Leigh Luna's Clementine Fox

Back in 2013, I wrote this of Leigh Luna, who at the time was still an undergrad at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design (MCAD): "Luna seems ready to cut her teeth on a longer character narrative, and a story involving anthropomorphic animals might suit her best." That was after I had read her first minicomic featuring Clementine Fox and her friends, going on an adventure at sea. A decade later, Luna's Clementine Fox And The Great Island Adventure was published by Scholastic, and it's an engagingly dense and complex character narrative aimed at a middle-grade audience. 

Like a lot of middle-grade comics (and especially those from Scholastic), there's definitely a message at work here. Luna says a lot about friendship, trust, and communication in this comic, but the real message is with regard to learning. Young Clementine hates math, is confused by it, and isn't taking at all to the way it's being taught by her. This actually spurs her to make her journey to an island where her aunt lives, stowing away on a giant turtle with her friends that she strong-arms into coming with her. Facing the idea of school as a kind of dead-end prison where roadblocks like this exist only to frustrate her otherwise creative mind is enough to get her to flee. 

Clementine is a wonderfully obnoxious protagonist. She's a creative dreamer & schemer who's pushy and blows by her friends' boundaries on a regular basis, but she is also fiercely loyal and giving. Clementine is the kind of charismatic leader of a group who makes everything into an adventure, even if it's by the seat of her pants. Her friend Nubbins (a squirrel) is the perfect sidekick: equally curious and adventurous but defers to Clementine's plans. Her other close friend Penelope (a rabbit) is cautious and cerebral, and she's occasionally resentful at Clementine's aggressive attitude. She's the perfect foil to Clementine's recklessness, just as Clementine nudges her out of over-cautiousness.  

This push-pull dynamic between Clementine and Penelope fuels the narrative, as Nubbins tells Penelope about going to the dangerous island, and she appears in order to talk them out of it. Instead, she gets peer-pressured into joining them. Assorted hijinks ensue, as everyone's parents find out about the escapade and the friends discover a race of plant-based faeries on the island and inadvertently get the island's stone giant hooked on delicious croissants. Every new plot development is carefully developed, especially when new characters and dynamics are also introduced. Luna's sense of humor and character dynamics are sometimes surprisingly tart, as slights and mean words aren't allowed to pass without some sense of reckoning. Math is a plot point throughout, and Luna slips this in seamlessly as a plot device, including the climax where it becomes crucial. 

The cartooning is sophisticated and beautiful. The character design is unrelentingly cute, which serves to soften some of the harder emotions felt in the book. The crazily detailed and colorful establishing shots (especially on the island)  are absolutely dazzling, but Luna is also adept at grounding the pages with less detail & talking heads with smartly selected pastels. The big action sequences at the end are enhanced with spectacular and complex uses of color and line. Her line weight is perhaps a tad too thin on some of the pages, but the color doesn't overwhelm it. There are just some images that would have had a stronger impact with a thicker line. Overall, this was an extremely satisfying read and one that will resonate with readers who need different kinds of educational approaches to succeed. 

Minis: L.Luna/P.Wishbow, H.Fisher, R.Jordan

Cosmoknights, by Hannah Fisher. This is a great example of how younger creators have completely eradicated the boundaries between genre comics and alternative comics. This is a slice-of-life comic that slowly reveals its more fantastical details about two young women from very different societal castes who develop an intense friendship. Tara, as we learn, is royalty. Pan, her best friend, lives a more hardscrabble existence but is in many ways her friend's connection to the outside world. This comic is all about moments and the ways in which the two characters relate to each other, and as such, it's heavy on body language cues. Fisher has a strong sense of line but an even stronger sense of how to use color as the key element of her emotional narrative. There's one sequence where the friends are at a nighttime, outdoors concert where the blacks, purples and blues provide an emotional backdrop for the friends dancing, and then later Pan shows Tara a spectacular view of the two moons of her planet. (This is when it becomes explicit that this is a science-fiction story.)

When Pan helps her friend escape from how prescribed her fate is about to become, she does it knowing that she will be arrested and will be separated from her friend no matter what. As the back cover notes, a knight can be "the devoted champion of a lady", and that's precisely the role Pan plays for Tara in this first installment of a much longer story. Fisher is able to make this comic a complete story in and of itself, with a fully realized emotional arc. Obviously, there's a longer narrative arc in the offing, but it's clear that the series' emotional arc is its most important component.

Give, by Pam Wishbow/Hunt, by Leigh Luna. This is the last release of the sadly departed Yeti Press, but it's a good one, spotlighting two up-and-coming cartoonists. Wishbow's creepy comic about plumbing the mysteries of the forest uses a sickly green as a spot color as the story's narrator tries to resurrect a dead mouse using various herbs and ephemera she finds in the forest. When she's eventually successful, she learns that getting what she wanted wasn't necessarily what was good for her, as the forest gave and then took it away. Wishbow's art is dynamic and abstracted in the way children's illustrations sometimes are, popping off the page with powerful, stylized compositions. The way Wishbow incorporated text into the art itself made the comic more immersive, creating a world that the reader is drawn into.

Luna's story juxtaposes multiple bright colors against a pitch-black story, as tradition dictates that the mothers of a small town must put their daughters out into the woods with the wolves for a night. Tellingly, there is no reason given as to why the women allow this: it simply happens, because the wolves take them. The most the women can do is prepare them, fixing their hair and putting them in beautiful dresses as a kind of "preparation" that is not actually a safeguard of any kind. The comic is a brutal condemnation of rape culture without once using the word, with the ending featuring the women taking the sons of the wolves to "teach them to be good". The comic goes from a multigenerational commiseration of helplessness and inevitability to a seizing of power and agency. There's a delicacy throughout the comic in terms of the figurework and use of color, and that doesn't change even at the end.

Duane's Big Walk, by Rusty Jordan. This is a kind of catch-all zine for some of Jordan's recent short stories involving his Duane character. Jordan's trademark is exploring various contrasts with blacks and shades of gray, with Duane musing existentially with his bird friend Christian. There's a bizarre puppet/claymation story featuring a TV newswoman whose story starts to hilariously and disturbingly unravel as the comic proceeds. The worlds that Jordan creates are evocative and strange, full of losers, bottom-feeders, hard-travelers and the desperate. "Off The Schneid!" puts them all together in a single story and lets them all intermingle. A lost romance is rekindled. A friendship is repaired. A bar is the setting for all of this, as all of these desperate people become a community of sorts. There is warmth to be found in Jordan's world, even if it's covered up by grime and toil. It's reflected in his grotesque but friendly character design, all lumps and bulging eyes and tufts of hair out of place. These characters are familiar, like on the edge of one's social circle from years ago. There's a lingering sense of absurdity in Jordan's comics and a touch of sadness combined with an unformed but still present sense of hope.