31 Days Of CCS #19: Brainworm 3-5

Brainworm continues to distinguish itself as part of the continuum of CCS anthologies led by students over the years. So much of the CCS experience encompasses opportunities that are difficult to come by later in one's career, and the ability to easily collaborate is one of them. Having access to one's peers as critics, accountability partners, and creative partners as part of a difficult but rewarding experience is one of the biggest draws of living in White River Junction. There's also often an urge for a creative person when faced with an assignment or deadline to want to work on anything except their assignment. I've always had the sense that being able to blow off steam like that in a creative and productive way is a big reason why there have been so many anthologies at CCS over the years, but I'd also imagine having the opportunity to make something as good as Irene or Sundays presents its own challenge.

Brainworm's editor is Kat Ghastly, a second-year student. One can always tell that Ghastly's got a lot of different gears going, and her ability to wrangle consistently solid and interesting contributions is a credit to her as an editor. Brainworm is also a record of sorts that touches four different graduating classes, giving it its own unique identity regarding a specific period of time. Each issue is themed, and the third issue's theme is "Surprises." There are some fun incidental drawings from Leise Hook and Emily Zea, followed by a cute strip from Erienne McCray. The latter involves an octopus trying to get adopted as a pet, and McCray's line and use of blacks drives the cute factor home. Katz's strip combining the myth of Noah and the Trojan War was absolutely hilarious, especially with regard to the mumbled dialogue.

Cuteness and weirdness are interspersed neatly by the editors throughout the comic. Emma Hunsinger's dryly humorous bit about a skeleton woman who maintains high-fashion status is its own self-reflective commentary. Surprise monster payoffs from A.C. Rooks and Rainer Kannenstine mash that cute/horror dichotomy effectively. There's a long series of drawings from a number of artists for a "Trickster Battle Royal" that looks like it was drawn on post-it notes, but the reproduction was too small to discern most of the details. That's too bad, because there seemed to be a lot of clever ideas here. The two MVPs of the issue are Kristen Shull and Tim Patton. The former's autobio comics are among the most heartfelt and authentic I've read, especially with regard to sex and relationships. This one's about the horrible feeling of knowing that someone is in love with you when you don't feel the same way in a casual relationship. Patton's scrawled pencils start with a cutesy metaphor about a monster eating orange-creatures and then quickly turns the subtext into text by way of narrative captions. The reader is informed that all of his comics are really all about sex, love, and above all else: survival. "Absurdist constraints" are just there to hold into place that essential idea of barely being able to hold it all together, with one's vices both helping and hurting. This is as raw as it gets and Patton goes all the way while using an interesting layout that also harmonizes his text with funny drawings.

The theme for #3 is "Bad Romance," which is a wheelhouse category for a number of these contributors. Issy Manley's story takes the theme and bends it first toward romance comics tropes and then to EC horror comics. Of course, it's all about a relatively mundane event (power going out in winter, neighbor being sent to help) that's ratcheted up in everyone's imaginations to create tension and paranoia. Katz's comic uses a combination of extremely spare cartooning in some parts of its open page layout and then beautifully intricate linework to tell the story of an old woman receiving care from a volunteer. The story grows increasingly strange until the truly bizarre climax. Not surprisingly, Shull's comic on the subject is excellent. This is less about a specific relationship and more about her relationship between herself and her own body as she felt herself aging a little. More to the point, it's about the persona she felt she created in response to her feeling less desirable; it worked so well in attracting friends and lovers that she felt it wasn't ever really "her;" she had become her own shadow. Shull's line is perfectly suited for this kind of story. It's clear and slightly cartoony without being overly stylized.

Catalina Rufin, Jess Johnson, and Liz Young all tell variations of the same story. It's about younger versions of themselves finding themselves in abusive relationships where partners told them what to do, what to like, and what to say. They were demeaned and insulted. For each artist, they had to find their own journey to self-actualization. Johnson's story is interesting because she was so shaken by her experience that she wasn't even sure what she liked anymore, so she undertook a furious self-tutorial to figure it out that culminated in getting a cute Adventure Time-themed dress. There's also a trio of monster/horror -related strips from Rainer Kannenstine, Tim Patton, and William Prentiss. Ghastly's own strip involves a couple going to hell that feels highly autobiographical.

Issue #5's theme is "Doppelgangers." This was the most interesting and consistent issue to date. Zea and Daniel Foulfellow both use variations on doppelgangers pursuing or threatening the original versions with dramatic tension. Ivy Allie takes that idea and turns it on its head in a hilarious way. Lillie J. Harris' story about a brother and his twin is a story I've already reviewed back in her recent entry on High-Low, but I wanted to note how it really anchored the rest of the issue, along with Andi Santagata's "The Time Knife". Johnson and Shull both offer stories about how apparently twin versions of themselves were wandering around town, but Johnson at least met hers in real life while Shull was left wondering if they blacked out and dressed like a banana for a weekend.

Tristan Scilipoti's "What It's Like To Have Sex With Yourself" starts as an "erotic visual essay" but winds up being about dysmorphia and self-loathing. It's an unflinching, raw story. Ghastly's "Horrorshow" is about that feeling of "someone else driving the bus" when feeling disconnected and detached from the world. Patton's "Gemini" strip is a variation on Aristophanes' speech on androgyny from Plato's Symposium (humans being one being split into two). Coco Fox's strip about a murderous doppelganger takes a hilarious turn with a beautifully expressive line. Overall, the balance between horror, comedy, and personal stories made this the most fully-realized issue of Brainworm to date.

31 Days Of CCS #2: Gilmore Girls Fanzine and Doug Catches Up

A time-honored CCS tradition is creating fanzines for favorite TV shows, bands, and other pop culture. It's a very CCS thing to do, as it's collaborative, it's project-oriented, and it provides a fun way to blow off creative steam when not working on one's thesis. Considering that all of the equipment needed to whip out a comic is available at their fingertips in CCS's amazing lab, the urge for a project like this can be satisfied quickly. It also seems like fellow Keren Katz is at the center of a lot of these projects these days, be it comics or wacky dance performances or musicals. One person can mean a lot to a community as a catalyst, and Katz is truly a miraculous walking whirlwind.

Most of the fanzines from CCS have been about shows I don't know. However, the Gilmore Girls Fanzine (edited by Katz and Jess Johnson) is very much in my wheelhouse as a show I both love and love to hate. Of course, living in a small, quirky Northeastern town like White River Junction makes it easy to relate to the small, quirky setting of Stars Hollow in Gilmore Girls, with its vast array of cranks, weirdoes, dreamers, and artists. The heart and soul of this comic is Jess Johnson, who edited it but also provided a lot of interstitial material to bind its stories together. There's a funny segment imagining Lane, the childhood best friend of Rory, one of the main characters in the show, going deep into different kinds of manga to read in the same effortless, encyclopedic way she knows about rock. Johnson even ties this into Lane joining a comics circle in the same way she joined a band in the show.

Natalie Wardlaw zeroes in on Rory's romantic life and all of the horrible men she dated. She turned up the angst and even the undercurrent of physical threat presented by her Stars Hollow boyfriend Dean, based on a scene where he tangled with a bad boy at Rory's private school.  Rachel Ford's funny story digs in on the small character details and makes fun of the way that Lorelai, the mother of Rory, pretends to be humble but secretly revels in her relative glamorousness in town. Julia Alekseyeva talks in all seriousness about how seeing a bookish girl on television was very important to her as a teen, and she longed to have the same kind of relationship with her mother that Rory did with Lorelai. Pop culture and simply having the feeling of being seen can have a powerful effect.

Of course, funny strips by Emma Hunsinger and Kat Ghastly balanced that devotion as they imagined what the show was like, having never watched it. Ghastly imagined that cannibalism eventually would become a plot point. Isabel Manley and Ortal Avraham both get at the heart of the show: that putative protagonists Rory and Lorelai are both self-centered narcissists in the same way that Lorelai's mother Emily is. The tenor of this fanzine is at once loving, devoted, skeptical, and mocking: a perfect description of the Gilmore Girls fanbase. Now, pardon me while I start my essay on why Rory and Lorelai were the real villains of the series...

Kori Michele Handwerker and Pat L's Doug Catches Up is less a fanzine than it is fan-fiction, imagining an older Doug Funnie returning to his old town of Bluffington years after he had moved away. Doug was an interesting cartoon in the way that it addressed pre-teen angst and issues in a direct, honest manner, even if its visuals and details were absurd and cartoony. That's lost a bit in this black and white comic (although the cover preserves it), but the creators otherwise remain true to the spirit of the show. Doug has a long talk with his former bully, Roger, where he reveals that he's bisexual and engaged to another old friend of Doug's named Chalky. The entire comic has a tone of gentle forgiveness, understanding, and self-examination. As Handwerker notes in the afterword, the comic isn't a manifesto about the true nature of the show's characters or about forgiving bullies; rather, it's a logical extrapolation of how some of the kids might have turned out and dealing with issues that are more openly spoken about in today's culture (like coming out, or coming out as trans and using different pronouns). The artists really nail the visual style of the show to such a degree that this could easily serve as an updated version of the show.

Artists To Seek Out At SPX 2019

Here's my usual dive into artists that SPX-goers should definitely check out. As always, I try not to repeat names from previous years and other shows.

1. The Triangle's Finest (Table W67) That would be three excellent cartoonists from the Research Triangle in my state of North Carolina: Andrew Neal (Hillsborough), Adam Meuse (Cary), and Max Huffman (Carrboro). Neal is the former owner of the excellent Chapel Hill Comics and the artist behind the hilarious and strange Meeting Comics. Meuse has been producing funny, strange, and touching minis for years, including the classic Sad Animals and Square. Huffman is a fairly recent grad of the School Of Visual Arts, He's a wild stylist with comics like Plaguers Int'l and Garage Island. This will be one of the best tables at the entire show.

2. Lance Ward (Table J9). I've been a fan of Ward's scorched-earth autobio for years, and I'm pleased to see his work get wider recognition. His new book, Blood and Drugs, is a harrowing and honest look at how an injury forced him to adapt to using a scrawled, almost manic style. He'll be at the Birdcage Bottom Books table, but all of his work is highly recommended.

3. ShortBox (Table W8).  The cutting-edge publishing concern of Zainab Akhtar will have a major presence at SPX. Like any smart publisher, she's way ahead of the curve with regard to up-and-coming talents; she was one of the first to become aware of Rosemary Valero-O'Connell, for example. This table will be jam-packed with great comics you may not have seen before. Zainab herself will not be there, but the books will be!

4. Diskette Press (Table I14). Carta Monir & Co. have quickly become a force to be reckoned with on the publishing scene. Come check out the work of Ignatz Award nominees Emma Jayne and Mar Julia in particular, but there's a wide variety of material to choose from.

5. Eleri Harris (Table L9). This Australian and graduate of the Center For Cartoon Studies is also a Nib editor and find historical/editorial cartoonist in her own right. Her historical comics are consistently well-sourced, funny, and fascinating.

6. Rachel Masilamani (Table A6a). I've been following her career since her Xeric Grant days, and her personal, poetic, and sometimes enigmatic work is better than ever. I'm excited that she has a chance to show off her work to a new audience.

7. Kate Lacour (Table H8-9). Her brand-new book Vivisectionary is out from Fantagraphics, and this is an engaging, witty, and visceral bit of body horror. Lacour's dry sense of humor is ever-present in this collection of drawings that were previously published in minicomics form, but the production values on this book make it a bizarre, beautiful art object.

8. Mary Shyne (Table I13a). This recent CCS grad is coming armed with her new book, Get Over It. Shyne's work is a perfect combination of top-notch production design and color, a playful line, and dialogue that mixes fantasy and verisimilitude. This will be one of the best books of the show.

9. Rikke Villadsen (W68-69). One of many Danes attending the show, Villaden's The Sea was a surreal, erotic, and terrifying mix of tropes and genres. Her pencil work, in particular, is dense and visceral. She'll also be at the Fantagraphics table.

10. Breena Nuñez (E11b). Her personal and political comics are playful, expressive, and powerful. Her comics about being Afro-Guatemalan often delve into family stories, but she's just as adept in using dynamic and innovative techniques in talking about injustice.

11. Glom Press (W6). Marc Pearson will be repping this excellent Australian Risograph publisher in their first SPX appearance. Bailey Sharp's My Big Life and Aaron Billings' Mystical Boy Scout #4 are particularly great.

12. Keren Katz (C13b). Katz is one of the most brilliant cartoonists working today. I haven't taken the deep dive into her work that I've wanted (I've only reviewed one book out of her extremely prolific output), but the way she works dance, abstraction, and comics-as-poetry into her narratives is relentlessly fascinating and confounding. There aren't many artists with a more sophisticated color palette, either. Her new book, The Backstage Of A Dishwashing Webshow, will be out from Secret Acres.

Thirty One Days Of CCS #26: Brainworm 1-2

Anthologies have always been the lifeblood of CCS. In addition to work that's assigned to the students, there have often been cartoonists who have chosen to put together work with fellow students and alums. How the work is put together is often up to whichever cartoonist takes it upon themselves to edit the anthology, and in the case of the two recent volumes of Brainworm, that person is Kat Ghastly. She billed this anthology as "a catalog of obsessions for the obsessed" and themed both issues, giving them a nice sense of loose coherence. The table of contents in the first issue contains a sign-up sheet where most artists who said yes agreed at the expense of sleep or possibly quality, which speaks to the work ethic of the average CCS cartoonist.

The theme of the first issue is Endings. Tim Patton's stylish strip is about a couple of friends who visit an out-of-the-way coffee shop on its last day, and it's all about that sense of wistfulness that one feels in moments like that. The use of steam lines speaks to the ephemeral nature of the moment and then the memory. Hachem Reslan's silent strip is clever; it starts from heavily rendered as we see two hands: one holding a knife and other other an orange. As there is a surprise thing that is cut, the rendering and lighting gets lighter and less distinct, as though the cut hand is the one that's drawing the strip. Kristen Shull's cartoonish line is a delight in her story about songs that she can't get out of her head; it's a bit of fun that she braces with the final observation that banishing lingering thoughts is much more difficult. Sage Persing makes use of the dark in talking about their childhood OCD thoughts. Leise Hook's obsession with knowing how stories end was also cleverly drawn, with literalizations of the metaphors she was using. Bailey Johnson's drawing of a camera they took apart spoke to the way that working with its parts was soothing.

Unsurprisingly, CCS fellow Keren Katz's contribution was hilarious, odd and unsettling. It mixes drawings and photos (with a curly mustache drawn on Katz's face!) as the story follows a curator trying to figure out how to display the new heads. Each image is very typical of Katz, in that she's interested in exploring the way images in motion flatten themselves vs the ways in which still images can be arranged so as to create a strange synthesis. Ghastly's own strip is an amusingly cathartic story where she imagines people she hates falling into an open sewer grate, and then she thinks about what that fate may be. Her use of blobby figures reminiscent of Keith Haring drawings gives her story a strong visual charge.

The second issue isn't quite as interesting, in part because the topic ("The Undead") is a bit played out, and thus there was less variety on display. Katz once again takes an eccentric approach to an idea by taking three different documents (instructions for taking care of a cat, an origami instruction book and a book on making bubbles) and challenges people to come up with the first sentence of each book. It's all for reviving a monster. Katz is a walking idea machine, her brain and/or her body in constant motion as part of her relentless project to brighten the world with whimsical, bizarre and thought-provoking art.

There are some nice illustrations provided throughout by CCS instructor and horror master Steve Bissette, but they clashed with the generally lighthearted fare in the rest of the anthology. For example, Kurt Shaffert's "Bioethics and Zombie-care" is a funny take on how the rules of research (autonomy, beneficence, etc) would apply to dealing with zombies. Ghastly's own strip is about her own actual fear of zombies, or rather, that someone she loved would try to destroy her unexpectedly. Reslan and Persing's collaboration follows a sort of mannered, doomed romance, only one half of the couple is a zombie. Andres Catter's zombie gag is a funny one, using an image per page for maximum impact. Leise Hook's comic about a plant she revived and then might have killed again is a clever take on the theme, and its understated visual approach blends nicely with the text.

Comics-as-Poetry #10: Inkbrick #4

The comics-as-poetry anthology Inkbrick's fourth issue was the best to date, thanks to powerhouse bookend entries from Keren Katz and Sasha Steinberg. The former's "Marks On The Attendance Sheet" is a tense, sexually charged story about a teacher and a student told from the student's perspective. Katz's use of impossible angles on an open-page layout creates the illusion of there being panels on the page, only it looks like they're caving in and/or putting the characters into these extreme, oblique angles. There's a lack of neat order on each of the pages, which is further exacerbated by Katz's intense and textural use of color, to the point where it looks like she's exploring the aesthetic of textiles. Arms and legs bend at strange angles, boot-tips droop, colors and patterns surround line and a number of other visual signifiers are at work to express the sense of feeling upside down that the narrator is experiencing. She's feeling unbalanced and dizzy in this relationship, feeling thrills and doubts and disappointment all at once. It's a brilliant short piece, probably the best in Inkbrick to date.

This issue was printed in 2015, a couple of years before Sasha Steinberg achieved international fame as Sasha Velour, the drag artist. However, this piece should be easily accessible to fans of Steinberg's drag work, given that it works with Velour's trademark bald head. The piece, "What Now?" is about Steinberg grieving his recently-deceased mother, and it makes extensive use of negative white space. Alternating between huge swaths of red, black and green, we see Sasha going from room to room (in his mother's house presumably), dizzyingly processing (one word per panel) the new reality of her absence. Later, a series of panels alternate between Steinberg spreading her ashes in the snow and melting away in the house. The last two panels are killers: another silhouette of a dress, this time with a hat, with the next panel being a photo of his mother in precisely the same position. It's a beautiful, touching exploration of what it means to exist in one moment and to disappear the next, and what those ideas mean when you leave a loved one behind you. This was the first comics-as-poetry piece I had seen from Steinberg, and it was powerful and sincere.

Another welcome presence in the issue was that of David Lasky, a pioneer of comics-as-poetry. This issue featured an experiment in juxtaposing a textual memory against unrelated images; in this case, it was several images he redrew from London's National Gallery. The best poetry, in my opinion, is that which has concrete images. That's why Lasky's later piece, which provides simple descriptions of activities "Streetlight walks, Electric fan in the hall, Shadows and breeze" is so powerful, particularly since the images take off from those concrete descriptions and becomes plays of light and shadow, focusing on small, singular images that almost look concrete out of context.

Many of the cartoonists make good use of the fact that Inkbrick is in full color. Laurel Lynn Leake's juxtaposition of color as representative of environment is abstracted in part because of the way she compares it to depression and that "thoughts can trap you". There's the implication that staying mindful is crucial even when being presented with the pure beauty of one's environment. Isuri Merenchi Hewage & Deshan Tennekoon are more direct in their piece "August In Pasikuda", as a single color, displayed on each page in different patterns but all in a grid, represent a different time of day and different activity in the same locale. The use of light, texture and an especially rich mix of colors, along with the concrete descriptions, powerfully evoke a sense of time and place in an almost visceral manner. It's interesting that they concretize color to create a sense of time and place, whereas Leake abstracts the same color patterns we see in nature to reflect inward.

Kate Schneider's "May" takes familiar, comforting images as a kind of bulwark against the stress she felt regarding an upcoming surgical procedure. It starts with lightly-drawn pictures of her cat, then the trees outside, and finally simply the night sky. It's not as sophisticated, visually or otherwise, as the other pieces in the book, but there's a sincerity to it that makes it work. Not every use of color is effective. Hayley Fiddler's "Waves" uses light blue as the sole tone in her poem about infidelity that switches from an undersea oyster to a couple getting ready. The use of color is obvious here and doesn't add anything when she switches from under the water to a bedroom, and the idea for the poem is not especially remarkable. The same is true about Paul Tunis' otherwise clever piece about pomegranates; it would have conveyed precisely the same information if it was in black and white.

A lot of the pieces involve melting, shifting and otherwise transforming into something new. William Cardini's piece takes his garish, computer-generated imagery and creates something quite beautiful with it, as his creature talks about being thrown into the river and their mud mind compressing. That's followed up with an image of the creature's mind turning into layers of sedimentary rock, each one constructed of the words they describe them: "to chalk, to coal, to marl, to shale". Louise Aleksiejew's piece, other than resembling Michael DeForge a bit, is all about a transformation from losing all her drawings and pictures into seeing a witch who gave her a magic item as a kind of replacement. There's a sense of whimsy, not fear, at work here, which fits with the melting art style. Gary Jackson & David Willet's "The Midnight Marauder Contemplates Retirement" is a naturalist image of a crimefighter having beaten up some criminals, but the action in the piece takes place in the graffiti in the background, reflecting a change of emotional states. It's a clever device that leads the reader across the page expertly.

Alexander Rothman's own "Honey Locust" speaks to the increasing complexity and beauty in his pieces, as his use of colored pencil combined with a strong sense of negative space makes for an eye-catching piece, as he combines the particular scent of the honey locust tree and imagines mastodons ages ago trying to get at its buttery scent. Michel Losier's strip is text-heavy and doesn't let its images breathe, while Aurelien Leif's piece is an excerpt from a longer work that's hard to approach because of the swirling chaos on each page. The experimental piece from Alexey Sokolin and Angel Chen was clever, using sentence mapping to create alternative versions of ideas, all leading into different, separate, images. All told, there was very little filler in this issue. Most of the cartoonists made some powerful statements and the editorial team of Rothman & Tunis kept the issue flowing with a variety of different visual approaches, being careful not to arrange pieces that were too similar to each other too close to each other in the anthology. This was really the first issue I felt like I could hand to someone and say that it was a pretty thorough survey of comics-as-poetry at this moment in time.

Comics-As-Poetry #2: Linen Ovens

Linen Ovens is a 2014 anthology featuring four cartoonists who would continue to carve out interesting paths in comics-as-poetry. Keren Katz, a rising star in the comics world, led off with "A Picture Of Health", a story that features a frequent motif in her work: a narrative thickness that is immersive in the sense that it demands a reader's full attention and a willingness to adhere to the frequently playful, absurd quality of her imagery. At the same time, Katz also uses a lot of negative space in her page design, letting the reader breathe and refocus their gaze on a page-by-page basis. Using colored pencil and a distorted figure composition, Katz weaves a tale about performance, celebration and secrets, as creatures pour from a tree to provide gifts and secrets. The use of color is dazzling and is crucial to moving the eye across the page in the ways in which Katz wants. The story follows the flights of imaginative fancy that follow after attending the ballet, with text that adheres to figures and creeps around the page. The tone is one of strange delight throughout the story, which befits the images.

Molly Brooks' "Selvage" leans heavily on its two-tone effect in addressing memory and place. The dark green of the sweater that's been knitted and its inner fibers is analogous to the narrator's thoughts, plans and dreams unraveling. The flashbacks to the finished sweater and a lover now gone add poignancy to the interminable Now the narrator finds herself in, having lost both a burden and a gift. Andrea Tsurumi's comics always tend to hew closer to light absurdism. In "Hectacle", there's a nursery rhyme cadence to the disparate set of farm-related images and the text that accompanies them, especially the phrase "biscuits and breath". Alexander Rothman's "The Thing In The Wall" is illustrative of one of his main interests: the poetic qualities of brief, quotidian moments. This story is about hearing a sound when one is about to drift off to sleep, a sound that shouldn't be there. It goes beyond simple fear or annoyance and instead follows a different path, as the narrator drifts into a dream (in a beautifully bright image that's a nice contrast to the greyscale of the other pages) and considers the way time is warped by perception, sleep and seasons. He ponders the theoretical existence of the animal he thinks he hears and mourns its theoretical passing in a touching panel where he's leaning up against a wall and the ghost animal is on the other side.

This is a strong, if short, anthology. It's a good forerunner/companion piece to Rothman's Inkbrick anthology and an excellent primer for just how broad a category comics-as-poetry can be. For Katz, it's about the image in itself that creates meaning. For Tsurumi, it's formal juxtaposition. For Brooks, it's poetic and abstract language that is aided by the drawings to help communicate the emotions involved. For Rothman, the images are conventional and the text is descriptive, but their combination is indicative of a place outside time and our conventional understanding of the everyday. It's a great place to start for those new to comics-as-poetry.