31 Days Of CCS, #10: Leise Hook & J.D. Lunt

Leise Hook has had some early success in her career with the New Yorker and other venues, and given her spare but expressive line and thoughtful approach to storytelling. There's a reserved quality to her work that provides an interesting contrast to its inherent emotional content. For example, The Nest is a story about COVID and quarantining, as related to various attempts at mourning doves laying eggs outside her windowsill in the New York apartment she shares with her partner. The eggs laid were always a sort of physical manifestation of the renewal of life that chased away the existential dread of the pandemic. Each time, something would intervene to kill the eggs. Sometimes it was a storm, sometimes it was shoddy nest construction, and finally it was wily crows who were aware that Hook was trying to shoo them away. As COVID rates rose and Hook wondered how people become aware when the world has turned against them, she endeavored to keep trying with the doves, and as it is implied, with her own struggle against giving into despair. 

One way Hook does this is through humor. Some Jokes & Drawings contains a number of single-panel gag strips rejected by the New Yorker, but it also serves to act as another kind of COVID journal. There are a lot of very amusing conceptual gags here, like the masks of comedy and tragedy being obscured by N95 masks, so there's no way to tell which is which. There are jokes about social media, masking, the anxiety of zoom meetings, and the apocalypse. Many of these things are related. There are some solid gags here; a few are a bit dated, but most of them still land in a direct but mostly gentle way. 

Birthday Blues, by J.D. Lunt. Everything about this comic is big: the pages, the drawings, and the feelings. Lunt uses 8.5" x 11" paper for this memoir about the passage of time and changes in identity and circumstances. A lot of this comic is about processing things creatively; he discusses being part of a life-changing comics residency but notes that he's had trouble finishing projects since then. He talks about his strained relationship with social media, and how travel can be an antidote for it. Most importantly, he discusses the role of the folk artist Bert Jansch and his album Birthday Blues have had in his life at various points, including as a younger man at an evangelical college. Ultimately, this is a comic about coming to terms with mourning, empathy, and isolation. Lunt's PTSD (as detailed in previous comics) often leads him to isolation and melancholy, but the comic itself is a way to reach out and acknowledge the perils of isolation and embrace the gift (and risks) of connection. Lunt's willingness to be open and vulnerable is a gift both to readers and himself. There are times when his line looks like he's perhaps worrying too much about naturalism, and it can make some of his pages look stiffly drawn. In other spots, he abandons that for a more cartoony and expressive style that's far more adept at expressing the immediacy of his feelings.

31 Days Of CCS, #26: Fantology

Every year, someone from CCS always seems to step up to do the work of editing and publishing an anthology. It's a time-tradition that has produced some excellent comics, including Sundays, Irene, Maple Key Comics, and most recently Brainworm. This time around, it's Fantology Volume 1: Origins, edited by Kristen Shull and Emily Zea. It's a straight-up fantasy anthology that makes no apologies for its subject matter and celebrates it with gusto. Not everyone in the book is a CCS student or grad, so for the purposes of this review, I will mostly focus on the CCS contingent.

While there are some solid entries in this anthology, the care that editors Shull and Zea put into make it greater than the sum of its parts. From Tess Scilipoti's simple but eye-catching cover design to the interstitial rhymes of Bartlebee the Bard to the choice of paper stock, this is a cohesive-looking and attractive book. Shull and Zea also chose to put these stories in a shared world (similar to what Isaac Cates did in Cartozia Tales), with a map at the beginning giving readers a rough understanding of that world and where the stories take place. It's a clever device that helps draw together a number of disparate styles and as well as skill levels.

Catalina Rufin's "The Quest" is one of the highlights of the anthology. Rufin went all-in on a thick line weight and spotting blacks and it works well with her relatively simple but expressive character design. It's an interesting contrast, because fantasy art with this kind of line usually tends to be more naturalistic and dramatic, but with the story's actual emotional narrative arc, that contrast between dramatic and pared-down made sense. The story follows a warrior and a young apprentice magician sidekick, and his supposed quest against a powerful witch. Rufin touchingly and hilariously subverts this trope in a way that still makes sense within the genre but also makes fun of warrior-types who can't express their feelings.

Filipa Estrela's "Discovery" is another delightful, warm story about a goblin who happens upon an island inhabited by mushroom people called Mycelia. Estrela cleverly sets the entire paradigm of an explorer on its ear, as Frond the Goblin realizes that she can't report her discovery of the island to anyone, lest it be despoiled by invaders. There's a delightful romance between Frond and Frill, the Mycelium who greets her on the island, and it leaves off on a note that implies that there could be future stories featuring this couple. The one problem with this story is that Estrela's line is light to the point of illegibility at times; it looks more like detailed thumbnails rather than a completed story. The story is also highly text-heavy, and there's some awkwardness with word-balloon placement. This was also a story that fairly cried out for color to add some weight to its pages, but the anthology was of course in black and white. 

I reviewed Alexander Washburn's "Clan Zargs" last year, as he submitted it as a separate feature. It's a nice fit in the anthology, as his anthropomorphic animal character design, thick line weight, and use of negative space allow the pages to breathe while he tells his silly and funny story about a newly-formed group of treasure hunters. I also reviewed Shull's "Thirsty" in her entry this year for CCS, and it perfectly encapsulated the best of fantasy fiction. It's not just telling a fantastical story, but introducing characters who are trying to tell their own story and create their own identity. 

Rainer Kannenstine's "The Apotheosis Of Jahk" is a well-realized story of a fisherman and a malevolent being named Titanis who at first offers friendship and wisdom to Jahk and those around him, but later inspires bloodlust and conquest. It's a story of a seemingly impossible moral problem and how Jahk failed it. Kannenstine's bold use of black and white contrasts matches his simple line nicely; it's a good example of creating a powerful set of images without overrendering.

Zea closed the anthology with "Seas The Day," a delightful coming-of-age fantasy story about a young princess who wants to be a warrior like her older brothers and the pirate who raids their city. Zea's sketchy pencil drawings and spare but powerful inking make each drawing pop off the page without losing any of their expressive power. 

Natalie Wardlaw and L.S. Hook both contributed short pieces. Wardlaw's was a silent story about finding a fairy with torn wings and mending them. It's simple, sweet, and drawn in Wardlaw's signature elegant line. Hook's contribution isn't so much a comic as it is a series of hunky drawings of men on an island that so enchanted the explorer that they chose to remain there. Both are the kind of short, intermediary pieces that provide flavor in anthologies like this. Amy Burns' "When The Gods Grew Bored" is a powerful creation myth for a particular group of people that's well designed and cartooned. Burns' attempt at a naturalistic approach didn't quite land because her character design was too crude; her lettering was also all over the place, which was distracting. 

Other interesting contributions included Jared Beerman's highly atmospheric fumetti photos of miniatures telling a story, Eliot Crow and Keren Katz's haunting story of a people turned into currency in the desert and what ultimately happens to them; Emily Bradfield's story of an official trying to thwart poachers and its surprising outcome; and Tay James' funny story of a young potion-maker trying to decide her future. 

Another volume of this anthology has been produced, and I'll be curious to see what kind of a jump the dedicated creators, as well as the editors, made. The second volume of an anthology tends to be the one where the editors figure out how to fix the errors they made in the first volume, so I'm eager to see what kind of leap they all make. 

31 Days Of CCS, #1: Leise Hook

Published in The Believer, Leise Hook's The Vine And The Fish is an unusual entry for High-Low in that it's a limited-animation downscrolling comic. This is a fine work of personal journalism that compares so-called "invasive species" like the kudzu vine and the Asian carp to xenophobia and generalized anti-immigration sentiment that was fanned during the Trump administration. Given that Hook is of Asian descent herself, it was easy for her to connect the dots to create this kind of emotional impact. What was interesting is that she let the material and the images speak for themselves, as she even muted the emotional content during the strip. She didn't have to rely on histrionics or polemics, because the whole point of the piece was about how nuance is lost in arguments about immigration. 

Hook's research was impeccable. Her dispassionate yet pointed information-gathering provided historical context as to why both species were initially imported to the U.S., and how events unforeseen by those who upset delicate ecosystems led to both species overrunning their new environments. Hook points out that the language of war is often used when it's decided that it's time to get rid of these species, which she describes as a symptom of "the human desire to create order by imposing clean categories on an untidy world." Hook makes reference to a historian who notes that this kind of language is related to a latent fear of invasion. 

The second half of the story, which focuses on the Asian carp, digs further into linguistics and meaning. The animus against the fish was feared to have created a negative view of Asians in general. While at first this may seem to be an overreaction, the worldwide view of Asians after Donald Trump insisted on referring to COVID-19 as the "Chinese virus" demonstrates why words are important. They have an impact, and falsehoods repeatedly told start to feel like the truth. 

Hook's use of limited animation is graceful and lively. It never felt gratuitous or showy; instead, it enhanced the flow of the strip and its transitions. The downscrolled animations deftly moved the story along and its natural stopping points coincided with breaks in that animation. The muted green wash added to the somber yet earthy tone of the story. It's clear that Hook has found her niche with this kind of journalism, and this article practically begged for more of this kind of research from her.

31 Days Of CCS #12: Leise Hook, Ross Wood Studlar, Beth Hetland

Beth Hetland just can't stop creating things. Even when she and her writing partner Kyle O'Connell took a break after finishing their epic Half-Asleep, they crafted a super-fun project called Who's Counting? Hetland has often enjoyed formal experimentation by the way of making the actual delivery system of the comics unusual. From folding comics to color-coded narratives and much more, Hetland often seems to like to clear her creative palate by working on more craft-related projects. This "Collection of Tallies" has a single image on a page depicting something happening at a comics show or elsewhere, and a rotating series of images in a clearly divergent wheel that the reader turns by hand. It's a clever and fun twist, but there are subtle critiques as well. There's a funny page depicting a snooty artist using a number of different words to say very little, as well as Hetland's series of reactions to answering the question "What's it like to be a woman in comics?" This comic is just a bunch of these tiny illustrations and observations, with Hetland's self-caricature doing a lot of the work on each page in terms of leading the eye. There's also a sense of glee on some of these pages, as Hetland is clearly relieved to be doing funny work for a change.

Ross Wood Studlar has been quietly publishing interesting nature-related work for years, and his latest, Follow The Moon, fits nicely in that category. Studlar has also always been interested in local myths and legends regarding nature, especially those of Native American origin. This story follows a mother sea turtle telling her daughters about the first turtles and how they came to give birth on land. The story involved a turtle trying to hitch a ride with a heron and the whole experience going horribly astray, with one exception: the turtle learned how the heron followed the full moon as a guide. Studlar's art is both naturalistic and expressive, with gritty stippling grounding the details of the turtles laughing and showing other emotions. Studlar has a solid grip on how animals relate to their environments, and it shows in his drawing.

Leise Hook is a second-year student, and her comic The Moonbug Caper shows that she has a solid career in young adult and kids' comics if she wants to go down that path. She tells the story of an anthropomorphic rabbit family in a series of charming vignettes, grounding the story in the essential conflict between a younger girl named Jam and her teen sister Amma. Jam is pretending to be "Supercat," a masked superhero, while Amma is trying to summon magic using old radio equipment. Unbeknownst to them, an alien worm creature named "Secretary Moonbug" pops up and demands their help. The story is a wonderful mix of believing in the fantastic, as the rabbits help Moonbug on his mission, in part because he reveals that the stories in the book Amma loved so much were real. Hook's understanding of sibling dynamics gives the book the tension it needs to drive the rest of the plot, and the resolution of the story points to how their relationship is actually quite close. Hook's character design is irresistible, and her use of negative space, in particular, gives each character plenty of room to breathe in individual panels. She adds just enough grayscale shading to give each page enough weight. The book does seem designed for full color, and the line weights she uses would seem to support this nicely.   

                                            

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.

Thirty One Days Of CCS #18: Leise Hook and Kori Michele Handwerker

Bristlehead, The Surfer, and City Mouse And Country Mouse, by Leise Hook. Bristlehead is an interesting shot across the bow of a comic; it's just four pages but packs an enormous visual punch. Hook is a stylish cartoonist who makes extensive use of spotting blacks in her work. In this comic, we are introduced to a woman putting on makeup. Each page grows progressively stranger, as a "client" comes through who is there to get his hair brushed by hair, until a final transformation that is in turns horrific and mystifying.

The Surfer is Hook's Ed Emberley project, using basic, simple geometric figures to draw her figures. This is the story of an office worker who was drawn out by dolphins to seek the perfect wave, a quest that eventually took her away from her old life forever.  Hook took nicely to this style, while she used a dynamic page layout style that went between emphasizing big moments and pushing action along quickly. Hook simply has great cartooning chops, which working in this style tends to emphasize. Her panel-to-panel transitions are fluid, her characters interact well in space, and her use of gesture is key to understanding the story's emotional beats. City Mouse and Country Mouse is her take on the Aesop's Fables project, and here Hook makes great use of negative space and wonderfully funny animal character designs. Hook exaggerates the individual things that horrify the cousins about their respective urban and rural environments and uses all sorts of subtle visual cues to play that up. It's clear that Hook is a solid storyteller and has a strong visual style, so I'm curious to see just what kind of cartoonist she becomes.

Most of the time, when I'm reviewing work from CCS students, I'm reading material from artists who are just starting to find their voice. Most of them have at least some experience doing comics, but usually not at an extensive basis. When I read Kori Michele Handwerker's comics for this feature, I saw an artist who was in transition, trying to figure out what kind of cartoonist they wanted to be now. Handwerker's been doing popular comics, mostly on the web, since 2011. They've finished two webseries, edited an anthology and generally been extremely prolific. Artists generally go to CCS for two reasons: first, because they want to learn from the ground up how to do comics; and second, to get an MFA so they can teach. I can't speak to Handwerker's motives, but judging by their comics, I see an artist who doesn't quite know what they want to do next, and they're working that out by trying a bunch of different things.

Some of their comics are intensely personal and relate to their gender and sexual identity. Handwerker's Fuck You I'm Trans is a little howl of a mini, talking about how being trans is something that is defined by each individual, not anyone else. Handwerker did this zine for themselves as well as for others--giving everyone permission to be femme and nonbinary, or whatever they need to do. Each page is a little statement of purpose or power, done on a risograph with bright backgrounds. My Pronouns Are They/Them is a personal guide for others to follow regarding how Handwerker wishes to be called, and they note that others may have different approaches.

Most of the other comics here are personal, diary-style comics related to depression, political issues and quotidian observations. Snowpool features some interesting visual ideas, like a strip about visiting a friend of theirs that only features images of the environment around them. The strips about taking care of a loved one and waiting around in hospitals mine humor out of the tedium and stress of being in such environments. The strips about their first day of school at CCS was excellent, nailing the excitement, stress and awkwardness of the event in a funny way. The hourly comics here are interesting because they reveal their problematic sleeping habits, funny anecdotes from lectures, and other well-chosen bits of a day spent.

One thing I've noticed about Handwerker is that their comics have a greater impact when they emphasize visuals over text. The text-heavy pieces, while clearly expressing ideas and emotions that are important to them, don't work as well as their more visually-oriented pieces. Handwerker gets to the heart of their creative crisis in Face The Abyss, when they state "For me, comics is a perpetual identity crisis." That comes through in the way they write about and around mental illness, for example, but fall back on spelling out feelings more than working it out through their art. That changes a bit midway when they work out the process on the page, as their self-caricature morphs from hamster to bear to rabbit, to one wearing glasses, adding a word balloon and then piling on more details before turning to the idea of whether they have ever screamed. All of this was done directly to ink without penciling, and there's a raw expressiveness hear that doesn't necessarily appear in other of their similar strips.

So Much features more political work as well as more hourly comics day strips. This comic feels a little more visually fleshed-out, with the hourly comics in particular forming a more coherent narrative rather than a series of anecdotes. There's a great two-page spread reflecting their hairstyles over the years that shows off their excellent character design and use of gesture. There's a confidence here that was absent on some of the other pages, a confidence matched in "Things That Have Very Nearly Brought Me To Tears This Week". That's a series of three horizontal panels stretching across two pages. One involves their husband in a hospital bed, another is an angry and despairing observation in nature, and another imagines satellites falling in love with each other. Their more explicitly political comics are interesting because they go back to Handwerker's dilemma of just who they are and why they're an artist--if it's a worthwhile activity at all in this horrible world.

Finally, Ice Skaters Kissing features some recent work, including an excerpt from a genre story called "Fire Island", which is about a bar and the aliens who come visit it. In just a few pages, Handwerker establishes character, setting and even conflict in a way that feels natural and entirely connected to character. Their line is sharp and bold and the themes related to xenophobia are laid out in an organic fashion. This is Handwerker truly working in their element, in a way that wasn't evident in their more directly political work. The same is true for the two pages of "Ice Skaters Kissing", a title that sends up the beloved Yuri On Ice series but also allows them to work more in that style, using a lot more grayscale shading. Handwerker is obviously talented, and it will be interesting to see them figure out what they want to do in their thesis year at CCS.