn’t be resolved instantly, speaks to the sisterhood that’s the theme of the issue and the story itself. It speaks to drag’s power and possibilities while gently examining the human imperfections that are a part of it, so that it can be celebrated authentically.

More CCS Comics: Cockle, Studlar, Olivares

Continuing my look at recent work by CCS grads, here are three wildly different projects.

Frog Stories, by Ross Wood Studlar. Studlar, who has a career as a park ranger, brings that interesting experience to bear on his comics rather dramatically in this comic. He's really found his voice doing comics about nature and wildlife, bringing a clear and whimsical voice to these animal narratives. This comic is a one-man anthology of frog-related stories, imagining a voice for these animals as they go about the business of predation. The first story, "Song For  Hungry Horned Frog" was drawn four years ago, and one can see the progress Studlar's made as a draftsman since that time. That doesn't apply so much to his drawings of frogs (though they have become sharper), but rather of of everything else. Studlar's also become more adept at depicting motion, as shown in the second story, "Acrobat By Night", which was done white-on-black to depict night activity. Here, the frog remains still in one panel and then jumps impossibly high to devour its flying prey. The way Studlar draws the frogs in full extension is quite beautiful; one can almost hear the frog's muscles stretching in mid-air. "Big Bad Bo" is about a bullfrog that terrorizes its pond, eating everything in its sight--even small mammals and birds. He meets his match when he's caught and placed in a terrarium, and even his constant stream of urine doesn't save him from that particular embarrassment. One can see Studlar's limitations in the last panel of the story, where the person is revealed; he clearly doesn't have a good feel for drawing people, or at least not as developed a one as he has for drawing nature. That really doesn't matter all that much, considering how lovely and charming his wildlife comics are. I'd love to see a book full of such stories, ones that continue to display the humor that Studlar mines out of his wildlife observations along with the deadly reality of nature.

Annotated #8, by Aaron Cockle. This is the latest and densest in a series of postmodern comics by Cockle that muse on the idea of language, the way it is controlled, and the ways in which language at its very core is rooted in deception. Prefacing the contents of the issue as being "half-told stories" (a clever play on Twice-Told Tales), each of the single-page anecdotes in this comic contains wide swaths of text that have been redacted, as though by a government agency that got a hold of the work before the reader saw it. The comic follows a day of an unnamed woman as she negotiates politics at her job at a publisher of some kind, goes out to lunch, goes on a date and later gives a lecture about her experiences. That lecture is interspersed with an account of her father telling a story about what happened in his life after getting divorced from her mother. The story ends with both the woman and her father more or less trailing off, alluding to events that they assume are well-known to the reader and involve a great deal of high-profile stress. This issue is all about in-between times, the times when the characters suffer setbacks so great that they have to leave town and take up again with their parents.

There are also three comics about artists: Ezra Pound, Jean Cocteau and Hal Croves. Each of the the three comics deals with the artist's biography as well as works, focusing on Pound's avid fascism and personal stake in knowing that his precise words were being used for the cause; Cocteau and his thoughts on critics and "this sickness, to express oneself" and the shell game that was Hal Croves' identity. Croves wrote The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as B Traven (maybe), but his identity was something he kept purposefully vague. The mystery surrounding his identity is tailor-made for Cockle, who skillfully plucks certain key quotes about his life and then depicts a scene from one of his stories. The labyrinthine nature of Cockle's storytelling is reminiscent of Borges and Roberto Bolano, and Cockle builds on that effect with the physical manipulation of text and the juxtaposition of text and image. Words are warped, staggered, blotted out and erased. Even titles of pieces are frequently partially redacted, as though Cockle was pulling out a piece from a puzzle and hiding it from the reader. He leaves plenty of hints for the reader to follow along, but this comic is so effective because at no time does it rely on the visuals to create an impact. Instead, his mixed-media style enhances the text and allows the simplicity of his image-making to hold sway. Cockle's comics grow more exciting with each issue as he continues to play to his strengths as an artist.

School Pencil and other comics by Jose-Luis Olivares and friends. Olivares' fascinating, scrawled comics made him one of my favorite of the CCS artists from the very beginning of his tenure. For 2012, he had the idea of starting a minicomics subscription service (something that Liz Baillie also did): each month, the reader gets a minicomic, hand-made book, stickers and/or other assorted miscellany. The package he sent me contained several of his projects, starting with the gorgeous full-color accordion micro-mini-comic Animal Sense. Flipped on one side, and this is a comic featuring colorful cut-out animals going through the food chain on a desert island. Flipped on the other side, and the various rows form a single image. Each page of the hand-constructed Tramp Stamp is done with a hand-cut stamp as it follows the sad story of a woman with a bad tattoo who catches her boyfriend cheating on her, leading up to her stabbing him. School Pencil is an anthology done with fellow CCS alums Matt Aucoin and Holly Foltz, each of whom participate in a jam and contribute a variety of one-page strips. The work here is off-the-cuff to be sure, but Foltz and Aucoin contributed some fairly polished strips (especially Foltz, who has really sharpened up her draftsmanship) with solid punchlines. Foltz's pun on "Illuminati" was especially funny. For his part, Olivares contributes several diary strips that flip between studied naturalism and scribbly expressionism. There's something about his blocky, chunky style when he draws figures that's simply eye-catching and appealing to follow across a page. The strips are also personal and revealing while being restrained as far as going into too much detail; all the reader needs to know to understand the emotional context of these strips is what Olivares gives you. This mail service is the next best thing to seeing Olivares at a convention.

I just got a new comic in the mail from Olivares called Pansy Boy #1. While not explicitly autobiographical, it feels deeply personal. It starts with a teenaged boy's dream about a superhero and his sidekick (the titular character) saving the world. The hero then declares "And now we must kiss...first with our tongues...and then with our butts"--and then we shift to the boy waking up, as we see he was the sidekick in the dream..The rest of the comic features the boy quietly trying to deal with his erection, sneaking around the house and looking for "gay" images on a search engine. There's a level of verisimilitude that is almost uncomfortable yet funny, like reaching down to take off one of his socks when he's close to ejaculating. As he's cleaning himself up, his little brother comes in and barks out "Mom says you can't use the computer" without understanding what's going on or why. He's assuaged when the teen promises to tell him a story, starting off with a story of "2 handsome superheroes". Olivares' scribbly line is a perfect fit for a story about kids, even as it touches on the kind of adult issues that teens must face. In particular, it's a story about a teen who knows that he's gay, even if it's not something that he can discuss openly with anyone else. I also love that while there's an element of risk involved in this story, the teen manages to find pleasure without guilt or recriminations. I can't wait to see how Olivares follows this up. 

Four New CCS Anthologies

Anthologies have long been the lifeblood of the students and alumni of the Center for Cartoon Studies. Self-published anthologies are frequently the first place they publish, but many alumni continue to edit and publish them long after graduation. Let's take a look at four recent anthologies by alumni, students and faculty of CCS.

Too Far, edited by Joseph Lambert. This is a very strong anthology from One Percent Press, the minicomics and music collective that includes Lambert, JP Coovert and James Hindle. They've done a number of anthologies but this one shows both their growth as artists as well as their taste in picking new contributors. Of course, this is really Lambert's show in terms of editing and design, and one can clearly see him evolving in every aspect of comics. Hindle's piece, "Microscopic", combines the very specific pain of dealing with a one-way breakup with the sort of phenomenology of space as it applies to emotional states that Tom Kaczynski does so well. Alexis Frederick-Frost contributes a story done in his recent, more relaxed style that's not quite so heavy on the blacks. With that thinner line, he crams a ton of ornate but clear detail into a hilarious period piece about society functions and how women started wearing ever more ornate hats with live birds on them. This is a wonderfully witty story that fully exploits its premise and ends with a great punchline. Coovert's piece is one of his fantasy/autobio pieces involving an argument with his finger after he picked at it. This is a wisp of a story, but some of the cartooning involved is clever.


Jose-Luis Olivares offers a typically visually crazy story about Superman and Storm giving birth to a baby hurricane. His line is simple but dense, using thick, swirling strokes to create an atmosphere of chaos. At the same time, this story is whimsical yet strangely affecting emotionally. Even when Superman learns that Mickey Mouse is really the father (a move that scored Olivares a hat trick of copyright infringement), he embraces the baby as his own--even as it destroys the world. Lambert follows a story by one of the most original stylists from CCS with another, as we get a Dane Martin story involving his bizarre bird people. There's always an inchoate rage present in Martin's comics that matches the bleakness of his dotted backgrounds and the blank expressions on the faces of his characters.


Lambert's own story is his best-ever, perfectly encapsulating the theme of the anthology as expressed by its title. Lambert's stories tend to center around sibling rivalry and the viciousness it can entail, putting that conflict on a fantastic, over-the-top stage. This story sees a scared child literally eating his father and then the entire world (truly a "going too far" moment) and then following up on the ramifications of this action by exploring what happens to the world when it's eaten. Lambert always had flash and slickness in his line, but he's now branching out with experimental and even quirky solutions to visual problems. Finally, Alex Kim picks up on the eschatological themes present in this book with a story about a man at an Antarctic base being confronted by the end of the world in the person of a woman who shows up at his door to tell him the news. "Too far" in this instance is less about nuclear devastation than about an extra act of shocking cruelty, and the paranoia in the story is heightened by Kim's trademark wavy line. There's no question that Too Far is on my short list for best minicomic of the year.

Stranger Knights #2, edited by Bill Volk. Volk expanded this genre-based anthology from the first issue, and while there's some interesting and off-beat stories to be found, the anthology as a whole is sloppily assembled. The work of some of the contributors feels rushed and even dashed-off in some cases. It doesn't seem like any editing or proofreading was done on any of the submissions and the errors are glaring as a result. Mary Soper, for example, has a pleasant enough style, but it's hard to tell her characters apart. This comic looks like it was drawn on a computer, but in any event Soper's line lacks weight, depending way too much on gray-scaling to give its characters some presence on the page. Volk's own stories are typically eccentric, but I'm not crazy about his new style. It's cartoonier and more spare than his old style, adding some interestingly deformed character designs, but it still feels like Volk isn't quite comfortable with it yet. What is never in doubt is Volk's wit, as the story of a "future archeologist" interpreting 21st century culture entirely through tattoos was very amusing. The weakest story in the anthology was Shawn Atkins' "The Rise of Phoenix Nine": the narrative is one cliche' after another, it's rife with spelling errors (due, no doubt, in part to its computer font), and the occasionally lively facial expressions are marred by pedestrian layouts.

On the other hand, the offerings by Morgan Pielli and Casey Bohn were a cut above the rest of the entries in the book. Pielli's "A Forged Man" is visually stylish, playing on Frank Miller-style figures and use of blacks to tell a story of a hero trapped in an awful loop. Pielli is really starting to hit his stride of late. Bohn's lumpy style is reminiscent of Steve Ditko, down to the stark simplicity of his character design and clarity of action. There's something slightly crazy going on under the surface of his staid-looking comics, creating an interesting tension between form and content. Overall, I'd say Volk's desire to expand the anthology's contents got the best of either his editorial judgment or attention to detail with regard to the other submissions. The idea of an alt-genre anthology is a good one, but the overall level of craft and care is not yet up to the standards of other CCS anthologies.


Subterranean #3, edited by Sean Knickerbocker, Alex Bullett, and Andrew Greenstone. All three of these artists were new to me, but this mini was surprisingly tight and impressive. Each brings a different set of visual and narrative approaches to the table. Knickerbocker is a student at CCS, and he draws his inspiration from underground comics and contemporary cartoonists who take their cues from classic comics, like Sammy Harkham. His story "Hunters and Gatherers" is a grim take on two hunters exploring an environment, with the tragic outcome for one being mourned but briefly by the other. "Pekar" is a meditation on the great writer, done in the style of a Pekar/Crumb collaboration. His true gem is "My First Panic Attack", a (presumably) autobiographical story about a young man who experiences a panic attack when confronted with the age difference between him and his girlfriend. The attack manifests as he and his girlfriend transform into Floyd Gottfredsen-style, vaguely anthropomorphic characters and are menaced by a spider/cop. Knickerbocker clearly has a bright future, especially when he's fully processed his influences.


Bullett's story about two bumbling aliens sent on a mission to assassinate a political leader feels like a Heavy Metal pastiche/parody, and as such it's got a wicked wit. From the (subdued) spectacle of the villain wearing only a mesh tank top and sunglasses (a funny comment on the way women are dressed in such stories) to the distorted and grotesque figures, Bullett's chops are just good enough to tell the story the way it needed to be told without unnecessary clutter. Certain panels could have used backgrounds and more decorative detail to fully bring this world to life, but he certainly gets the point across. Greenstone's thick lines and clutter make his story about a vampire wage slave looking for love and inspiration at a hipster party spring to life. His cartoony style gives every drawing a springy energy, one that's contained by the generous helping of zip-a-tone effects he adds to nearly every panel. About the only problem I had with this story is that his lettering is just a bit too big and intrusive; the lettering itself is fine, but I would have preferred a little more visual impact in each panel and a bit less word balloon. All told, this was an impressive showcase for all three of these young artists, each of which has talent and potential.



This Isn't Working: Comics About Ex-Boyfriends, edited by Robyn Chapman. Chapman was never actually a student at CCS (she went to the Savannah College of Art & Design), but she's been an active part of the school in various capacities since virtually its inception. After years of editing and self-publishing her own comics as well as anthologies like True Porn and zines such as Hey, Four Eyes!, Chapman has officially launched her own minicomics publishing concern: Paper Rocket. She'll be reprinting classic minicomics series as minicomics (an ingenious idea) as well as doing new comics and anthologies. This Isn't Working is an anthology that includes several CCS folks in the mix, and it's exactly what the title suggests: autobio comics about relationships that didn't work out for one reason or another. The range of cartooning styles as well as experiences helps create a variety of stories. There are tales of woe, angry anecdotes and funny stories about crazy relationships. It's a short, tightly-edited anthology that doesn't overstay its welcome.

Cara Bean's pleasingly ornate tale of a rocky relationship she had with a man who was as miserable as she was ends with a tragic but not surprising result. Her self-caricature as a sort of walking potato was simultaneously endearing and self-deprecating. I've always admired Caitlin Plovnick's ability to use her limited skills as a draftsman to nonetheless create clear, simple and direct narratives. This story of a hideous recurring dream that turns from warm to horrible when an ex-boyfriend pops up is especially effective as she cleverly renders herself losing all definition after she wakes up from the dream. Chapman's spare and cartoony style has always grabbed my attention through the use of a thick, economical line surrounding key aspects of people and objects. Her story concerns her slight obsession with a long-ago boyfriend, wondering if he thinks of her the way she sometimes thinks of him.

Liz Prince's story of the hurt that remains long after the breakup with her boyfriend was surprisingly powerful. I thought her depiction of that relationship in Will You Still Love Me If I Wet The Bed? was lightweight and twee, but there's a level of thematic complexity at work in this story that goes beyond the simple drama of a break-up as she ties music into the narrative in an interesting way. Jen Vaughn's "Let's Go Out" is hilarious, depicting why cunnilingus after eating hot sauce is always a bad idea. As always, Vaughn is better at depicting clever visual solutions to compositional problems than in rendering actual figures, a factor that detracts a little from the story's punchline. Finally, Mari Naomi contributes another of her "Kiss and Tell" stories of people she's dated; this time, it was a rebound relationship after she broke up with her fiance'. The stark simplicity of her line, the frankness of her confessional story and sheer storytelling momentum she manages to conjure up out of minutia make this a strong closing act for an anthology that will hopefully have future volumes. Chapman clearly knows what she's doing as an editor and publisher.

CCS Anthologies: Werewolf IV, Werepups, Kids, Visions of the Aporkalypse

Let's take a look at three recent anthologies by students and alumni from the Center for Cartoon Studies.

Visions of the Aporkalypse, edited by Kevin Uehlein. The theme of this very silly anthology was perhaps a bit too limiting: humans doomed by the revenge of the pigs. Most of the artists turned in the same kind of story: pigs (led by an all-powerful "swine-clops" figure) rising up, devouring or otherwise sacrificing humans. It's a pretty thin concept, made even thinner by an overabundance of pin-up pages, as opposed to actual stories. And of course, the revenge theme of an animal being bred for food makes some of these stories as subtle as a sledgehammer. That said, there were three stories that elicited a chuckle. Betsey Swardlick's "bacon-porn" story, while as subtle as that aforementioned sledge-hammer, was still funny in the extreme she went to in depicting a man sexually excited by bacon and the revenge his wife gets on him as a result. Nomi Kane's story about a pig king getting ready to sacrifice humans but being urged by a minister to spare the Jews (since they didn't eat pork) had a very amusing punchline (seems like everyone makes an exception for bacon, even pigs!). The best story in the anthology was Carl Mefferd's "Meat Is Murder", which features a group of anthropomorphic pigs liberating a human processing center...only to face a rather gruesome end when nature takes its course. All told, this was one of the lesser CCS anthologies I've seen, though as always its presentation was attractive and its design was clever.

Werewolf IV and Werepups, edited by Penina Gal, Betsey Swardlick, Josh Rosen & Nick Patten. This particular editorial collective has done a fine job of showcasing a wide variety of story types from what would seem to be a fairly limited theme. They wisely chose to end the series with their fourth volume after the third started to run a bit thin in terms of material, but piggybacked it with a minicomic aimed at kids. Given that a number of small press conventions tend to have kids looking for material aimed at them, it was wise of the editors to create Werepups. It's a lovely package, featuring (as always) glow-in-the-dark paint on the cover. It's a short anthology at just 32 pages, which again is a perfect length for its audience.


The line-up is a strong one, starting with Melissa Mendes' "Where-Wolf?". Already specializing in comics featuring the experiences of children, this story is a lark about a young girl trying to keep a bag of meat destined for grandma's house safe. When she invites her best friend to come along, she should have checked to see if there was a full moon out. Mendes' open page design is as reminiscent of children's books as it is comics. Penina Gal's "Crisis In Jamlandia" is another story with an open layout, this time two panels to a page. In her typically scratchy and expressive style, Gal tells a story of two twin musicians who befriend a group of werewolves who want to play in a band but are afraid to go out in public. Nomi Kane's clean line is a nice contrast to the prior two stories with a two pager about a wolf who is confused when he wakes up wearing a tie, only to make the horrible realization that he can turn into a human!


Colleen Frakes, who specializes in folklore and monsters, does a fun segment about "Werewolf Tips and Tricks", a handbook for dealing with lycanthropes that works because of her light touch and delicate line. After several stories that are mostly restrained, Betsey Swardlick goes broad with "Double-Team", a typically funny story featuring teen werewolves at a summer camp forced to play teen vampires in a soccer match. Her comics have a frantic quality to them, usually climaxing in some sort of loud bang-up or crash, and this one is no exception. Swardlick's work really came alive in the course of these Werewolf anthologies, mixing slice-of-life stories with the supernatural. Her scratchy pencils contrast well with Dakota McFadzean's "We Like The Moon", a Joseph Lambert-style tale of a girl wanting to see the moon with her dog but worried that it's too cloudy. This is a simple tale made clever thanks to McFadzean's page design, wherein the reader sees the moon in the top set of panels but the girl and her dog don't, thanks to the clouds acting as a very thick sort of panel border. In another clever device, everything the dog says about the moon winds up being true, including the rabbit in the moon who eventually blows the clouds away. McFadzean's storytelling solutions in this story are ingenious, making full use of the formal properties of comics without losing track of his narrative.


The last issue of Werewolf, is a solid send-off and an improvement over the third issue. What I like best about it is its varied tone, from autobiographical to genre adventure to slice-of-life humor to straight-up gag work to horror. Jesse Lonergan's "Battle of the Bands" was a cute series of riffs on genre types as indy bands, with groups like The Zombies singing about eating brains and The Mummies breaking of a Chuck-D style rhyme. The payoff gag, featuring a group's unlikely werewolf transformation, flatters Lonergan's compositional skills as well as his angular, cartoony character design. My favorite story in the book came from Annie Murphy, whose "Queerwolf" was an autobio story about going to an elementary school to teach comics and coming up against the way gender and identity get locked in at such an early age for children. She aims to break that up by working with the class on a comic about a female werewolf. There's a touching simplicity and sincerity to this story as well as a dose of humor that's not always a hallmark of Murphy's work. Murphy is an impressive young talent who hasn't published a lot of comics to date, but they're certainly all worth tracking down.

"Lock and Load" by Jon Chad is a typically well-drawn story by him that serves to provide an unexpected punchline to what seems to be a silly flub by its main character. Penina Gal's "Wolfsbane" benefits from her simple, stick-figure drawings and small panels. Quirky horror artist Denis St. John's "Mangia La Mia Carne" is a bizarre bit of fetish-fiction about a woman who is a bit too turned on by what wolves can do. Luke Eastman's "Knacker" is a visceral tale of an animal carcass collector who may not be what he seems. Only Ryland Ianelli's "The Curse of the Wearwolf" felt undercooked to me, with sloppy drawing and unclear storytelling. It felt like a last-minute submission.


Two of the series' editors, Swardlick & Rosen, have also turned in some of the most consistently interesting work in the series. The latest chapter of Swardlick's "FailWolves" serial finds the two twentysomething female werewolves meeting more of their kind but finding they fit in as well with other lycanthropes as they do with the rest of society. As always, her dialogue is witty (though a couple of spelling mistakes stood out) and her line is agreeably sloppy & expressive. She may not be a top-drawer draftswoman, but she is clearly a talented cartoonist. Rosen's werewolf hunter character is appealing both in terms of narrative possibilities as well as design, thanks to Rosen's clear-line style. At some point, a collection of the best of all four issues of the anthology would yield a strong volume. Collections of the serials from Swardlick & Rosen would also seem to make sense. The success of the anthology is a tribute to its editors' commitment to providing diverse material, while allowing each artist to do what they do best.



Kids, edited by Melissa Mendes & Jose-Luis Olivares. This is the strongest of the anthologies I discuss here, which isn't a big surprise considering that its lineup is similar to that of the Sundays anthology group. That includes Mendes and Olivares, who are the editors of this well-curated 64-page effort. The theme is simple: comics about childhood in its various incarnations. For many of the artists invited to contribute, writing about childhood was already one of their main storytelling interests, so doing a story for an anthology such as this was not much of a stretch. Mendes kicks off the issue with a wordless strip about a kid waking up in the night, quietly sneaking out of the house, and then dropping his/her pajama bottoms and dancing. The rubbed charcoal style resembles crayon and is a nice invocation of a story about a kid that involves some aspect of the sort of drawing a child would make.

Robyn Chapman's "Krissy's House" is done in her minimalist clear-line style, and it's an autobio story about hanging out at the house of a friend as a pre-teen. The tone of the story is purely joyful, even if Chapman's adult perspective makes her understand that Krissy came from an extremely poor family. Chuck Forsman's "Witch Beach" was a touching and strange story about a young girl who declares to her (witch?) mother that she had decided that she no longer needed parents and informed her of this. There's a great panel where her mother panics but decides to play it cool by telling her daughter Icky to go outside to see what her father was doing. In another heart-crushing panel, Icky tries to tell her dad the same thing but the broken man says "I'm really not up to the whole 'father' thing right now". However, Icky's proclamation makes him feel better, and the two then share a moment both absurd and intimate. Forsman's cartoony and slightly fragile line are key in how he wrings emotion from these encounters without becoming mawkish.

Nate Beaty's "LCB" is a bit of silliness about some 80s breakdancing kids busting moves, battling rivals and videotaping themselves for demo purposes. It shares the light touch found in the rest of the anthology's stories. Lydia Conklin's "The Kittens Hate You" is another story in a series of strips about the ways in which children can be cruel to each other. It's about a bunch of kittens in a barn and how two girls are each given a chance to hang out with them. When one girl's time is up, she imagines the kittens telling her how much more they like her--and a funny competition ensues as to whom can get the most affection on demand from one of the cats. As always, there's a scratchy ugliness to Conklin's style, as she refuses to idealize or make childhood seem cute in any way.



Alex Kim's story about a young girl who has an unspoken crush on an older boy who has a crush on her older sister does a lot of its storytelling without saying a word. The weird little girl has no way to verbalize her feelings in general, as she sets up a tent outside the house and growls at the boy when the boy comes around to try to talk to the girl. Kim's use of spotted blacks and his slightly vibrating line are his trademarks and they're put to good use here to lend a sense of the young girl's anxiety. An anthology about kids has to have a story by Joseph Lambert, and here Lambert contributes a two-pager about a pair of young brothers fighting sleep and each other. Lambert's lettering is a crucial part of his overall aesthetic, matching the outsized and exaggerated nature of childhood itself.

Melissa's sister Amy contributes a two-page memory of herself, her sister and their mother dancing outside in the rain. It's a lovely image, more of an illustration than a comic. The anthology then shifts from this realistically rendered story to Max De Radigues' more bigfoot, cartoony style in his depiction of a young boy discovering a witch in the forest trying to turn animals into children. It's not a scary moment, because he then reveals that he knows the witch intimately and even makes suggestions for success. It winds up being a wonderfully touching strip about familial connection with a gentle sense of humor.



Olivares' "Made of Sand" features tiny figures and small panels, mixing fantasy and magic. In it, we see a young boy who discovers a tiny princess in a sand castle who asks for a starfish. He finds one and sets out to bring it to her, only to find that the castle has been demolished. I love the way Olivares has his character close his eyes while walking, imagining a world opening up in front of him. James Hindle's "Trash Heap" is about a teenage boy who rebels against his parents and winds up making a friend on the street, and they're extremely close until the other boy tires of him and heads out of town with a rich girl. Hindle really gets at the ache of how teens attach so much meaning to the friendships and relationships, even if they don't quite understand how that attachment is frequently not reciprocated.


Once again, the anthology rarely presents the same style twice in a row, so the transition this time is to Dane Martin's scratchy, feverish line, anthropomorphic characters and absurd yet disturbing story ideas. Martin switches character perspectives in a dizzying and hilarious manner, displacing the upsetting narrative events he creates with a crazy transition. The final story is more autobio, this time by David Libens. It's another story with a fragile, scratchy line about the ways in which the roles of children and parents can switch in times of stress. Everything about this anthology is well-designed without being overly fussy; I love the touch of the photos of the contributors as children being posted on refrigerators (complete with magnetic letters that spell out "comics" holding them up) as well as the hand-stamped letters spelling out "Kids" on the cover in paint. Hopefully there will be future volumes of this anthology.

TCJ Post #12: Various CCS Comics

Here's my review of assorted comics from CCS students Jose-Luis Olivares, Melissa Mendes and GP Bonesteel.

More From CCS: Dan Archer, Colleen Frakes, Jose-Luis Olivares, Jeremiah Piersol

Rob reviews some recent releases from some CCS grads and alumni. Included are WOMAN KING by Colleen Frakes, ARCHCOMIX #1 by Dan Archer, END OF EROS & POLITE FICTION #1 by Jose-Luis Olivares and THE MARVYNS: PROPER DECEPTION, by Jeremiah Piersol.

Let's look at some recent work by some graduating students and an alumnus of the Center For Cartoon Studies (CCS). The four projects reviewed couldn't be any more different from each other. Dan Archer's comic continues along the lines of the sort of polemics one might see in WORLD WAR 3 ILLUSTRATED. Jose-Luis Olivares' comics fall very much into the "mark-making" school of comics, with thick blotchy lines carrying the narrative almost exclusively. Colleen Frakes continues with her modern myth-making rooted in sex & identity, while Jeremiah Piersol pens a wild tale that owes a great deal to Gilbert Hernandez in its willingness to break boundaries as well as some of its visual flourishes.




WOMAN KING, by Colleen Frakes. Frakes' work reminds me a bit of Eleanor Davis in the way she works in myth and allegory, putting a modern spin on it. WOMAN KING is the final product of a story that's appeared in various stages in anthologies and minis, about a very young girl who is named "king" of the bears, who take up arms against their human enemies. Like Davis, there's a sensitivity in her line that borders on fragility, informing the actions and gestures of her characters. Earlier versions of the story felt overrendered, but the final output has a simplicity and delicacy to its line that put total trust in her own character designs and their ability to convey emotional information.

The delicacy of Frakes' line is usually juxtaposed against a certain savagery of subject matter. In a Frakes comic, someone is usually going to get killed or maimed, and I've always admired the rather matter-of-fact way this is delivered. Old fairy tales were rife with all sorts of mayhem (and sometimes even for instructive purposes), and Frakes recreates that feeling in her comic. The structure of this comic is one of its strengths, as we follow the girl from age 3 to 5 to 7 to 9 and so on, up to age 18. The most distinctive contrast in the book is the innocence of the girl with the ferocity of the bears, who are seeking bloody vengeance on all humans for taking their land. The book brings up questions of the difference between justice and revenge. The child is quietly miraculous, bringing down sheep from her dreams, only to look on horrified as the starving bears feast on them.



At a certain point, the bears' vengeance turns bloodier and bloodier, eclipsing the girls' ability to understand her role. For the bear leader, she's a sort of symbol or token, a way to weaken their enemies in a talismanic fashion. When the leader finally tires of war and plans to marry the girl off to a human king, he's not cognizant of the metamorphosis the girl has made: for all intents and purposes, she considers herself a bear, one of "us" and not "them". This transformation became complete after the girl met a human boy and was then inadvertently betrayed by him, completing the circuit of a cycle of violence. Frakes deliberately quotes back key dialogue and symbolic actions toward the end of the book, emphasizing the cyclical nature of revenge and how it feeds on itself, exploiting the innocent. Frakes is careful not to be heavy-handed in delivering this message, allowing the reader to tease it out (with the exception of the last image in the book, which spells it out just a bit). Frakes' work is all about how we perceive and react to the Other, set against a pleasant line that invites the reader to deeply and fully immerse themselves in the story.

ARCHCOMIX #1, by Dan Archer. With a silkscreened cover image of Richard Nixon, one could instantly tell that this was going to be an attack comic. I've always been made somewhat uneasy by comics that were both directly political and prescriptive, since it's easy for such work to fall into propaganda. Art falls by the wayside in such efforts, serving only to advance a particular rhetorical position. Such comics also tend to stop trying to tell a story and fall into lecture bullet points. I thought this was true at times in Archer's WHAT A WHOPPER, which is what made this collection of short stories such a welcome departure.

Certainly, Archer's political edge is still in full force. "Lunch On K Street" is a lecture about how lobbying is done disguised as a human interest story, and that disguise works quite nicely. "Global Meltdown" is a bit of a fantasy revenge story, but it's also a bluntly accurate comparison of Wall Street predators as deer caught in the headlights. One reason why this comic works well is that Archer varies his tone, writing glowingly positive accounts of a woman who works on a cruelty-free farm and a group of amusing gay marriage protesters. His best short strips are those where a story is laid out but the reader is given more leeway to make their own judgments. "Take Me Out To The Gun Show" is an incisive but playful bit of reportage that allows its targets to hang themselves, while "Beggars" is a memorable anecdote about how a micro-trend of beggars on a bridge (one with horrible gangrene) hints at larger problems.

The centerpiece of the issue is the first part of "The First 9/11", about the US government's direct hand in an infamous military coup in Chile in 1970. Being of Chilean descent, I was already well aware of many of the facts of this incident, yet Archer created a compelling and chilling narrative about the hows and whys of the coup. The source documents he used to spin this story were equally fascinating. What is hinted at but not fleshed out in this part of the story was the way Chile wound up as a lab for the laissez-faire economic theories of Milton Friedman, and how this eventually nearly ruined the nation.

As an artist, Archer needs to play to his strengths, which sometimes contrasts with his storytelling aims. He's not a very strong naturalistic artist, leading to some stiff figures and clumsily-designed characters. When he relaxes and allows himself to work in a slightly cartoonier style, his pages come alive. I'm not saying he needs to marry his political interests with a bigfoot style, but rather ensure that his visuals aren't working against his story. A little exaggeration and a little playfulness with his character design will relax a reader, allowing them to more fully absorb what the artist is trying to say. That's another reason his Chile strip was so effective: he quickly abandoned trying to recreate realistic renditions of Nixon and Henry Kissinger and instead created simpler caricatures that readers could easily identify and move on from. As he continues to loosen up his line, his political comics will only have a much greater impact. I hope that he continues to develop the Chile story, expand it, and redraw certain sections; it could be a potentially fascinating, explosive statement.



END OF EROS and POLITE FICTION #1, by Jose-Luis Olivares. While Olivares is certainly interested in narrative, he's also interested in the visceral qualities of each panel he's drawing. The texture of line, the visual effect of tools like zip-a-tone and the way blacks are spotted are as much on his mind as the story he's telling. This gives his stories a certain raw power and influences his subject matter. In particular, he's fascinated with the way eschatology converges into creation myth. In END OF EROS, a couple engaging in sex literally become physically merged at the same time this happens to millions of others. Taking this to its logical outcome, you have a race of huge, misshapen creates with diffuse and now-primitive wills lumbering about the world. Olivares goes crazy with his monstrous character designs, gleefully approaching this sort of Gnostic idea with a smudgy line and dialogue that devolves into primitive symbology. This is a sort of shaggy dog of a comic, as he stretches and stretches the idea out for a number of pages, but the climax is still reasonably satisfying.



POLITE FICTION starts with "Creation Myth", a story that begins with what we think is a retelling of Adam & Eve but is really about how vowels were created. It's a bit of a visual lark, cleverly designed. The more interesting stories were "Buh", a series of strips about a primitive man engaging in silent adventures and discovering things like art and magic; and "Munster", another wordless tale about a creature kept in a basement who gets out. The former is Olivares' best cartooning: cleverly designed characters, clarity in line despite its chunkiness, and funny punchlines (and sometimes not-quite-punchlines). I don't think he quite had the chops to pull off the desired effect in the latter story, as the creature emerged into a huge, ornate church and was then ordered back downstairs by the hand of god. There's enough information given to have the joke make sense, but with perhaps a lesser level of impact if we had seen something a bit more naturalistically rendered. That said, Olivares is certainly an artist who will benefit from being highly prolific. There's no question that he's imaginative and has an interesting point of view; the rest will start to coalesce as he keeps writing. He's actually only finished his first year at CCS, so we'll see what he builds up to next year.


THE MARVYNS: PROPER DECEPTION, by Jeremiah Piersol. This comic felt like a weird, alternate-world version of Gilbert Hernandez's LOVE & ROCKETS X. Set in Los Angeles, that comic was the intersection of racial tension, punk rock, the sex lives of teens, the status of being a foreigner in the US and much more. It had a huge, sprawling cast and was filled with ambiguity. THE MARVYNS takes a number of cues from Beto. First, the cast is similarly huge and quirkily memorable. Second, it concerns itself with what lies beneath the surface of polite society. Third, Piersol owes a lot to Beto's character design and rubbery line. Piersol's line is not graceful or flowing, but has a sort of fascinating ugliness to it, much like the characters in Hernandez's world. In THE MARYVNS, even the good-looking characters are ugly.

The main difference between the artists is that Piersol is less interested in contocting a balanced stew of fleshed-out characters than he is in cooking up an over-the-top social satire. This is a story in the tradition of Roger Corman: sex as a form of power relation and exploitation, freely mixed in with violence, degradation, social humiliation and every other soap opera trope in the book. When one of the main characters in the vast ensemble explains away being late to work by making up a story about her daughter trying to kill herself, one gets the sense that there are no limits here. Piersol introduces each character vignette with a fake ad that promises total transformation by way of material consumption (like a clothing ad whose tagline reads "Let's start a revolution").

Another influence here is the story (and later film) Short Cuts, one where a number of characters live out there lives and cross over briefly (and sometimes significantly) with other characters. But in THE MARVYNS, every character's story is an operatic one. So we are introduced to a man who was rejected for a loan at a bank one of the characters worked at, promising to blow himself and the bank up with dynamite strapped to his body. We meet a woman who not only has a crush on the woman from earlier in the story, we find out she's a practicing witch casting a spell to capture her heart.

It's a larger-than-life comic, and this 64-page promo version was even printed big: 9" x 12". Every vignette has a crazy twist or weird development that covers as many aspects of the seedy underside of polite society as possible. Subtle is not what Piersol's going for here, but he makes going big and loud work for him. At the moment, he doesn't quite have the chops to create as many varied character designs as he'd like; there's a certain sameness to some of the characters in the book. While his characters have great facial expressions, their body language is sometimes a bit awkward and stiff. This book really needs to flow from story to story to create that sweeping, soap opera feel, and the stiffness of some characters hinders that flow (that's especially true of the male characters in the book). One can forgive this because of the level of his ambition and cleverness, but I do wonder if the finished version of this story will be published as is or if any pages will be redrawn. Piersol is another one of those CCS grads who are utterly devoted to comics and have just finished an intense experience that has made them better cartoonists because it afforded them the time and opportunity to do nothing but draw and write. As long as he continues to refine his style and loosen up just a bit, he has the potential to do some very eye-catching and provocative stories.