31 Days Of CCS #17: Melanie Gillman

Melanie Gillman's As The Crow Flies has piled up the awards, in part because their depiction of queer youth in a religious setting at a camp felt so painfully real. Gillman has a lot of equipment in their artistic toolbox, and they use every one for good effect. First, Gillman focuses on character detail. Who they are, what they like, if they're shy or outgoing, their racial identities, social background, etc. While Gillman naturally features queer characters who go through experiences identifiable to their readers, it's those details that truly bring them to life. Second, whatever setting Gillman happens to choose for their stories, they clearly research it fastidiously. The religious camp in As The Crow Flies felt so very lived in, whether that was from personal experience or simply asking the right people the right questions. In their new book, Stage Dreams, Gillman shares their research into the Civil War, its impact on the western US, and stories of queer and trans people at the time. Third, Gillman's painstaking use of colored pencils gives them total mastery of mood and tone in their stories. In a book with a lot of sweeping desert vistas, colored pencils had the desired effect of overwhelming, sheer beauty.

Aside from all that, Gillman's just a crack storyteller with a solid use of dialogue. In a shorter book like Stage Dreams, things zip along quickly without sacrificing character development. The story is set in the New Mexico territory in 1861 as the Confederacy is making advances in their effort to take the California territory and its resources. A bandit known as the Ghost Hawk is terrorizing stagecoaches, while a young trans woman named Grace is fleeing conscription into the rebel army. In a series of swift moves, The Ghost Hawk (aka Flor) robs a stagecoach and kidnaps Grace. When it becomes clear that Grace is trans and has no money, a scheme is hatched to crash a Confederate party and to steal some plans. Along the way, there are clothes to be altered as part of the plan (leading to a fascinating scene in the shop of a sympathetic tailor) and a budding romance between Flor and Grace.

The climactic party loops a character introduced earlier into the plot as a catalyst for the key action scenes. As Gillman notes in their endnotes, women made great spies in the Civil War because most men didn't take their presence seriously. The way Gillman uses and then subverts gender assumptions cleverly moves the plot along at key moments, and the romantic denouement feels well-earned. The result is a fun genre mash-up that never forgets the oppression and erasure faced by queer people of this era. It's a celebration of trans people in particular and the ways in which they found and find ways to survive and thrive. The fine details of Gillman's research only make the story richer and more authentic. The story isn't as profound or personal as As The Crow Flies, but it isn't meant to be. Stage Dreams is a light, breezy bit of historical fiction whose underlying themes and realities give it poignancy.

Thirty Days of CCS #25: Melanie Gillman

Melanie Gillman (who uses they/them pronouns) has been at their expansive webseries As The Crow Flies for well over three years, and the first print volume has been published by Iron Circus Comics. I can’t think of a more complementary fit between artist and publisher, especially since the popularity of the webcomic made its kickstarter campaign (a staple of Spike Trotman’s company for each book they publish—and not a single campaign has come up short) an easy sell.

This is a slowly-paced, contemplative book that emphasizes (despite everything else going on emotionally and spiritually) the relationship between humans and nature. In particular, its focus is on being present and experiencing nature aesthetically, taking in the beauty of each moment and connecting one’s own life force to that of life around you. Gillman astoundingly uses colored pencils for every panel and page, and this allows them total control over every image while maintaining a soft, human touch. Just as Gillman emphasizes in the story how important it is to be able to continually perceive just how beautiful nature is, so it is also the case that the reader is reminded what a treasure it is to look at each beautiful page.

Their character design is simple but extremely distinctive, especially with regard to the ways they draw so many kinds of differently shaped faces and is able to render them consistently, page after page. That simplicity makes the facial expressions of their characters their laboratory for expressing emotion and providing a specific path for character interaction. Body language and gesture are part of this, but the reader must follow the character’s expression in relation to each other to truly follow the action.

Something that is not noted in this book is that it’s the first volume in a series. This is important, because otherwise the reader would be baffled by the ending. It’s a minor point, but most book series make it a point to slap “Volume I of a thousand…” on the front cover, inside the front cover, at the end of the book, etc. And while those books try to tell something of a complete story in a single volume, this first offering from Gillman is most certainly not that, even if there is a solid break point on page 272.

The story follows Charlie, a queer, thirteen-year-old African-American girl, being dropped off at a wilderness adventure Christian camp. She has immediate and continuous doubts about being there, especially when she walks in and realizes that every other girl there is white. Throughout the course of the book, she gets to know a few of her fellow campers, is taken aback by some insensitive comments by both the counselor and other girls, and by the end of the book plans some subversive action with her new friend and ally Sydney, a trans girl. The trail they’re taking follows that of a (fictional) woman named Beatrice Tillson in 1894, who led a revolt of sorts against the men in the town by going out on a sabbatical with all of its women.

The plot is simple. The ideas that Gillman explores are difficult and complex. It would have been shooting fish in a barrel for Gillman to have Charlie experience something like a fundamentalist/evangelical assault, filled with characters of faith who are portrayed as clichés and hypocrites. Instead, Gillman weaves an exploration and critique of feminism that is not intersectional along with a personal and meditative examination of religion and spirituality--all told by well-meaning but flawed individuals. As it turns out, not all of the women were allowed to go on this journey in the 19^th century; there were servants of color who were told to stay behind to take care of the children. Bea makes an off-handed joke when Charlie asks her for a tampon where she’s relieved that Charlie didn’t tell her that she was a demon-worshiper or really a man, implying that as a Christian and feminist, Bea would tend toward the trans-exclusionary side of things.

The thing that Charlie zeroed in on was Bea talking about the sacred ritual at the end of the journey, a “purification” that involved a “whitening of the soul”. When Charlie eventually mentioned this to Bea’s daughter Penny, the latter was horrified by the use of this metaphor. It spoke to how just as the book was about Charlie finding her physical footing on the trail, so too was she finding her footing, her voice and confidence in interacting with others in direct ways. Charlie talked to God throughout her trek, wondering if she should really be there and starting to doubt her faith altogether. She and Charlie devise a pact to find a way to disrupt that final ceremony and expose its hypocrisies. Gillman also starts to explore some of the other characters, like mean girl Adelaide, who confesses to being conscious of her meanness and how she’s trying to be better, especially with regard to Therese, who obviously adores her.

Gillman hits on the essential idea that right and wrong are frequently easy to differentiate and are only complicated by people themselves, who are contradictory and complex and often irrational. They note that there are layers of belief systems with regard to race, class, gender, sexual identity, sexuality, etc that all have a place in how these belief systems play out, and that by ignoring or minimizing any of these component parts, any competing system that strives for fairness is incomplete. Every character in the book that gets extended time feels real because Gillman strives to tell their stories from their point of view, even if that narrative excludes others. Gillman doesn’t need cheap conflict or obstacles to tell a compelling story; indeed, such tricks would only detract from the conflict that’s on the intellectual, emotional and spiritual level in this book.

Thirty-One Days of CCS #28: The Other Side

CCS alum Melanie Gillman noted in the introduction to The Other Side, the anthology they co-edited (with Kori Michele Handwerker), that as a young queer person, they were drawn to paranormal romance fiction. That's because most other kinds of fiction were so heteronormative, they felt that paranormal romance at least opened up the possibility of something different, something outside the norm. In tribute to that idea, and in the spirit of queer fiction that doesn't inevitably wind up in tragedy, there's a pleasant warmth that suffuses the book. In general, I found that the overall quality of the anthology was especially solid for a self-published effort, and a quick inquiry into the book's Kickstarter status revealed that the editors raised enough money to give everyone a $60 page rate. Remarkable that when you pay an artist for a passion project, they have the time and energy to put their best foot forward.

The pitfall of a themed anthology is the possibility of too many similar kinds of stories. Gillman & Handwerker gave their contributors a theme tight enough so that they made sense sequentially but loose enough to let them interpret "paranormal" in any number of ways. Fyodor Pavlov's "The Black Dog" is straight-up folklore-style fantasy, only it turns the fear of the black dog as a harbinger for death on its ear and restores the faithful-dog idea, only in lycanthropic form. Like most of the stories in the book, it was a story where the use of grayscaling was entirely unobtrusive. There are also several paranormal "meet cute" stories, like Sfe' R. Monster's "En-bae & Boo", which is about the romance between a cryptozoographer and a ghost that started on the internet. There did seem to be two distinct styles of visual approaches in the anthology: dense and immersive or cute and clear.

There were haunted-object stories ("Emma-FZR 400 RRSP" by Mary Verhoeven and "Appliance" by Handwerker), which wound up doubling as sort of meet-cute stories. The latter was especially clever, because there was a genuine mystery behind it and the end was one of the few stories where things got more complex instead of all tied up neatly. There were haunted house/apartment/lighthouse stories ("Bare Bones" by Britt Sabo, "Yes No Maybe" by Kate Leth & Katie O'Neill and "Pulpit Point" by Amelia Onorato), of which Onorato's story was the best. The other two were cute but also extremely telegraphed from beginning to end; they were less stories than character impressions. Onorato's story had a genuine surprise twist and an element of discomfort to it on behalf of the poltergeist who can't leave the sea behind that made its ending far more poignant than most in the book. There were stories where characters try to get in touch with loved ones beyond the grave, like the quiet "Rabbit Stew" by CB Webb, the overly treacly "Till Death" by Gisele Jobateh and the hilarious "Ouija Call Center" by Mari Costa. The latter story is conceptually clever (a Ouija doll acting as a sort of supernatural operator) and emotionally satisfying in an unexpected way, as the ex-boyfriend the protagonist is trying to contact is a jerk and the operator tries to ameliorate that.

Another common trope was a sort of supernatural debt. F. Lee & Rainy's "Halo" was interesting for the striking image of an angelic spirit who was visible to a preacher, though the character work was a bit wobbly at times. Unsurprisingly in a story where the writer and artist split duties, it was overly talky. The writer-artist team of Laurel Varian and Ezra Rose got that balance better with "Third Circle Pizza", where a spirit was bound to a family-owned pizza parlor until a love interest intervened. The romance in this story felt real because the characters were so well-developed, and Varian even threw in a twist or two down the stretch. Unfortunately, "Fifty Years" by Sarah Winifred Searle and Hannah Krieger as well as "Shadow's Bae" by Bitmap Prager and Gillman both succumbed to that sense of being overwritten despite attractive art, especially on the part of Gillman. The points that Prager was trying to make in an otherwise cute story were hammered home in a way that was unnecessary, given Gillman's skill. The vampire plot in the first story felt played out and predictable.The wild west ghost story "Tierra Verde" had an intriguing premise but the end felt off, tonally. On the other hand, the hypnosis/telepathy theme of Aatmaja Pandya's "Airspace" felt emotionally raw and realistic, especially as a metaphor for how difficult it is for a person to express their true feelings and the existential problem of never being able to truly know what another person is feeling.

Three of the best stories in the anthology dealt with a character's relationship with a higher power. Natasha Donovan's "Dive" is beautifully drawn in an immersive style, with all sorts of whorls and intense line patterns. It's about a woman and her granddaughter walking on the shore, passing by an abandoned village. When the grandmother reveals that she used to live there, the granddaughter wants to know the story. In a clever move, the grandmother knits while she talks, literally spinning a narrative yarn in all respects. The story involves a mysterious woman showing up to help her, a game of chance against a supernatural being in an underwater village, and a tearful goodbye. The story ends in classic "return to me" style as the grandmother descends into the ocean. The dialogue is sharply written and there's actually a compelling plot and mystery in this story that's absent in a number of the other, breezier stories in the book. Kou Chen's "Beneath My Breath Above My Gaze" is a beautifully designed strip about a young man who nearly falls off a bridge on a mountain, only to be saved by the mountain's god. The god falls in love with him and the man is drawn back to the mountain for reasons he can't understand until his death as an old man. It's a subtle, restrained bit of storytelling that doesn't worry much about background information and instead focuses on emotion.

Along the same lines, and certainly the best piece in the book, is Bishakh Som's "Threnody". An old woman in India finds herself increasingly isolated and out of step with the modern world and says a prayer to the goddess Kali asking if there was a place for her in the world. She decides to retreat to a shrine to Kali, where she encounters a loquacious young woman who gives her all sorts of advice about the proper way to worship until the old woman finally snaps and yells at her. In a nifty bit of transformation, it's revealed (as one expected), that the young woman was actually Kali, who kisses her devotee and takes her to the next world. It's a sensitive, restrained and poetic story by Som, whose pacing, design and dialogue are all in perfect harmony and lead to the ending that makes the most sense, even if there's a sadness to it. Even the least successful stories in the anthology were still fun to look at, and Gillman & Handwerker did a fine job in sequencing the stories in a way that created the greatest amount of story-to-story variety.

Thirty Days of CCS, Day 4: Penina Gal and Melanie Gillman

Non Binary, by Melanie Gillman. This comic is a sort of conceptual companion piece to Joey Alison Sayers' classic Just So You Know. That comic was about her transition into becoming a trans woman, and both amusingly and heart-renderingly got across the highs and lows of the experience. With a striking fold-out cover and a eye-catching use of purple and orange, Gillman tells their tale of coming out as non-binary; that is, identifying as neither male nor female. Gillman, in a series of four-panel strips, talks about the fears and self-critiques that go along with being non-binary, but they also share how ultimately freeing it is. From the first image of being on a first date and suddenly blurting out a stream of gender-related anxiety ("There wasn't a 2nd date") to negotiating with their phone after texting their old friend about using "they" pronouns instead of "she" from now on, Gillman expertly laces humor into the terror of being judged, being shunned, of feeling guilty for asking others to change how they addressed them. Being open to some but being closeted at work is discussed, as is the constant doubt and self-judgments that spring from seeing comments from assholes on the internet. Gillman's rejection of binary, linear graphing to describe gender is also a fascinating corrective, as they note that it's just not that simple. The comic itself is as much a corrective as it is a series of autobio confessions, because Gillman notes that there just isn't that much information out there about non-binary genders and how they relate to issues like feminism, being queer, and misogyny. The expressive and simple rendering style is given shape by the soft shades, adding an additional layer of intimacy and warmth for the reader.

Limp Wrist, by Scout Wolfcave & Penina Gal. Written by Wolfcave, she recounts her childhood before she transitioned into becoming a trans woman. It's a harrowing, brutal story, one where young Scout (here cleverly anthropomorphised by Gal into being an actual young wolf) is told in no uncertain terms by every authority figure in her life that if she didn't conform to the standard behaviors expected of men, they'd be abused, yelled at, disowned or (eventually) abandoned. The latter is precisely what happened to her, at the age of thirteen. Gal illustrates each painful anecdote using an open-page style, emphasizing isolation and darkness with a scratchy use of colored pencils throughout. The use of black is especially threatening here, but even on pages without it, Gal creates scenarios where image is poetically integrated with prose in order to convey the emotional impact of each incident. Wolfcave's prose is extremely matter of fact, leaving it up to Gal to bring out the anger, sadness and terror that Wolfcave continues to feel. The last pages depict Wolfcave as she is now, as an adult trans woman, but one who still feels the echoes of past abuse and is angry because she feels that she's still not been able to reclaim all of her lost feminimity. This collaboration is bracing and powerful.

Thirty Days of CCS #16: Melanie Gillman, Allie Kleber

Melanie Gillman's webcomic and subsequent minis As The Crow Flies are beautifully rendered stories about the acute and intense feeling of otherness.The protagonist, Charlie, is a queer African-American teen at a summer camp involving a hike to a spot that's special and even sacred to a pioneering group of women. Still, in a series of lush, beautiful and haunting images, Charlie feels like an outsider because of her race and sexual identity, as well as her religion. She is spiritual but not necessarily in a typically christian sense, and her conversations with god about whether or not she should be there are telling. Gillman gets at the heart of a problem related to any group or activity related to empowerment: just because a group of people are enlightened with regard to gender and feminism doesn't mean that they're sensitive or aware of issues related to race or sexual identity. Early on, after Charlie reluctantly agrees to stay in the all-white camp after initially wanting to go home with her parents, her internal alarms go off when she hears language that is inadvertently racist (the phrase "whitening our souls") and when someone makes a comment about something being gay. Of course, someone who is othered has essentially two options: to speak up early and often and risk being labeled a problem, or to be silent and feel unable to voice their opinions about anything. In what is shaping up to be a long storyline, these first two issues establish that inner conflict and Charlie's sense of being entirely alone with girls who don't relate to her and have no interest in trying to understand her. Gillman's use of color is absolutely crucial in the story, as the beauty of the natural environment is key to Charlie's feeling of being connected to the earth and nature but disconnected from other girls. Her character design is simple, direct and expressive, with Charlie herself very carefully crafted. I'm pretty sure Gillman is using colored pencils here, which gives each page a certain gritty texture with regard to color; that texture, though not naturalistic, nonetheless makes each image feel more real than a slicker color approach would have yielded. This will make a great-looking book once the story is complete, and I'm quite curious to see what kind of journey Charlie winds up having.

Allie Kleber is another artist interested in exploring themes related to gender identity and queer issues. However, she prefers to explore them by way of genre ideas. In Heartburn #0, Kleber takes the reader through a series of high-concept introductions, some of which are more engaging than others. In "Goodness Knows", a trouble-making angel is sent down to earth to act as a background guardian angel for someone. Kleber's angel Lucille is a rock 'n roll angel who sticks out as a result of her rebellious attitude. It's an amusing idea, even if it's entirely predictable so far. Much better are "The Swamp Bride" and "AI Love U", both of which play around with fantasy romance tropes and sci-fi/Frankenstein ideas. The former story finds a female adventurer finding that a dread swamp monster is not only misunderstood, but was taken advantage of by one of her "victims".  In the latter story, a romance between a professor and her student is mediated by their robot creation, one imbued with the personality of the student. Kleber's character design is her best asset as a cartoonist, especially in terms of the way she uses a diverse array of races and ages for her protagonists.

Her more recent story, Asylum, takes some of the best elements of her earlier stories and mashes them up. It's a science-fiction story in the sense that the protagonist is apparently being thrust against her will into a fantasy world. It's a fantasy story in the sense that this world is one in which the characters are living in some kind of retro society built on scavenging and barter. Reality is "soft" here, though, as the protagonist, Ash, sees things that defy her senses (like birds flying through a wall). In this world she's being programmed to experience, she can sense the glitches and knows that something isn't quite right, even as all of the characters within are so strongly realized. Interestingly, it's once again a society dominated by women, which is a running theme throughout Kleber's comics. It's rarely hammered home in an obvious manner; rather, Kleber resets the gender status quo and assumptions without trying to draw attention to it. It's a clever and subversive tact to take, embodying the idea that "the personal is political".

Finally, her comic Tiny Dynamos: Demos is about an all-female punk band, how it got its current lead singer, and life on the road. This one feels a bit rushed and leans more on rock 'n roll cliches, because the reader doesn't have an opportunity to really get to know these characters as characters. One senses that she needs many more pages to get to know these characters herself, as she's just warming up.