31 Days Of CCS, #14: Lillie J. Harris and Coco Fox

Coco Fox is the rare cartoonist whose non-cartooning activities I'll mention in a review, because her upbeat authorial persona is 100% accurate in real life as well. As a host of various follies in White River Junction as well as a workshop leader (including one for me at SPX), she truly is a walking ray of sunshine. Beneath that enthusiasm, however, is a sharp intellect carefully guiding a reader, student, or audience member in interesting and intentional ways. Fox also understands how the decorative aspects of art add value and delight in projects with rock-solid foundations.

At SPX, she sold "Little Ghouls Fortune Telling Cards," a sort of all-ages card deck based on Tarot principles. Accompanied by a minicomic that gives the interpretations of each card (the Mouse, the Rockstar, the Snail, the Ghost, the Pencil, the Detective, etc.), Fox cleverly devised an uplifting and affirming series of creative prompts. It recognizes the negative aspect of each creative urge (the Detective out of balance is bored) and how to get back into balance (for the Detective, it's "crack open a book, baby!"). Fox also sold a mini fitting into this gently spooky theme called "Ghost Jokes," which features her delightfully cute and expressive line and some deliberately groan-inducing punchlines. It's all packaged in a sheer bag decorated with suns and moons, tied off with a ribbon. The whole thing is a delightful package aimed at pre-teens, but it's fun to look at for any audience--like the best lit aimed at kids. Fox's cartooning seems highly intuitive; having followed her career, she's wisely focused on gesture and expression instead of the drawings themselves. As a result, she's developed an irresistible style that pares down lines to their essence while retaining an idiosyncratic quality that makes the final results cute without being cloying.

Wilderness, by Lillie J. Harris. This story has had a couple of different iterations, but it's always revolved around a young man named Roscoe (also known as Jemiah), who sees things a little differently. His second sight was more prominently featured in the prologue comic for this story; this version leaves some of the supernatural elements behind in favor focusing on its human elements. In particular, it centers around Roscoe, who is traumatized from a car accident that cost him his arm; Beau, a prizefighter with a secret, and his sister Ronny, a drifter who is on the run. 

Roscoe and Beau strike up an unlikely friendship, as Roscoe is a painter and Beau likes to whittle. Beau is out in the woods when Roscoe finds him and recognizes that his new friend is out looking for roots and herbs to help him with sleep. These are Roscoe's "tinctures," and they both recognize that they have ways of expressing themselves that are private and personal. The big reveal is that both Beau and Ronny are werewolves, and she joins her brother for the full moon and their transformation. At its heart, this is a story about generational trauma. When Beau and Ronny take in a little kid werewolf who has obviously been mistreated by her mother, it triggers a lot of old feelings for both. As Beau has tried to figure out what to say to his mother, Ronny has avoided dealing with her presence in her life, until she's forced to confront it when they meet the kid. Roscoe has his own issues with her preacher father who tries to downplay his memories and trauma, and that's why Roscoe and Beau are kindred souls. Harris' nightmarish splashes of color, silent pages of traumatic memories, and visceral violence all coalesce to tell a story of family trying to survive their pasts and making unlikely new connections. It uses the tropes of horror in clever ways that only enhance the psychological aspects of the story. It also doesn't feel quite finished; or rather, that a sequel seems to be needed to explore these stories a bit further.

31 Days Of CCS, #7: Lillie J. Harris

Wilderness: Prologue is the first entry in what promises to be a longer horror story by Lillie J. Harris. The story follows Jemiah, a teen whose father is a preacher, and his increasing crossover into another realm of awareness. That other realm includes two women who have just adopted a pair of feral boys they dubbed Enoch and Beau. It's the rituals of that latter world and how it interacts with Jemiah's world that form the crux of the mystery. What's clear is that the rift between worlds is a sinister one, and the mysterious world is not a friendly one. 

Harris uses a huge visual bag of tricks to create tension and suspense. Jemiah's character design is so effective because he's so harmless-looking, his face taken up by a huge pair of glasses. Enoch and Beau are all wavy lines, with their hair looking not unlike matted fur, reinforcing their feral nature. The comic is in black and white, but the creepy green spot colors indicate that rift between worlds in a direct manner. The creepiest part of the comic is when the women take the boys out to the forest for a ritual of some kind, one with three rules: walk till you don't see the wall; if you see anyone, then hide; and meet back in the forest, but only in the morning." 

There are no indications as to why they are out there or what purpose it serves, which only makes it more disturbing. When Jemiah later sees something monstrous behind a dead deer on the road, he starts to understand that something deeply unsettling is happening. Harris' use of greyscale shading contributes to the mood of the comic, and they did a lot of narrative heavy lifting to draw in the reader. In particular, I'm interested in seeing how Harris' narrative thus far involves a lot of character types not usually seen in this kind of story, and I'm curious to see how the implications of that plays out. 

31 Days Of CCS #8: Cuyler Keating, April Malig, Lillie J. Harris

Lillie J. Harris is a first-year CCS student, and their comics to date reveal an interest in working with dense blacks and shadows in particular. Jawbreaker is a short comic that uses what appears to be the image of a roughly-drawn moon in a night sky, until it sinks and the sky and it's revealed that it's a jawbreaker--a kind of chewing gum. The person getting it is horrified when it comes out, it's warm, and it has a face. This is just a little horror warmup of a comic, but it establishes how Harris likes to use light/dark contrasts in order to establish mood. Gemini is another more explicitly horror comic about a boy with an identical twin named Elijah who wore a mask--and his brother was warned never to look at his face. In a manner similar to Nate Powell and Steve Bissette, Harris uses a dense, scribbly line that soaks up light on the page. The visuals heighten tension in such a way that just some hints at Elijah's true form are all that's necessary to reveal the final fate of the narrator.

Harris' Aesop's fable assignment is The Eagle And The Beetle, which they used to counterpoint against the story of the Kennedy family and its many tragedies. Just as the Eagle ignored the Beetle's efforts to protect a hare, so too did Joe Kennedy lobotomize and institutionalize his eldest daughter Rosemary, afraid that her behavior would hurt "his family's political career". Just as the Beetle got revenge by pushing out the Eagle's eggs from its nest, so too did the other Kennedy children suffer all sorts of tragedies. Harris keeps it simple and naturalistic here, relying more on grayscale than shadow. Finally, Maggie Doll is a beautifully-drawn comic with heavy atmosphere about a young woman finding her childhood doll in the attic. All of the memories, good and bad, come rushing back at her, but it's ultimately a positive experience as she reconnects with those memories and her love of the doll. Once again, Harris' use of pacing is sharp and tense, and their more naturalistic figure work is top-notch.

April Malig has mostly been making interesting Risograph zines with commentary on photographs for the last few years, and Near Constant Background Noise continues that trend. It's in many ways a summation of this period, as it directly addresses the frequently nihilistic quality of her musings. She asks the pertinent question if it's a distraction to search for happiness, or if there's a "possibility of a possibility" of hope. The bright, almost garish colors indeed provide both a distraction and an attraction on their own; they are pleasing in and of themselves. Malig's first comic in a few years, Rotten Roses, actually carries on this theme as it's about believing in close friendships. Mixing internet imagery with real-life interactions, Malig knowingly manipulates appearance and reality as part of a sense of personal performance. There's a group of friends living in a house who bond over a particular manga that spawned several adaptations, and their obsession was the lingua franca of their relationships. It was a way of highlighting and protecting the friendships from the ennui and despair of the outside world. Malig's character design is killer and the impact of her use of soft pastels gives the whole experience a gentle touch.

Cuyler Keating's The Attempt is a collection of short, experimental comics. "Jellyfish" goes all-out in presenting the reader with a dizzying array of images and visual approaches. On the first page, there are multiple colors in different panels and a lack of a traditional grid. The second page is a black-and-white splash page, with gray tones giving the pool in the water a double-exposure effect. The next two pages maintain that same shadowy tone, only the water in the pool has been replaced by jellyfish. It's a brief nightmare of a comic. An exquisitely-drawn silent story sees a skeleton in armor coming back from the Crusades, only the entire town consists of skeletons in regular clothes. The naturalism of the story is what brings that feel of death so close to the reader, a death that is only vaguely perceived. "Spaces" is a nice bit of comics-as-poetry, using the rhythm of a four-panel grid to define the physical and emotional spaces between her and her partner on a road trip. Keating's use of color is much sharper and more purposeful here than in her first story. "Full Formed" is about her wish to have been born fully-formed like in mythology, and once again Keating's deft touch brings famous images to life in an animated fashion. There's no stiffness in her line, as subtle soft tones accent her drawings without making them too fuzzy. The open-page layout is extremely clever, with the negative space working to push time forward on the last page in particular, as Keating comes to term with growth.