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 #2: Laura Terry

Laura Terry is the perfect example of a CCS grad who used their experience not just to learn how to cartoon, but also to draw much more boldly and confidently. Terry’s senior year work was solid and well-told, but the leaps she’s made over the years in terms of technique and production have been astounding. Terry’s done it in a very CCS fashion as well, working with short stories in minicomics form, each one more beautiful and intricate than the last. That work culminated in her first book with a publisher, Graveyard Shakes (Scholastic). Terry’s method has always included cute character designs and bright colors teamed up with unsettling stories and images. She exploits that formula to the hilt in her book, but she ties it to more personal and relatable matters as well. A common thread in the Scholastic Graphix line is a deliberate attempt at providing stories that are not just fun but also teach lessons in a manner that is less didactic and more on the side of creating experiences that children can relate to—especially girls.

The story follows sisters Victoria and Katia as they begin their stint at a private school. They are both weirdos in their own way, but the older Victoria is desperate to fit in. The younger Katia, her hair a mess of wild, tangled curls, is openly hostile to the idea of conforming and doesn’t care when others make fun of her. Terry, who notes that she spent time at an all-girls boarding school in her author’s bio, absolutely nails the intensity of not just going to school as an outsider, but also being forced to live with these girls 24/7. It’s a level of constant anxiety were Victoria tries to find any way possible to fit in, including joining the soccer team, which finds her getting pummeled by the ball. Her quest to fit in is undermined by the relentlessly eccentric behavior of her younger sister. That culminates in Victoria secretly signing up Katia for orchestra, which only made sense since she was a musical prodigy. While her classmates are wowed by her talent, they are taken aback by her dramatic playing style and overall messiness, saying that she’ll adjust. That’s the breaking point for Victoria, who’s tired of people judging her, including her sister, and she runs away.

There is another family drama occurring, only this time it’s underground. A scientist named Nikola, as it’s revealed in a flashback, kidnapped a student from the school thirteen years earlier and used his soul to bring life to his patched-up son Modie, a near-victim of an accident that took his mother. Modie doesn’t want to be this sort of Frankenstein’s Boy, but he can’t get his father to see it his way, even with the help of his friend Little Ghost. He’s also an outsider in his environment, as the ghouls and ghosts who live underground can’t stand his good manners and overall niceness. Terry goes over the top to create an amusing but also unsettling group of creatures who do the bidding of Nikola. They’re like something out of a nightmarish Max Fleischer cartoon, as one can sense their mischievousness warp into anger and sadistic behavior.

Nikola needs another victim, and when Katia wanders away, he sends his ghosts after her. Meanwhile, Victoria is searching for her sister in the graveyard when she encounters Little Ghost, who accidentally frightens her and then she falls into an open grave. That triggers an action filled climax full of escapes, ghost fights (ghosts can’t hurt humans but they can hurt other ghosts), and an amusing but also terrifying sequence straight out of Fleischer where the ghosts encourage Katia to wreck a church. The ghosts play on Katia’s resentment toward her sister and her bossiness as a way of luring her to her death, but through teamwork and sacrifice, the girls manage to reunite and triumph. Both of them learn a lesson, as Victoria stops trying to control her sister and stops caring about trying to fit in, and Katia opens herself up to the possibility of having friends. It’s a story both heart-warming and macabre, a combination that avoids a treacly ending and in fact makes the lessons learned through struggle feel authentic.

Terry’s line is clear and strong. Katia in particular is a marvel of character design, with bulging eyes and scribbly lines for hair. Terry has mastered subtle modulations of emotion in her facial expressions and proved herself a capable action cartoonist, and the latter made the last 75 or so pages flow extremely quickly. That said, Terry’s real talent lies in her extravagant use of colors as she used both hand-painted and digital watercolors. The images pop off the page as a result, but Terry never overdoes it on any particular page. Modern coloring techniques can leave a page feeling overly slick and render its images inert, but Terry’s use of white space helps each page and the narrative as a whole breathe nicely, giving the eye some resting points after being popped with vivid imagery. The purples and greens in particular, in the underground scenes, instantly create mood and atmosphere before a single ghost does anything. It’s a skillful, heartfelt first book that’s ideal for a YA audience.

Of course, Terry’s roots are far darker than YA, as the second issue of her minicomics series Adorable Empire reminds us. Told in flashback form by the poor woman unlucky enough to be stuck with a small gaggle of cute creatures, Terry demonstrates how these fuzzy bunny-like, squirrel-like, bat-like and just plain walking bits of fur with eyes may seem adorable, but they are in fact the authors of untold chaos and mayhem. The narrator reveals that the creatures lived in the streets of New York City before they found her, and there’s a long scene where NYC’s vicious cockroaches overpower the critters with a swarm and almost manage to pull them into the gutter. Then there’s a scene where the Adorables sneak into a store and cause all sorts of destruction before falling asleep. The character design is achingly cute, even with the teeth showing in their mouths. What’s most dreadful about the story is Terry’s hinting that whatever horrible stuff we might have seen up to that point, it was about to get much worse. 

Thirty-One Days of CCS #18: Laura Terry

I remain amazed at how far Laura Terry has come as an artist from her earliest work at CCS. Her wit and storytelling chops were always there, as was her knack for dialogue, but everything else was rough and unpolished. She has gone from that to among the very best in terms of pure craft that CCS has to offer, and she hasn't lost a bit of her edge. Indeed, her two most recent minis are studiously cute on every single page, and she took such pains to subvert that cuteness in as dark a way as possible.

Take Adorable Empire, for example. It's not just the infestation of cute creatures that are absolutely lovable. Her design of the protagonist, dour as she is, is at once cartoony and realistic in terms of body type and the way she moves. The design is so appealing that I would read that character in any kind of story and know that I would be entertained by it. The plot of this short story is that cute creatures are infesting the city and that she can't escape them. She manages to resist them by ignoring them as much as possible, but when a coworker squeals with glee over their adorable qualities, she is soon overwhelmed and presumably consumed by them. Even when one of them eats a small dog, the creature remains huggable. Terry shows the main character trying to find a way to coexist, though after a disastrous trip to a grocery store, they try to make amends by stealing food. There is no resolution to this story; we began in media res and conclude with the main character walking down the street, trying to shake the creatures off of her umbrella. It's tempting to make some kind of metaphorical comparison for these creatures, but I think ultimately Terry had a funny idea and wanted to exploit it as directly and succinctly as possible.

Kitsune And The Land Of The Immortals has a similarly dark tone, as it subverts the idea of a magical being making a young protagonist's life a wonderful adventure and turns into a more traditional mythological structure: that of a bored god screwing around with mortals. Whereas Terry used color to break up what was an otherwise black-and-grey hued story in Adorable Empire, color here is a kind of poisonous serving of cotton candy. Everything is bright and colorful, but the titular goddess Kitsune is bored by the splendor and the reality of immortality as one of where she ran out of stuff to do. The mortal world is drably colored by way of comparison, and young Francie is performing a ceremony with a friend to summon her patron goddess. Kitsune appears behind the person doing the ceremony as a way of messing with Francie, and it wasn't the last time. The reader is reminded that no matter how cute things might appear to be, something horrible will inevitably happen. Kitsune has to attend an interspecies wedding between a spider goddess and a troll goddess, and after the beautiful ceremony, the inevitable of what happens with certain spiders and their mates occurs on the altar. What's hilarious is that another spider goddess finds the whole thing incredibly romantic, even as horror unfolds in front of everyone. The issue ends with Kitsune hearing Francie say that if she had powers, she could crush her enemies with them, so she took this as an invitation to whisk her away to the land of the immortals to find some enemies to crush. I'm curious to see how much darker Terry is willing to get with regard to this story, and if she's even interested in something like a redemption storyline for Kitsune. Regardless, this was a highly amusing first salvo in this promising story. 

Thirty Days of CCS, Day 2: Laurel Lynn Leake, Alexis Frederick-Frost, Laura Terry

Poly Morphous 1-3, by Laurel Lynn Leake. Leake specializes in writing about sexuality and forest-related fantasy stories, and this little trio of minis combines those two interests. Each eight pager contains a poetic narrative caption along with images of Poly, a cute critter who explores different desires. In the first, Poly lives up to her name as she wants to "be the conduit for your current" for a couple in their forest. It's an expression of wanting to absorb and be part of the energy of a relationship, frustrated by the couple's total lack of interest in the idea. The inherent sadness of the narrative is mitigated by the cute and funny nature of the drawings. The second issue comes from an entirely different place, as Poly is consumed by obsessive thoughts that she worries might spread to her loved ones. This leaves her to be alone, even if solitude is the worst thing possible for obsessives. The third is about the tension between consciousness and sleep and the difficulty of inhabiting either world fully. Hear, the melting drawings do a spectacular job of supporting the text instead of working in tension with it, as Poly can't quite cohere to a single form. These are fascinating little workouts about mental health, curiosity and desire.

The Aeronaut, by Alexis Frederick-Frost. Frederick-Frost specializes in comics about travel adventures, so this silent account of a one-man balloon expedition to moon based on a variety of fanciful newspaper accounts is right up his alley. He's a master of economy on the page, as the quest is set up in the span of just three pages, leaving lots of room for the perils of the voyage itself. He goes from an information-dense four panel grid to a two panel set-up during the journey itself, giving the reader a chance to drift along with the balloon in question. An encounter with a large bird who thinks the balloon is one of his lost children is salvaged with a handy set of giant feathers, enabling the explorer to fly up to the moon, wherein he encounters gigantic and deadly vegetation, intelligent and friendly anthropomorphic beavers, and lighter-than-air dandelions that allow him to get home. This is a charming if slight bit of imagination, an extended and detailed doodle daydream inspired by the tall tales of past adventurers. It's lovely on its own but would look even better in a hopefully future collection of Frederick-Frost's short stories.

August Chase Volume 1, by Laura Terry. Terry has become an ace with regard to fantasy stories with a tinge of emotional regret. Her character design lush but restrained use of color and storytelling is simply top-notch, and the first chapter of August Chase is something that I could being a huge hit in a different format. The story follows a lone hunter in a forest wearing goggles and an animal cloak. It's a striking bit of character design that's simple but instantly memorable. The other character designs range from anthropomorphic ducks, bulls and monsters that are drawn with a great deal of tenderness as well as other humans that are far more harsh.

The first chapter gives the reader a lot of backstory without actually dumping much text on them. We know the hunter with the bow is August, we learn that he's a renegade and hunted by his cruel father, and we know he's not much of a joiner. By the end of the first issue, his fate gets tied to that of a group of forest adventurers, entirely against his will. There are beautifully staged chase and action sequences, moments of humor, and instances of deep emotion. What I admire most about the comic is that despite its obvious young adult target range, it's a comic that doesn't talk down to readers, nor does it telegraph its immediate themes. Starting the book in the middle of a hunt gives the reader a great hook, rather than saddling a reader with a lot of backstory. It works because the reader is meant to feel and empathize with all of the relationships in the book: betrayed son, vindictive father, tight-knit group of friends and a general fear of the unknown.

New Comics From Dakota McFadzean and Laura Terry

I'm reviewing Laura Terry alongside Dakota McFadzean because they're two graduates of the Center for Cartoon Studies who produce the most consistently beautiful and haunting minicomics. Terry is the student (probably alongside Chuck Forsman) whose work has improved the most since their first CCS comics til now. The wit and storytelling sparkle was always there for Terry, but it took a while to figure out how to find a style that suited her and then play to her strengths as an artist. McFadzean came into CCS fully-formed as an illustrator, but the quality of his writing has become richer, deeper and more enigmatic.

Terry's Shotgun Funeral is a short comic that manages to cram in some charming scenes of one friend trying to comfort another in a cemetery with her account of her father's funeral. In just sixteen pages, Terry is able to give the broad strokes of an emotional breakdown and the beginnings of recovery, thanks to the friend's story about a family friend sitting at their house with a shotgun during the funeral. What's wonderful about this comic is the way Terry closely follows the body language of her characters to reveal mood and wisdom. While the despondent young man mopes around, the young woman runs around, trying to catch fireflies. The comic is all about letting go feelings that hold us back, as she liked to think that the shotgun story was really about guarding the house from her father's spirit coming back to a place where it would be easy to stay, given that it needed to move on. Terry's brush strokes here are nice and simple, more about creating shapes than trying to sculpt figures. That shape creation allows her bright and bold use of color to take over and tell the story, both in the muted flashback sequence and the cheerier present-day sequence.

Her Xeric-grant winning Overboard exercises some different storytelling muscles. Her brush is even freer and more scribbly in this comic and her use of color more expressive. This is a funny and strange story about a nightmare n the form of a nervous breakdown...or something far stranger and more sinister. The unnamed, redheaded protagonist (another extension of Terry, perhaps?) starts the story on a boat that is dashed to pieces by a vicious storm. She barely survives, but she is unable to save her girlfriend. She wakes up gasping, only to hear a faint sound of music and see the impossible: a tiny whaling ship that views her as its target. The image of the protagonist in the shower hearing "Thar she blows!", only to find a harpoon penetrating her foot, was both hilarious and unsettling. Things devolve further from there as the protagonist gets more and more paranoid (being fueled by codeine and booze doesn't help), drives her girlfriend away and has to hold on for dear life once again under the most surprising of circumstances. Overboard is a success viewed as a metaphor for paranoia  as well as a work of magical realism, and once again Terry's use of color (I believe she used colored pencil to striking effect) drives the narrative. The color here is more ragged than in Shotgun Funeral; taking away a level of slickness gives the story an emotionally raw quality. The simpler and more direct Terry is in her working methods, the more fully realized her comics have become.

McFadzean's Unkindness is typical of his work in that it depicts small town life in Canada in an entirely unromanticized fashion and also contains unexplained elements of magical realism. While there's a strong streak of naturlaism running through his work (the world he creates feels quite solid and real), his character design is looser and more expressive. He allows for a certain rubbery quality of reality that gives him the opportunity to mold and bend it. An "unkindness" is what is referred to as a gathering of ravens, and there is indeed a mysterious and surprising visitation by the birds in the dead of winter. The birds observe, feed and even communicate (one says "goodbye" to a little boy), often by creating a series of mysterious lines and circles in the snow. The title also refers to small acts of unkindness in the story, leading up to a mother essentially telling her teenaged daughter that she was a mistake. There's a sureness to the way in which McFadzean flips from character to character in this story, each of whom are just trying their best to get by in life without a whole lot of happiness or fulfillment. There's also a sort of hidden momentum and tension in this story generated by the wild card factor of the birds and the hidden emotions that well up as the story unfolds, exploding in a manner that was unexpected. It's also a story about different entities being at cross-purposes and being unable or unwilling to fully communicate their desires. That's made literal in the mystery of the ravens--there's no real sense of what their purpose is or if they mean harm to the humans in the town, but it's also expressed in the way that characters talk past each other.

Last Mountain #0 is his one man anthology of short stories. "Grey" is a short horror story about a man and woman running through a forest where all its animals have become petrified, as they are trying to outpace some kind of spreading, unseen force. It's an atmosphere piece devoted to creating a feeling of dread and then irrevocable loss. "War of the Old World" is one of McFadzean's few true humor pieces, and even this one has a rather ghastly punchline. Seeing him wring every ounce of sentiment out of an immigrant's story only to subvert it with a carefully developed but still shocking gag was quite a way to end the issue. "And The Horse You Rode In On" is the anchor of this comic. It's an Archie pastiche that features extended segments about a lone horseman riding out on the prairies by himself, relishing his solitude. This is the daydream of a nebbish who is manipulated, abused and/or ignore by school administrators, fellow students and his parents. He has a laughable lack of agency even as he's drawn to fit in a kind of Archie-verse, content to flit from embarrassment to embarrassment even as he refuses to truly knuckle under to anyone else's desires. There's a delicious, unresolved tension at the end of the story where the protagonist is given a chance to renounce his "purity" once and for all with a bag of weed that was given to him, but it's unclear what path he will choose.  Both McFadzean and Terry are ready for long-form work, and any publisher would be lucky to have them.

Brief Comments On Short CCS Minis

Finding Moby Dick, by Laura Terry. This is "a collection of sketches, drawings and comics"; more half-formed ideas than anything coherent. I don't have any interest in critiquing the content, given that the ideas are half-formed. Instead, I wanted to mention that this little sketchbook mini (in full color, no less) is further evidence of just how far Terry has come as an artist. Her figure work is so much more self-assured, for one thing, as is her general command over line and using different line weights. Most impressive, however, is the highly expressive way she uses color. In one story snippet, she shapes the story of a shipwreck using only midnight blue and blacks for spotting. Another image of three skeletons dancing on the ocean is rendered in aqua blue and sea-foam green. Her figure work in general is lively, full of personality and edged with humor. This is an artist who's ready for a leap forward in terms of the scope of ambition in her projects.

Zee Leetle Prince, by Katie Moody. This mini is an interesting exercise in style, as Moody takes the classic story by Antoine de Saint-Exupery "as filtered through Ed Emberley". Moody turns the book into kind of a goof for kids, rendering the characters in illustration teacher Emberley's trademark simple style (everything is basic geometric figures, lines, and squiggles--things almost anyone can draw) and adding a Pepe' LePew style French patois (The first line of the comic is "Zere wonce was a leetle prince"). The only problem with the comic was that there simply weren't enough images, and most of those images were just too small. An Emberley-style book packs a lot of visual punch into each page, even if the figures themselves are tiny, and this was dominated by text. That's not to say that the mini didn't have its charms, especially since Moody never strayed from the silliness of her text, but it didn't succeed in what she set out to do.

Moose #3 and #4, by Max de Radigues. De Radigues' series takes true narrative form in these two issues. The protagonist of the series, a nervous teen named Joe, is exhibiting all sorts of odd behavior, we learn, because of the way he's harassed by a bully. He has the opportunity to talk to a teacher about it in #3, but with his tormentor standing right outside the door, he has to hold it in. This issue is all about setting up the hopelessness of his situation in conventional terms. The fourth issue is about Joe managing to hide from the bully and his crony (whom he keeps in line with threats of physical violence when he's not gung-ho about torturing Joe). There's a sweetness to this issue as Joe doesn't exactly solve his problem, but he does derive some satisfaction from frustrating his nemesis (whose self-esteem seems to derive entirely from tormenting him). As always, de Radigues uses a fragile, simple line that emphasizes angles and negative space. His characters, though simply-rendered, are lively and bursting with emotion. de Radigues' ability to portray body language is remarkably intuitive, and he seems to thrive doing this short episodes that include eye-catching covers and incidental illustrations by guest artists.

Freeloader #1, by Nomi Kane. This is a typically charming and well-drawn set of short strips about being unemployed and living with one's parents after graduating from college. Her thoughts turn from her preferred job (illustration) to slightly less glamorous pursuits (like waitress, delivery person and stripper). Kane's all about the gag in this story (her bit about being unable to jiggle as a stripper was especially amusing), though the gag covers up real stress. This comic is also about the rare opportunity she has to live with her parents for an extended time as an adult, which is both stressful (because of the limbo she finds herself in) and an unexpected delight. Kane's character design and self-caricature are enormously appealing and have always been her major strength as an artist, and this comic is no exception.

Twelve New Drawings, by DW. DW is a CCS student who is clearly heavily influenced by Fort Thunder and the old Highwater Books comics. His drawings have the raw, hypnotic power of Ron Rege and Marc Bell, without the level of craft and sophistication of those two masters. There's not much narrative at work here, but each page is worth close inspection as DW mixes decorative patterns with hidden messages, surprising images and even small narrative snippets. It feels like sketchbook work, a form of graphomania almost, in that the artist is drawing just to draw, to make marks on paper. His bold sense of design is something that will serve him well as he shapes this vision, especially since CCS emphasizes narrative structure in even its most avant-garde students. He's someone to keep an eye on.
Early, by Joseph Lambert. This is a full-color charmer that involves Lambert's typical subjects: quarrellous little kids and the sun and moon as anthropomorphic beings. This eight pager finds a kid getting mad at the sun for melting his ice cream cone and throwing a spider at him. The sun freaks out and sinks early (a lovely metaphor for the way time can pass for a child), only to reemerge later and ask the moon if she's afraid of spiders. What's interesting about this strip is that Lambert cuts way down on his typical level of detail in favor of letting the color tell the story. The back cover has the unexpected bonus of telling the story from the poor spider's point of view.

Artists To Seek Out At SPX 2011; High-Low @SPX

I will be at SPX 2011 this year. I'll be hosting a panel on 9/10 at 3:30 in the Brookside Conference Room on "Stories Of Cultural Identity". I'll quote the blurb from the website: "America’s own culture wars are only part of a global struggle with identity, as nations the world over attempt to address the challenges of assimilating multiple cultures within a stable society. Moderator Rob Clough will talk to Jessica Abel (La Perdida), Marguerite Dabaie (The Hookah Girl), Sarah Glidden (How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less) and G. B. Tran (Vietnamerica) about comics that deal with issues of cultural identity." I'm looking forward to it.

As always, I'm happy to review whatever comics cartoonists choose to give me.

Here are ten young artists to seek out at SPX, on the basis of their potential and/or significant debuts at the show. A number of them are up for Ignatz awards. In alphabetical order:

1. Darryl Ayo. Ayo is an Ignatz nominee for Promising New Talent and is someone who has been steeped in comics and comics culture for a long time, even for a cartoonist as young as he. He's become a sharp observer of social mores as well as a mark-maker whose style has begun to coalesce.

2. Pat Barrett. This graduate of the Center for Cartoon Studies is one of its best draftsmen and stylists. His Oak & Linden minicomics are well-crafted one-man anthologies, and the actual anthologies he's been a part of (Nymphonomena and Tag Team in particular) are rather good.

3. Marguerite Dabaie. Dabaie is on my panel and has proven to be an interesting young voice with her Hookah Girl comics, which are autobiographical stories about growing up as a Palestinian-American. Dabaie is a fine draftsman with an eye for intricate detail.

4. Mike Dawson. Dawson is one of the more established cartoonists on this list, but his new book Troop 142 debuts at the show and it's his strongest work to date. He'll also be hosting a panel on his Ink Panthers co-host (on ten years since the publication of his first major work, Box Office Poison) that will likely be hilarious. Look for an extensive interview with him (by me) at tcj.com very soon.

5. Lisa Hanawalt. She's one of the top humorists in comics, full stop. I don't know if she'll have anything new, but now is your chance to pick up both issues of her awesomely gross and hilarious series I Want You.

6. Melissa Mendes. This CCS grad has a bright future ahead of her and will get a bit of spotlight with the release of her collected Freddy stories. Mendes' scratchy line and ear for children's dialogue make her comics a wistful pleasure.

7. L.Nichols. Nichols is a talented artist still restlessly searching for her ideal style. Her Jumbly Junkery one-woman anthology comics feature an assortment of diary strips, longer autobio stories, fiction, comics-as-poetry and other experiments. Like the other young cartoonists on this list, she has a relentless work ethic and it shows in her improvement.

8. Laura Terry. Terry's up for an Outstanding Minicomic Ignatz award for Morning Song, a comic I greatly enjoyed. Terry's work has a lyrical quality that complements her interest in formal experimentation quite snugly.

9. Matthew Thurber. Thurber is the genius behind the 1-800-MICE series, which is now done and will debut in its collected form from PictureBox. He'll be on a panel at 1pm on Saturday titled "Drawing The Grotesque".

10. Noah Van Sciver. Van Sciver is another hard-working cartoonist who's gotten better thanks to his willingness to publish everywhere possible. His recent mini The Death of Elijah Lovejoy will likely be one of my top 25 minis of the year. He has a book coming out with Fantagraphics next year, but until then I'd buy up copies of his one-man anthology comic book Blammo.

New Post: Minis from Laura Terry, Ross Wood Studlar, Bill Volk & Sean Ford

Here are some recent minicomics by alumni from the Center for Cartoon Studies.

Stranger Knights, by Bill Volk, Mary Soper & Casey Bohn. This is a slight but amusing anthology edited by Volk, an artist who seems drawn to a grungy and unglamorous version of folklore and myth-making. All three feature smart-ass and off-kilter superhero stories. Volk uses a clear and clean line in depicting the adventures of Shamash, the Mesopotamian god of justice. Midway through, the story takes a left turn as he must go home to ask a favor of his grandfather, Enlil, who insists that he try some potato chips. Despite the story's whimsical trappings, it has the tight plot of a Silver Age Marvel story, right down to the interpersonal squabbling of Shamash's superhero teammates in the "Stranger Knights". That light touch, combined with just a touch of angst, continues in the Volk-written, Soper-drawn story of Incantrix X. This is a sci-fi superhero story about a character who uses her mind-clouding abilities to defeat alien dinosaur men but is given a prophecy about turning evil in the future. Soper's line is expressive and exceedingly fine, which gives the whole story a breezy feel. Bohn's work is similarly quirky, as he depicts the adventures of a superhero who uses an electric guitar to fight evil. His art is crude, not unlike a Golden Age cartoonist who had a week to crank out a nine page story, but it has a primitive energy and stays remarkably clear. I wouldn't say that Stranger Knights is a remarkable comic, given the scores of fusion-light superhero comics that have emerged from the alt-comics scene in recent years. I will say that it's one of the more enjoyable comics of its kind that I've encountered, especially in the way that it kept its mood light while being entirely aware of the sort of story it was telling. This looks like it will be the first issue in a series, and I'd like to see what Volk can do in future issues.



Only Skin #7, by Sean Ford. This is the final issue of this storyline, one that will be collected by Secret Acres in 2012. That publisher has released minicomics collections from several CCS cartoonists, including Sam Gaskin, Joseph Lambert and (tangentially) Ken Dahl. Ford says in this issue's notes that the series will continue with a new story. I won't say much about the actual story given that this is the last chapter, but this is very much a denouement to the explosive events of the previous issue. It's a line-dividing issue that very much has the feel of a monster or zombie film where the heroes didn't quite win and are lucky to get out alive. What's interesting is that ultimately the most destructive, (literally) society-obliterating elements of the story turn out to be human ones. Ford makes this issue a mirror of the first one, where there was page after page of bleak, full-page shots of the desolate setting. In this issue, we see that environment burned down in page after page, with Ford's distinctive smeared pencils creating an eerie, shifting environment. This series has been quite an opening salvo in Ford's young career, one that has seen him refine his line while creating beautifully composed and balanced pages.



Morning Song and b.f.f by Laura Terry. Terry has always been a strong storyteller with a distinctive voice, but these two minis demonstrate a newfound devotion to craft and detail. They're both what I refer to as "convention minis"; that is, minicomics that are art objects as well as comics. They generally tend to be slightly flashier and more gimmicky than a standard mini. What makes these minis by Terry stand out is the way she manages to fold in function along with form. The gimmick of each mini serves the actual story (slight as it is) well, and the story would not be able to function well if it didn't appear in this particular form. Morning Song, for example, is an eight-panel comic. It's about a young man whose fiddle playing gently nuzzles the wildlife from sleep to wakefulness. It's tucked into a cute cardboard rodent head. When you pull the comic out, we then read the first two pages, as we see the song bringing dawn. The reader then unfold the comic up to reveal the next four panels, as we meet the musician. Finally, we unfold the comic one more time to its full 11 x 17" length to see the final scene. Reading this wordless comic takes less then thirty seconds, but the physical experience of folding and unfolding it is a clever way of making the reader understand the passage of time.

b.f.f. has a clever wrap-around cardstock cover featuring two girls in a tree; opening up the right front flap changes the picture so that only the girl on the left is present. This story reveals just how much Terry's overall chops have improved. Her line is thinner and more confident at the same time. One of Terry's strengths has always been the depiction of movement, and this mini sees her using some interesting techniques to depict movement by moving the reader's eye across the page in a zig-zag fashion. The story is semi-auto-bio, based on a childhood experience where she had her heart broken by a girl. What I liked best about it is the way it resolves; rather than end on a self-pitying note or a cheer-up platitude, it instead unites "Laura" and her anthropomorphic heart by having them engage in "petty revenge". Terry seems ready for a next-level jump, and so I will be quite interested in seeing her tackle a long form work or short story collection.



Avian Tales From Crater Lake, by Ross Wood Studlar. Studlar is a park ranger who also happened to attend "cartoon school". Unsurprisingly, his subject tends to be nature. In terms of his drawing, this comic is a step forward from the previous comic I reviewed of his, The Raven And The Crayfish. His line is no longer quite as labored; drawing directly from nature is a nice match for the looseness of his line. This eight-page comic is a collection of small observations of birds at Crater Lake, from young eagles' leaps out of their aerie to the way diving ducks plowed several dozen feet into the crystal-clear lake in order to devour fish. Studlar also has a prose piece connecting mythology and folklore to the unpredictable and threatening nature of storms on the lake. This is a slight comic at best, one that hints at many more interesting anecdotes and observations to come. Studlar is clearly still trying to figure out just what it is he wants to do as a cartoonist, and his eye and interests are so different from that of the average cartoonist that he has the potential to do some interesting work. A book full of these stories and observations, linked together with prudent editing, could produce a unique comics artifact. As long as he continues to use a more restrained line for both his true life and mythological interests, that book could be a compelling read.

TCJ Post #10: Only Skin #4 and One Thousand Lies

Rob reviews two new minicomics from CCS folks: Sean Ford's ONLY SKIN #4 and Laura Terry's ONE THOUSAND LIES.