Thirty One Days Of CCS #1: Laura Terry, Mary Shyne, Joyana McDiarmid

Welcome to another year of Thirty One Days of CCS! Every day this month, I will review the output of students and alumni from the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. I've been covering the comics and creators who've attended this school focusing entirely on comics education since close to its beginning back in 2005, and I've seen a lot of remarkable talents grow. The CCS ethos is to publish and get better in public, and so hundreds of minicomics have poured out of the school during that time. Let's see what's up with old favorites and new artists.

The Sweetest Curse, by Laura Terry. Terry had a big success with last year's Graveyard Shakes, and she'll be publishing Adorable Empire for them next. I reviewed the first couple of chapters of that in mini form last year. Her entry this year is a short, complete story that once again works in the fantasy milieu while subverting it. This time around, it's about a Bog Fairy, who are supposed to curse humans. The story follows a nice Bog Fairy who can't quite get the hang of cursing other creatures, doing things like turning a bush into a nice kitty. She takes abuse from bully fairies and gets mocked by a Fairy Princess. Terry neatly turns that conflict around and turns it into a sweet romance, as the Princess had a crush on the Bog Fairy, and the end sees them cursing bullies and having a grand old time of it. Terry's character design and line are both impeccable and irresistible. Her use of gesture and body language sells every aspect of the story, with a style that's wildly expressive while looking clean and precise. It's a great formula, because it gives her a template with which she can subvert expectations. Hopefully, she'll continue to return to this setting, because it seems fully-formed and capable of bearing a number of different stories.

Get Over It, by Mary Shyne. This is an extended version of a mini I read earlier that happened to be part of Shyne's senior thesis at CCS last year. The high concept for this comic is brilliant, as it's about a young woman who can see the emotional projection of each person, which takes the form of a creature of some kind. For those whose "emotional miasmas" have been damaged, they manifest as monstrous forms. The main character, Leigh, is a bit directionless as we start the story, acting as a bike delivery service for her father's restaurant. When she delivers food to a lab and puts on some equipment, it becomes obvious that others know about what she can see, and the equipment acts as armor. Putting it on allows her to literally fight trauma by getting it to become corporeal and punching it. The red ink she uses for the miasmas flatters her thin, careful line, giving her entire presentation a liveliness that just doesn't quit. Shyne barely scratched the surface of her narrative in this tantalizing excerpt, yet she left the reader with a fully-formed main character that was easy to root for. Shyne really succeeded here because she clearly understands the mechanics and pacing of how fights and action work.

Interstitial, by Joyana McDiarmid. McDiarmid's Long Division series (and hopefully upcoming book) was one of the best of the CCS projects that have been completed. She's certainly deserving of wider recognition. Interstitial sees her plunge into a new project, about three different young women who have been strongly influenced by a particular book of poetry. Elise and Quinn, in the present day, are lovers. Elise is in college and Hanna works there. Elise is friends with a third young woman, Hanna, who is also in college. At the beginning of the story, all three are in a very good place, as Hanna learns that she's going to be helping as a TA. The story starts with Quinn seeming to fracture across time as she looks out a window, from various ages of her life, and the rest of the chapter is simply set-up and introductions.

The second chapter winds back and starts to establish the actual story, as we look into the pasts of each of them. Hanna's part of a family where she's the second oldest and already a mother figure, thanks in part to an indolent older sister. Elise is neglected by her father in favor of her younger brothers. Quinn's in a turbulent relationship with a man, goes out dancing to spite him, and he tells her not to come home. The point of each of these flashbacks is to show them as unhappy here as they were satisfied in the first chapter. We get hints that that book of poetry, little poems for little girls, has some kind of transformative quality. Hints and pieces are all that McDiarmid reveals in this first issue, but there's a lot to think about here. Her character design is superb, as always. She draws bodies that look like real bodies, for one thing. Her use of gesture is a key aspect of the comic. The art isn't quite as elegant or intricate as her prior series, but it's obvious that she's going for a different, more cartoonist style here because the story's ultimate tone will be quite different.

Thirty Days of CCS #5: Joyana McDiarmid, Jarad Greene, Mary Shyne

Jarad Greene has distinguished himself thus far as an excellent YA comics maker, but in his Memories of a Former Porcelain Doll, he relates an autobiographical story about appearances, the cruelty of peers and eventual body dysmorphia. That was in the form of skin problems, which he experienced later than most teens. The irony is that in middle school, his skin was perfect but he still used Clearasil. Only he accidentally used the kind that had concealer in it, leading his classmates to call him a porcelain doll and make fun of him for “wearing makeup”. Things got worse in his senior year when he actually developed acne for real, and it proved resistant to every standard treatment. That forced him to go on Accutane, an effective drug with brutal side effects, including skin so dry that it peels off and horrible arm rashes. 

There are also psychological side effects that he managed to dodge, and the end of the first issue finds him happy and ready to go to college. However, this story is told in flashback, and he let the readers know that his problems would return. He presages that at the very beginning of the story, where it’s not just having skin problems, it’s the fear of them always returning, triggered by any number of factors (including stress and anxiety). Greene uses a simple, clear line in a mostly naturalistic style that still allows him to be expressive when necessary. The occasional bulging eyes, sponge head, skull face and other self-descriptors add to the drama in a way that doesn’t take the reader out of the story. In many respects, they’re a way of Greene telling a ghost story about himself; a tale of his own haunting from mysterious, outside forces that tortured him. 

Joyana McDiarmid's Long Division #5 concludes the bracing, honest and uncompromising look at depression and suicide that was based on true, personal events. The first four issues featured the main character, Elena, in her stay at the psychiatric hospital and flashbacks to what led up to her suicide attempt. Struggling with bipolar disorder, she found herself unable to take care of herself or reach out to others for help. Ingeniously, McDiarmid used the metaphor of the branching nervous system as a way of visualizing her mental state, with her depression slowly blotting out healthy functions. McDiarmid's line is fine and expressive, and she's especially great at character design and drawing clothing.

The last issue is deliberately quiet and understated after the frantic quality of the four issues preceding it, both in terms of the day-to-day events and the stark metaphorical imagery seen in the early issues. It's McDiarmid's way of acknowledging that life is not a neat narrative, and that the struggle with mental illness, even with all the support, therapy and medication that's needed, is one that will always have good days and bad days. This issue features a difficult conversation between Elena and her ex-boyfriend, with whom she discusses her suicide attempt for the first time. Their relationship had been rocky and he had come off as self-righteous, and while an understanding of sorts is reached between the two of them, he tried to make her suicide attempt all about him. "I feel terrible, I really should have seen it coming" is a phrase he repeated, as he in no way tried to show empathy. Unsaid in the narrative is Elena's understanding that while she felt a responsibility to talk to him about it, she was not in any way responsible for his feelings about it.

The rest of the issue features Elena's attempts at self-care: hanging out with friends and family, getting rest, and generally being gentle with herself. We see her struggle with weight gain and her academic work while finding ways to accept those feelings. We can see the background paintings in her room echoing the anatomical imagery McDiarmid used throughout the series. Finally, the imagery of branches meets reality as she climbs up a tree, rests on a firm branch, and simply breathes. The image of disappearing a little with each breath and then reappearing reflects an exercise in acceptance. It's a beautiful, understated way of providing not so an ending as a coda or a grace note.

Incompatible, by Mary Shyne. This is one of the smartest, starkest self-examinations I've ever read when it comes to relationships. The high concept is simple: she includes one example from each of the twelve Zodiac signs of a man she dated with that sign. It's in order of the traditional Zodiac, starting with Aries and finishing with Pisces. It's one page per partner, each page a six-panel grid. Shyne efficiently uses that space to offer highlights, lowlights and particularly visceral and graphic images that really drive home what each relationship was all about. For example, the Aries that she kicked things off with two panels about how she met this particular guy and his impeccable dressing habits, while noting (with raised eyebrows) that his penis was two different colors, "almost like a pudding cup". The last three panels touch on how conscious she was that he never took her out, most likely because of her weight. It's a marvel of great cartooning (clear, bold lines, with an extra thick line weight for her glasses, her dominant accessory) and efficiency, as there are no wasted lines.

Another relationship wound up with her hating herself for how much she wanted one sort of indifferent guy to love her. Another was a platonic relationship where she actually liked the role of Friend that men often assigned to her. There are almosts, guys she broke up with because they needed more than she could give, guys who friend-zoned her, and a guy who made her feel safe but with whom she didn't have a sexual connection. Shyne is great at drawing bodies, and her own self-caricature is both full of clever details (freckles, glasses, shape of nose and eyebrows) and economical in terms of its overall presentation. There are times when her choices regarding negative space (she only spots blacks here and there) give her pages a slightly hollow feel, but her line is so engaging that it doesn't matter much. Above all else, her understanding of gesture, expression and bodies interacting in space is top notch, and that's the key to making this comic work so well. 

Thirty-One Days of CCS #3: Joyana McDiarmid

Long Division, Parts Three and Four, by Joyanna McDiarmid. The thing that has made this series about a young woman named Elena's struggle with depression and eventual time spent in a mental institution after attempting to commit suicide so distinctive is the array of formal tricks that Diarmid has used to visualize what is internal. The comic has jumped back and forth in time throughout, going from the present in the hospital to the past where she slowly started succumbing to her depression and started feeling suicidal. One of the visuals in the book has been doing anatomical drawings of Elena's body, focusing on the nervous system in particular. It's an emphasis on the fact that depression is a neurochemical process, not a sign of weakness or self-pity. McDiarmid's drawings are also compared to the branches or root system of trees: incredibly complex and mostly hidden from our sight. There are two pages after Elena has decided to kill herself when her various systems look like they're being strangled and blotted out by the dark blight of depression, superseding all other functions.

Later in the comic, in a section simply titled in cursive script (that personal touch made it all the more real) "today I'm going to die", McDiarmid really gets at that sense of relief, almost a kind of lightness when one's mind snaps from the pain of depression to the decision to kill oneself. McDiarmid depicts Elena dressing nicely, putting on earrings, etc and only pauses when she saw a thoughtful gift from her boyfriend. She overdoses, passes out, and instead of embracing that oblivion, imagines that there are dark hands all over her body, squeezing and obliterating her. It's a stark, two page-spread where this happens, with everything on the pages being black except for her form. The hands are almost like tendrils, slowly insinuating their way through her being, until she forces herself awake and calls for help, telling her housemate that she overdosed.

The nature of that help and the experiences depicted are genuinely overwhelming and frightening for her, and that comes through on the page. She has her wrists restrained because she had been yanking out her IVs and panics when she wakes up. She loses control of her voice for a while. The world in general is disorienting and she has no sense of time. The comic also depicts her friends and their feelings of helplessness, especially when Elena is moved to the ICU and they are unable to see her. When McDiarmid fast-forwards to life in the psychiatric ward, there's little sense of comfort--only routine. The concern of the workers feels forced and syrupy instead of actually therapeutic, like when one woman who starts talking about the voices she started hearing again and then being shut down by the worker, and that same worker putting words in Elena's mouth in a manipulative fashion. There's a notable difference between her actions and those of the psychiatrist who sees her, he talks to her with respect and just talks openly saying, "Because you are not your diagnosis". She engages Elena in things that she loves, like mathematics, and we see new branches and trees behind her outside, framing her discussion and representing growth.

However, it's one thing to get better enough to get out of the hospital, and it's quite another to make the readjustment to outside, daily life. The final scene of issue four shows her isolating from her loved ones again and avoiding the studies that she actually loves. McDiarmid here gets at the idea that the progression of mental health and illness is not a linear process. Progress can be halted and halting and regression can be common without therapy, medication and support. That support is especially important, especially given the sense of "exhaling" among loved ones after she comes out of the hospital, with the idea that she's "cured". The cure is a multi-faceted process, and McDiarmid really gets at the idea that simply working one's way back from the bring of suicide is not the same as being freed from depression and the things that trigger it and make it worse. There's one more chapter to go, and I'll be curious to see how McDiarmid resolves the narrative now that past and future have caught up with each other.      

Thirty Days of CCS #24: Queerotica

Queerotica is the aptly-titled anthology containing "queer erotica". What I found interesting about it is that the editorial team of Allie Kleber, Joyana McDiarmid, Laurel Lynn Leake and Sasha Steinberg specifically asked each contributor to come up with their own definitions of both "queer" and "erotica". That bit of editorial direction proved crucial in forcing each artist to think deeply about their choices in coming up with pieces (stories or illustrations) that fully expressed their own understanding of the term. Reclaiming pornography/erotica is something that every generation of cartoonists seems to do every few years, from the earliest underground comics (both gay and straight) to anthologies like Smut Peddler, True Porn, Dirty Stories and Thickness. Each one of those books had a strong editorial hand that both selected and directed their contributors to think about identity and sex in particular ways, and Queerotica's finely-honed editorial edict led to a surprisingly coherent and fluid read.

The anthology itself is beautifully designed. Leake's front cover is sensitive and evocative, with hands belonging to various genders and identities interlocking with each other, evincing both desire and tenderness. The back cover's parade of different shoes amusingly both recapitulates the front cover's theme of diversity and gives it a slightly dirtier take, suggesting what happens when shoes come off. The book's purple ink was an interesting choice, working well for the large variety of storytelling choices and line weights in the book. The pin-ups all contained striking images, some sillier than others. One person's erotic image is of course completely ridiculous to another person, so the pinup by "A.B. Fiddlestyx" featuring a furry reflection in a mirror just made me laugh. Laura Terry's monster orgy was deliberately funny but also had a strange erotic charge. Rio Aubry Taylor's beautiful drawing of two figures in an intimate embrace was the perfect complement to Terry's over-the-top image, once again recapitulating the kinds of pieces a reader would find throughout the anthology. That was repeated with Miz Moody's feather tickling illustration and Rachel Dukes' frank but tender image of a woman in front of her partner wearing a strap-on dildo.

The opening piece, Alexis Cornell's "Arbiter and the Bird", features two women in bed, as one is nervous about having sex. It's a funny, sensitive piece that explores the very idea of sex as a key component of relationships and how this can be difficult for many people. Cornell nails the characters' body language and relationship to each other in space, which is absolutely crucial for a story about this level of intimacy. Morgan Boecher's "To Share" is about how difficult it can be to find a sexual partner, someone to share his body with, after he made the transition from female to male. Boecher makes the most of his somewhat crude line to tell a story that's in turns sad, funny and hopeful. "Headspace", by Ivy Weine and Kleber, is a mild BD/SM tale, the sort that uses it as a healing force. Parts of it felt pretty rote and cliched, and at ten pages the story started to verge into self-indulgence. Kleber's illustrations for it were quite good, especially the weird, freckled character design for one of the protagonists.

Kimball Anderson and Leake's piece, "Are You Sure" is not unlike Cornell's piece, but this time it features two (physically gendered) men. Leake's choice to use a fuzzy, distorted line and a thin line weight was interesting and appropriate, given the difficult feelings discussed in this story. That fuzziness made the intensity of their actual sexual contact all the more intense as one partner engages the other in his reticence and gender ambiguity (the partner identifies as the non-gender specific "neutrois"), while the other has to confront his partner's differing sex drive. By contrast, Lena Chandhok's line in "Oral Sex" is smooth and even cartoony, as she relates an argument between two women experimenting with talking dirty to each other, the awkwardness and upset that this causes, and their eventual make-up sex. Chandhok's approach here is direct, both in terms of the humor and emotional content and the explicitly detailed manner in which she drew the sex scenes.

Joyana McDiarmid's "Nothing In this World" explores polyamory and one woman's struggle with the concept, as well as her (soon to be ex-) boyfriend's being OK with her having sex with women but not men. For this character, she views any sexual encounter outside of their relationship as cheating and is distressed to find out that he doesn't. This leads her to an encounter with a woman who talks about polyamory and her relationships with other women, bringing her into a moment concentrating totally on the present and what they bring to each other. McDiarmid certainly doesn't skimp on the sex scenes either, but they're completely integrated with the story's emotional content, down to the very end. Her rendering style, with angular faces that have a minimal level of detail combined with her fleshy way of drawing bodies, makes this one of the most effective stories in the book.

Fydor Pavlov's "Gentleman's Gentleman" is more traditional gay porn drawn in a thin, delicate line; there's not much more to the story than just the sex scene. Lawrence Gullo's "The Fisherman" and Laura Hughes' "The Outlaw" are two example of using fantasy tropes to explore sex and identity. Gullo's story about an alienated fisherman neatly ties in issues related to otherness as the title character winds up having a silent sexual relationship with a gender-ambiguous mermaid/man. Hughes' story doesn't escape its fantasy tropes, mostly goes for laughs and winds up as the only juvenile story in the anthology. The book ends on a strong note with Melanie Gillman's "Wrappers" is a different kind of fantasy story, one in which both gender and genitalia are totally different constructs. Her character design here is especially excellent, as she quickly deflects reader expectations while still being able to relate both the embarrassment and powerful sense of discovery when two people explore each other's bodies. The way Gillman also subtly explores concepts like gender pronouns is also quite clever. Steinberg's "Somnata" is a beautiful and later hilarious way to celebrate this anthology, as it starts with three figures dancing an erotic and delicate ballet (Steinberg's line is beautiful and thin here) and ends with Steinberg himself crashing the party. All told, Queerotica has a high batting average of quality stories for the initial volume of such an anthology, and its impeccable design and careful sequencing by its editors make it a feast for the eyes.

Thirty Days of CCS #12: Joyana McDiarmid

Joyana McDiarmid's first two chapters of her serial Long Division start off in a mental institution and work backward from there, as we follow Elena's first days at the hospital and find out how she wound up there. The comic notes up front that "while based on real events, this is a work of fiction". This makes sense, as the narrative is too fluid to be precisely autobiographical, but the specific details of life in a mental hospital feel well understood and experienced. Whether that's from McDiarmid's own experiences or visiting someone in such an institution is irrelevant, of course.What the book does demonstrate is the insidious, destructive power of depression, one whose effect is that one's house is built on sand. In other words, for a depressive, any kind of sudden trauma or distress has the effect of sending them into a tailspin. What's worse, depression has a way of destroying friendships and relationships because the depressed person doesn't know how to seek help, or worse, doesn't feel like they deserve help. McDiarmid covers all of this ground in this comic, but it's her visual approach that makes the comic particularly interesting.

This is a story of a young woman who is struggling, but McDiarmid has the important understanding that this mental illness is one related to neurochemistry. One's brain and brain chemicals simply aren't working right, and the result is a profound effect on mood and behavior. McDiarmid gets at a problem intrinsic to treating mental illness: some perceive it as a sign of being weak, that one should simply "get over" bad feelings and move on. Others fear the stigma of being "crazy" and never coming back from that label. McDiarmid portrays that illness as a series of nerve endings, emphasizing the somatic nature of people as being made up of bones, nerves and flesh. There's a drawing early in the first issue where a pill Elena swallows dissolves in her stomach, gets transferred to her blood stream and then starts acting on her synapses. Drawing the nervous system winds up being an easy and clever way to draw depression as a series of roots, of tangled lines, as a maze that one gets lost in.

Elena's backstory reveals the ways in which depression can prevent one from emotional self-care. That's especially true since Elena appears to be bi-polar when she suddenly has a burst of energy and announces that she and her friends can make things with an Etsy store. At the same time, she wasn't able to communicate her needs to her boyfriend, a sometimes demanding and emotionally distant person. That clouded her judgment when another man showed interest in her and she wasn't honest with herself regarding her feelings and the boundary necessary in such a situation. When she confessed to her boyfriend that she had kissed him, that sent him into a self-righteous frenzy. Going home, McDiarmid illustrates the depressive mindset perfectly by drawing everyone on the bus out of self-destructive words. The present-day scenes in the hospital are bracing and awful, as they reveal the purpose of most such hospitals is to make sure you don't kill yourself and take your medication. One is lucky if one finds oneself in a hospital with truly compassionate caregivers, especially in a situation where Elena technically checked herself in. The frequently open-framed pages give the narrative a certain fluidity that's akin to the ways in which days can run into each other when experiencing depression, and how those days and details can blur. This is a bracing but humane and forgiving look at a powerfully difficult state of being, one that requires an enormous amount of work to dig out of. I'm especially interested to see in future chapters just how committed Elena becomes to the idea of getting better, the very possibility of such a thing.