31 Days Of CCS, #6: Melody Calderon

With Arroyo, Melody Calderon does the best kind of horror comic: one that is almost entirely dependent on its visuals to tell its story. This is a story about the Latinx horror urban legend La Llorona, the "Weeping Woman." She was said to have drowned her children in a fit of rage against her husband's infidelity, and now she lurks around bodies of water, looking for new victims. An arroyo is a narrow gully formed by fast-flowing water. In the story, a man drinks from a fountain that is a statue of La Llorona in an almost flip manner. He falls asleep, only to awaken to a flooded house and city (an arroyo) and the long hair of La Llorona telling him to give her his hands to receive her blessing. As one would expect, it does not go well. 

What makes this comic so good is its attention to detail. From the elongated lettering for La Lloronna to the use of paint for spot color to depict her bleeding forehead, Calderon's willingness to lean into the exaggerated aspects of the story gives it power. Her page composition is innovative, especially as she has a repeating motif of hands being plunged into water. The outstretched hands initially seem to be praying hands, and La Llorona's similarity to the Virgin Mary in the story is not lost on me. There is no mercy to be had here, as her "affections" are arbitrary and merciless. Calderon's got it all working here, and this makes me want to see much more. 

45 Days Of CCS, #40: Hole

It's a tremendous advantage to be a CCS student (or local alum) and have access to their print lab. That allows one the chance to do, for example, an anthology with multiple cut-outs. That's the case with Hole, a ridiculously elaborate anthology that reminds me of the early days of CCS. It's a bit like the old Four Square anthology that would have four artists and a theme or something you'd find on the I Know Joe Kimpel web storefront. 

This anthology features five artists and begins with a series of pages, each with a hole cut in the center concentrically. Holes cut somewhere on the page feature prominently as a formal device in each story, but all for different reasons. In Ben Adkins' "Down In The Hole," the protagonist gets away from the world by digging a hole and living in it. Wondering if he made the right decision, he looks up to the sky from his hole, and sees blue sky in a story that was otherwise black & white. It's a dramatic way for the character to make a major change in how he wants to live his life by rejecting isolation.

Ruby Arnone's "Alligator Pit" is about a delivery person whose job is to throw meat down to gators in a pit in what seems to be a zoo. They then dream about that same pit, but this time the hole expands to see the gators devouring not meat, but people--presumably, the zoo keepers. It's a punchy story that's effective because of the expressive use of colored pencils.

Kate Fairchild's "The Ever-Hole" uses cut-outs more consistently than any other story, and it's all in service to an actual "metaphysical hole" called the Ever-Hole that one character is trying to fill. It's another story about isolation, this time concluding with a hug that represents a lateral solution to filling the hole. Nothing could fill the hole, at least not alone, so the solution was to stop trying and connect. Fairchild's linework is simple but effective, working well with the big formal decision of cutting so much out of each page with the hole.

The most visually ambitious story was Melody Calderon's "Pory." It is quite literally about bubbles: living in a bubble, the bubbles that proliferate on our phones that demand our attention, the bubbles that fog our brains when we're drunk. Calderon takes what is a fairly simple idea and makes it sing with her extensive use of color and the multiple circular cut-outs on so many of the pages. The final story, "Fullness," is an "adapted Sanskrit verse from the Ishavasya Upanishad." Compared to the other stories, this is a very simply designed story that is no less successful for its simplicity, as it gets across its concept of fullness--a concept that cannot be reduced or diminished. The artist, Keena, uses black and white shapes that transform with a single cutout. The anthology as a whole is successful because there's enough variety in terms of formal approaches and storytelling to prevent the kind of stale repetition that sometimes happens in these kinds of anthologies.