45 Days Of CCS, #40: Hole

It's a tremendous advantage to be a CCS student (or local alum) and have access to their print lab. That allows one the chance to do, for example, an anthology with multiple cut-outs. That's the case with Hole, a ridiculously elaborate anthology that reminds me of the early days of CCS. It's a bit like the old Four Square anthology that would have four artists and a theme or something you'd find on the I Know Joe Kimpel web storefront. 

This anthology features five artists and begins with a series of pages, each with a hole cut in the center concentrically. Holes cut somewhere on the page feature prominently as a formal device in each story, but all for different reasons. In Ben Adkins' "Down In The Hole," the protagonist gets away from the world by digging a hole and living in it. Wondering if he made the right decision, he looks up to the sky from his hole, and sees blue sky in a story that was otherwise black & white. It's a dramatic way for the character to make a major change in how he wants to live his life by rejecting isolation.

Ruby Arnone's "Alligator Pit" is about a delivery person whose job is to throw meat down to gators in a pit in what seems to be a zoo. They then dream about that same pit, but this time the hole expands to see the gators devouring not meat, but people--presumably, the zoo keepers. It's a punchy story that's effective because of the expressive use of colored pencils.

Kate Fairchild's "The Ever-Hole" uses cut-outs more consistently than any other story, and it's all in service to an actual "metaphysical hole" called the Ever-Hole that one character is trying to fill. It's another story about isolation, this time concluding with a hug that represents a lateral solution to filling the hole. Nothing could fill the hole, at least not alone, so the solution was to stop trying and connect. Fairchild's linework is simple but effective, working well with the big formal decision of cutting so much out of each page with the hole.

The most visually ambitious story was Melody Calderon's "Pory." It is quite literally about bubbles: living in a bubble, the bubbles that proliferate on our phones that demand our attention, the bubbles that fog our brains when we're drunk. Calderon takes what is a fairly simple idea and makes it sing with her extensive use of color and the multiple circular cut-outs on so many of the pages. The final story, "Fullness," is an "adapted Sanskrit verse from the Ishavasya Upanishad." Compared to the other stories, this is a very simply designed story that is no less successful for its simplicity, as it gets across its concept of fullness--a concept that cannot be reduced or diminished. The artist, Keena, uses black and white shapes that transform with a single cutout. The anthology as a whole is successful because there's enough variety in terms of formal approaches and storytelling to prevent the kind of stale repetition that sometimes happens in these kinds of anthologies. 

45 Days Of CCS, #27: Natalie Norris, Keena

From the very first, the comics I read from Natalie Norris dealt with trauma. Regardless of the assignment, it was clear that Norris had a burning need to work through her trauma through her art. That culminated in the first half of her memoir about a horrific sexual assault titled Dear Mini. She's currently working on part two of that story (about the aftermath of the incident), but she did a mini-comic for Paper Rocket's Mini Memoir Project. It's called Scar Tissue that I Wish You Saw, and it's about what happened when she was sent to an inpatient facility for mental illness. It's laid out plainly on page one: various forms of pain, including endometriosis, along with major depressive disorder. 

At the same time, Norris tells the story from her perspective as a 16-year-old, where her major problem was that she was in love with her older sister's boyfriend Shane. Young Natalie is the picture of the unreliable narrator, as she refuses to discuss her trauma with her doctors and seethes with anger when her doctors take away her Percocet. She sneers at another teen for being an alcoholic because she "ruined partying for the rest of your life," noting that of course, she could "handle my shit." There's a lot of two-track narrative used in this comic as she visually recalls a lifetime of medical trauma while denying trauma to her therapist. Natalie in this story is certain that she and Shane (an older drug dealer) are a perfect match, and she fumes when she reveals that her mom told him to stay away from both her daughters. This is one of Norris' best comics, as her storytelling is subtler than much of her earlier work, and it makes the depiction of her trauma all the more effective. This version of Natalie in the story is wounded but bratty, not capable of loving herself or feeling worthy of love, and the subsequent acting out is captured in such a direct but not overly obvious way.

Speaking of feeling worthy of love, her comic Belles Heures ("Book of Hours") is less a narrative than it is a series of immediate sensory impressions of the early days of a loving relationship with a man named Ima. Generally, someone's diary entries of a loving relationship are as tedious as any anecdote, but Norris is going for something else. These are loose, immediate drawings that are a revelation for Norris precisely because they had never experienced anything quite like this before. It's as though she had to capture these experiences as quickly and directly as possible, not just for fear of forgetting them, but as a way of concretizing them. In this way, it's a sort of way to prove that it wasn't all just a dream. It's a form of devotional study.

Keerthana Srinivasan, aka Keena, is a CCS student who came to cartooning by a rather circuitous path. In her early 50s, she began doing art after a lifetime in IT when her children grew up and her husband took a job in another city. Prior to CCS, she did a book in collage form using basic color shapes to tell this story, and it's called Journey. Despite featuring no drawing, it's actually a well-done piece of cartooning whose meaning is easy to grasp. She's a red shape, her husband a blue shape, and their kids yellow and green shapes, respectively. When the kids go on their own journeys, there's an especially poignant page where the red shape is shown to be old and wrinkled. When her husband goes on his own journey, she finally attempts her own on a turbulent ocean. She sees her children fly away, but her husband arrives again to act as a sail to steady her own, new journey. It's a lovely and touching story. Keena also contributed a two page piece that was more illustrated text than comics about her father near death, wanting to make sure that the suitcase that had represented his livelihood was safe. Keena has a great storytelling voice, and I'm curious to see her make something more in the vein of traditional comics.