31 Days Of CCS, #9: Robyn Smith and The Mesozine #2

Ding Dong, by Robyn Smith. Noted as a "sketchbook zine," this mini shows off some of the things that Smith does best. Her character design, her understanding of how to draw clothing, her incredible detail with regard to hair are all on display, to be sure. Smith could ditch comics tomorrow and have a successful career as an illustrator, because her style is so lush and attractive. However, Smith never abandons what also makes her a great cartoonist, which is her understanding of gesture, expression, and the relationship between bodies in space. That's true in even the roughest pencils for some of her strips; Smith is especially adept at using a head tilt to convey meaning and affection. There are other drawings that give hints at untapped aspects of her talents, like movement and physical struggle, but Smith is best at drawing highly stylized figures in various states of repose talking to each other. While I've enjoyed Smith's collaborations with other writers, I'm eager to see her write her own material down the line. 

The Mesozine, Issue 2, edited by Denis St. John. St. John loves drawing monsters and dinosaurs, and this zine is a gathering place for his friends to also draw dinosaurs. St. John was in the second graduating class of CCS, and there are a lot of older grads in this mini. It also includes fellow co-workers in the Schulz Studio. the highlights of the mini include a serial from Morgan Pielli (whose bizarre sci-fi comics are greatly missed), drawing a dinosaur combat from three different species, and a thoughtful strip from Ross Wood Studlar (a forest ranger and cartoonist) discussing how the Oviraptor got a bad reputation as an egg thief. There's a wonderful image from Donna Almendrala-Joel and a slightly cartoony story from St. John that adds a touch of Carl Barks cuteness while still maintaining Carl Barks action and movement. This is the story of more dinosaur fights, this time with a mother trying to protect her children from predators. Bryan Stone, another early CCS grad, contributes some pin-ups, as does the legendary Steve Bissette, who was a faculty member at CCS for many years. Non-CCS alum Alena Carnes has a memorable but brief story about being on a dig open to the public, and what it meant for her. Overall, there's something loving and fun about doing this kind of drawing that's at once highly technical in its illustration style but also freeing in terms of the sheer nature of the visceral quality of these animals. Those who love dinosaurs will get a kick out of this zine. 

Minicomics: Morgan Pielli, Andy Warner, Sean Collins/Colleen Frakes

This minicomics round-up focuses on the end of the world, paranoia and dread.

The Creeping Things, by Andy Warner. Warner is a talented young cartoonist who's especially adept at drawing children and their concerns. This story is about two young brothers after they've moved to a new town. The older brother is consumed by his own fantasy life in the face of being unable to cope with the world shoves his way. The younger brother is far more happy-go-lucky but worships his brother, which means that he's swept up in that fantasy world as well. This comic is heavy on atmosphere and the older brother's constant (and frequently justified) feeling of dread; he channels events such as being beaten up on the playground into a monster tracking him and his brother, with only a "fortress" they have built protecting them. That fortress, a pile of rocks they build out in the forest near their house, proves to be crucial in the story's climax. The older brother constantly tells his younger brother to "be brave", despite (or because of, really) his own cowardice. That cowardice leads to the tragic events at the end of the book, which finally lead the older brother to cry for help. Whether or not help actually comes is beside the point of the story, because this is about the danger of using others to mediate your own fears.

Indestructible Universe Quarterly #9, by Morgan Pielli. This is another compelling issue of Pielli's one-man horror anthology, one that was recently collected in a volume that reprints the first nine issues of the series. Pielli has a strong sense of design and an understanding of how those choices affect mood. "Benson, Arizona" is a multi-media project of sorts, taking the lyrics of a song and expanding them into a story about an astronaut allowed only one visit with his earthbound lover, now old and gray after he first left on his trip. While the actual lyrics are on the mawkish side, Pielli counters that with sober, striking images (like his lover's picture on a pack of cigarettes) and blunt character design (like thick, rectangular eyebrows and a bushy beard). "City of Crowns" is fascinating in its mythology regarding royalty and the redistribution of wealth, though it suffers a bit from cramped imagery. I would have liked to have seen the simple design of the first story or else a bigger format. "Quantum" and "Dreams of Suicide" are thematically related and raw stories. The latter may be a personal anecdote where someone wakes up relieved that their mother's suicide was real, that she hadn't faked her death and put him in a position where he'd have to deal with her death all over again. It's a brutal, grim and absolutely honest expression of feeling. The former story is about a provocateur who murders quantum versions of himself but nudging them toward suicide, a sick pastime that comes with the nagging feeling that his "superior" will one day order him to do the same. Pielli still has some rough edges to take off his visual approach, but there's no question that he's a compelling storyteller.

Here At The End Of All Things, by Sean T Collins and Colleen Frakes. This is a collaboration between one of my fellow critics at tcj.com and a favorite CCS cartoonist in Frakes. As a writer, Collins likes to stretch out genre concerns with regard to horror and examine particular angles. This story is about the apocalypse in the form of deadly vegetation that's creeping all around the world, told through the eyes of a man just trying to get home to his love. The tone is reminiscent of a Zak Sally comic, with single panel images narrated by big block text at the bottom (sort of like some stories from Sally's Recidivist). Frakes' brush is all about big, bold strokes and thick black lines with cartoony figures, and it was interesting to see her work in such a directly visceral style. There's usually more restraint in her stories, but Collins needed her to work more broadly and it worked. Collins offers the reader a sliver of hope at the end, but it's implied that it's only a sliver. I'd be interested in seeing this duo work together again.

Indestructible Universe Quarterly #6 & #7

Morgan Pielli specializes in elegantly designed minicomics that feature unusual genre stories. Indestructible Universe Quarterly continues to be his grab-bag for anthology work, webcomics and other ephemera. Issues #6 and #7 finish up the first chapter of the forest-horror story "Driftwood", a classic nature vs man story that features logs attacking people and turning them into leaves. There's something wonderfully absurd about the image of someone being reduced to a pile of leaves surrounded by clothes. Along the way, Pielli interjects a myth about a cruel and clever bird and how the forest rose up against it, with the dawning realization that the bird was a stand-in for man. The final reveal of who is likely responsible for the forest uprising here is clever and surprising while being instantly recognizable. Along the way, I like the way Pielli explores horror-movie tropes. There's a touch of the grotesque in his character design, aided by his thick brush work.


The rest of the contents of #6 mostly consisted of material I had seen earlier, including two stories from his "Lightsmith" characters: werewolves and other shape changers engaging in training and troubleshooting of some sort. The ideas here are solid but the execution is sloppy, both in terms of the art (I had trouble making out some of the action on some of the pages) and overall execution (sloppy lettering and a significant number of spelling errors). Both stories simply feel rushed, as though Pielli was trying to beat a deadline for inclusion in the anthologies these stories first appeared in. The other story in the issue, "The God Snare", dips into the Jack Kirby playbook for the design of the giant, armored god figures he introduces. The contrast between these hulking, mysterious figures and the understated myth-telling of the narrative makes it all the more effective.


Issue #7 is perhaps the strongest of the whole series. With three four-page stories and a ten-page story, Pielli keeps his stories brief and crisp, giving us premise and conclusion for these EC comics-flavored stories of malice and horror. "Gold, Silver, Death" starts as a work procedural and ends with an intended victim of the a crime being one step ahead of the person who was going to harm him. "Picker" is about the process of becoming an archetype: the sort of person you see on a subway and think of in a particular way. In this case, perception is reality, as becoming an archetype strips one of individual thought and action. "Living Room" was a touch on the melodramatic side, beginning with the classic set-up of a man in a dark room who doesn't know which way to go and revealing he's a prisoner of a particularly inspired trap. It's less a story than a premise spelled out with some character details added on the back end.


Finally, "The Twisting Kiss" is probably the best story I've read from Pielli. It's a bit of body horror that begins with an interesting premise: a venereal disease much like herpes that twists one's lips into a number. No one knows how or why it started or what it means, until the climax of the story, which involves a grotesque transformation that turns intimacy into something altogether else. The final scene, where the protagonist's friend sees him jump into the ocean, is a chilling one, especially when he is reminded of a potential romantic hook-up awaiting him. The story is a clever way to blow up the terror of sexually transmitted diseases and fear of intimacy to an absurd but still horrifying extreme, recalling the work of Charles Burns a bit. There's a simplicity and groundedness in the way he portrays the friendship of the lead characters that adds a bit of emotional weight to the proceedings as well. Pielli could successfully fill up a book that leaned more toward the psychological and emotional aspects of horror; it's what he's best at right now.

Another Side of CCS

Here's another look at work from Center For Cartoon Studies (CCS) students new and old. Included are works by Sam Gaskin, Kubby, Jeff Lok, G.P. Bonesteel, Morgan Pielli, and Joshua Rosen.


OPHESTIOS, 1890 by Joshua Rosen. Rosen is currently entering his second year at CCS, and this pleasing little mini faked me out at first. Given the sort of alternate-world explication of the city of Orphestios as capital of the "Northern Empire", I expected some sort of political world-building story. The story started off as what seemed to be a comedy of manners, and then we got another fake-out: this was a rehearsal of a play that was going badly. It's not until we're introduced to the character of Iosif, an itinerant playwright, that the story really begins. It took me a while to warm up to Rosen's scribbly character design and extensive use of grey and black for backgrounds. I think the dreariness it created was intentional, given that this was supposed to be a Russia-like country in the winter. The consistency of Rosen's visual language eventually won me over, especially with the expressiveness of his characters.

This is a story about the intersection between art and love, and the quest to link the two. Iosif is a celebrity of sorts back in Orphestios, but he hates the attention, hates talking about his work and especially hates people talking to him about what they think art really is. He's fascinated by a singer at a club and starts to obsess over her, only to learn that they were childhood friends--and feelings still ran deep. What I liked most about this story is that ultimately Iosif is not a sympathetic character, even if he is the protagonist. Given the opportunity to grab onto something truly meaningful in his life, he instead gives into temptation and tries to slough off his regret by saying "Fuck it". That interesting turn came during a clever, silent two-page sequence where Iosif and an actress hook up. We see close-ups of the couple with grey backgrounds, alternating with white-on-black squiggles depicting sex and then dissolving into unconsciousness. This is a solid if modest early effort, and I'll be curious to see if Rosen continues to build more stories in this environment.



KILLER INK COMICS #1, ICE CREAM and THE SURVIVING LIFE OF HANZE ENEFFER, by G.P. Bonesteel. Bonesteel is a humorist somewhat in the vein of a Johnny Ryan, with a particularly deadpan and dry sense of humor combined with a tendency to go over the top (and beyond). ICE CREAM is a tiny minicomic wherein Bonesteel uses a minimalist line to depict what happens when an ice cream truck doesn't stop for a group of kids: rocks, guns and flaming arrows are deployed. This is essentially a bit of extended slapstick, with all sorts of clever background eye-pops. HANZE ENEFFER is another minimal-line comic featuring an anthropomorphic rabbit's pathetic dating life. This one feels more than a little familiar, with the lonely loser finally scoring but eventually feeling even worse about his life. It's nowhere near as provocative as his other work.

The real draw here is KILLER INK COMICS #1, especially the first story. This is the tale of "Abortion Andy", a for-hire aborted baby who lectures teenagers about the perils of teen sex. In this story, he interrupts a young couple with his bizarre lecture, complete with two pages of working in track listings from Grease into his warnings. It's an audacious idea, hilariously executed with as straight a face as possible. The backup story features a man on the run from Cupid on Valentine's Day and the collateral damage their conflict causes (including a man falling in lust with a newspaper vending machine). This story is a bit more predictable (and I've seen a similar idea in the pages of PROJECT: ROMANTIC) but still funny. Bonesteel's line is a bit crude at this point but still effective in getting across his gags. I'll be curious to see just where he takes the Abortion Andy series in future episodes.



INDESTRUCTIBLE UNIVERSE QUARTERLY #1 & #2, by Morgan Pielli. These are grab bag collections of CCS grad Pielli's stories for assorted anthologies and other odds & ends. These are really nicely assembled, with beautiful silkscreened covers, striking design and nice paper. The art in the first issue is all angles and interesting formal tricks. Pielli often dips into sci-fi type stories, like "For Want Of An Oomplip", wherein a punctuation error on an alien sign nearly sets off a war. A longer story in the first issue features a chase between two characters across, through and between the gutters of panels.

The second issue also features a story with some unusual panel configurations. "The Watchmaker's Dance" reimagines earth's creation story as carried out by three alien robots. The use of tiny panels and sketchy line makes this story work well; in fact, it's the most attractive and successful of all the stories featured in these two issues. Pielli abandoned that more angular style of character design for the rest of the issue in favor of a softer, fuzzier line that was a bit less interesting. His stories continued to have a certain tortured quality to them, like "The Terror In Choices", featuring a man who loses everything after he loses his ability to choose. "The Trial of Narcissus" features an irresistible hook: everyone realizes that god is coming in three days, but the revelation of its true form drives everyone insane. At the moment, it seems like Pielli is experimenting with different drawing approaches, looking for the most comfortable style. I thought the more angular approach was more interesting, but it's clear that Pielli really thinks through his pages carefully. I especially like the way he straddles genres without owing allegiance to any one in particular.



SAM 'N DAN, by Jeff Lok. A quick look at Lok's work reveals that while he doesn't have the drawing facility of some of his fellow CCS grads, he overcomes that with the use of various techniques and a total commitment to the dark absurdity of his concepts. This is the story of a bank-robbing dog and cat duo named Sam and Dan. The cat speaks with a faux-elegant dialect, as though he were an early 20th century con man. The dog, a truly disturbing characters, says little but does much. After they rob a bank, the dog shoots the sun with his gun, bringing on darkness and an encounter with a wood witch, ancient prophesies, fireflies that shoot lasers out of their eyes and a commandment to duel each other to the death. To set the mood, Lok makes extensive use of hatching and cross-hatching. That creates an oppressive atmosphere with his otherwise funnily-drawn anthropomorphic characters. Sam the dog in particular has a Droopy-like expression no matter his mood or situation, which cracks me up in spite of his psychopathic personality. Dan the cat is an oily smooth talker who talks loud but says nothing, and it's fun to watch him sweat, slant his mouth and otherwise squirm while otherwise looking quite cheerful. The wood witch, an amorphous-looking creature, later tries to disguise itself as a farmer in the least-convincing costume of all time.

Lok brings all sorts of weird, comedic touches to a piece that has apocalyptic overtones, making its overall tone hard to pin down but compelling. His matter-of-fact absurdism reminds a little of what Chuck Forsman is doing, but Lok brings a different sensibility to his work. It's more clearly calculated and less improvisatory than Forsman's comics (especially in SNAKE OIL). Both artists are world-builders where the reader is deliberately kept in the dark, but there is certainly a logic of sorts behind the weirdness. Forsman's work is more about the telling of tales through the mundane execution of a journey, while with Lok it's about a series of bigger moments. I look forward to fat collections of comics by both artists in the future.



THE MUD BOG, POCKET PORN #1, r, THE UGLY PLACE and BEAUTY PATROL, by Kubby. Kubby's comics are beautiful, intensely personal little art objects. All stops are pulled out as we see full color, silkscreened covers, interesting paper, etc. THE UGLY PLACE is a 24-hour comic that's one of the best-looking of it's kind that I've seen. It's a silent story about a farmer who puts in a hard day's work threshing a field, only to be overcome by a memory of a lost love. The stoic farmer tucks the memory away when he gets home, only to wistfully see the image of his lover in the door. This looks like it was done only in pencil with no inks, but Kubby goes to town on creating gradations of texture, especially in the close-up shots of the farmer's face. The viscerality and sweat of the farmer's toil on page after page is a nice contrast to the real pain he feels.

r is a very personal little mini that details the death of someone very close to the artist, printed on purple paper with what looks like colored pencil. There are some striking images, like the cartoonist-as-bear hunched over a sheet of paper with slitted eyes. THE MUD BOG is an experiment in color, detailing a funny memory of hiding out and watching guys driving their pick-up trucks into a mud pit, gunning the gas and getting it covered with mud. Why they do this and why people secretly watched it is besides the point; it was clearly something that both groups loved for different reasons. POCKET PORN was something Kubby drew collaborating with another writer and drawn with a brush, giving it a scratchy quality not seen in the artist's other work. It's a story of fetishes gone slightly awry, as a dominant woman and a more submissive woman who likes feet meet behind a dumpster. As the dominant woman is using her foot to pleasure the sub, the sub makes the mistake of suggesting that she be "rocked like a baby". That angers the dominant, who then uses her feet to slap her legs and ass raw. It's a visceral, ugly series of moments that clearly bring mixed feelings to the sub. The brush works both for and against the artist here: the scratchy quality of the line and the way it blurs reinforces the nature of the experience, but there are points at which there's a lack of overall clarity. It's still one of the more interesting examples of comics erotica I've read.



The artist's most-distributed comic is BEAUTY PATROL, a delightful series of fake-outs, science lectures, psychedelia, long-distance longings and time dilations. The book starts with a comic called "Beauty Patrol", about a bear making his way around the world. It's promptly crumpled mid-page by the artist of the strip, Cody Roder. The rest of the comic finds Cody going about her day off, meeting a strange person with whom she shares a connection they don't understand. It's there that Cody starts to wonder if deja vu is simply our understanding that time isn't a straight line. Meanwhile, we also follow the day of Cody's long-distance love Roxie Dagger, who who is on a more deliberate quest (to see her favorite band) but winds up in circumstances as unexpected as Cody. There's a spontaneity to Kubby's line here that I enjoy that carries it through some of its rougher pages; indeed, the more scribbly the line, the more the images burst off the page.



PIZZA WIZARD #2, CALL ALL MY DAWGS #3, and SUGARCUBE by Sam Gaskin. Gaskin's PIZZA WIZARD and other humor comics are sort of like Mat Brinkman on Pop Rocks. They carry fantasy elements, ludicrous quests and earthy & dense foregrounds and backgrounds. Gaskin's imagery is a bit simpler and easier to process than Brinkman's, and much sillier. There's definitely a story going on in these one-page episodes, revolving around the title character's quest for a magic pizza, but they're really an excuse for propulsive world-exploration in the Fort Thunder tradition. Gaskin is also working in the tradition of classic Sunday comic strips, supporting the main strip with shorter strips at the bottom of the page (usually tangential to the main story), wacky puzzles, and even hand-made advertisements (the weirdest of which was a straightforward ad for a fast food restaurant that winds up playing a significant role later in the story.



That's an apt metaphor, because Gaskin's work has a delightful junk food quality to it. In CALL ALL MY DAWGS #3, Gaskin gives us his ode to the schlock comedian Sinbad. Of course, it's filtered through Gaskin's demented imagination, so we see Sinbad bemused by the Cheshire Cat, posing in various outfits, having his TV son defecate on a toybox to spite him and dream about Kenan 'n Kel and barbecue sauce, wondering if he's become a "ghost dad". It's simultaneous a perfect tribute and deconstruction of a familiar but awful pop culture figure. It's comics like these that make Gaskin a singular figure as a humorist, even when he wears his visual inspirations on his metaphorical sleeve.



SUGARCUBE stands as a very surprising and personal work for Gaskin, and a wholly unexpected one. The story's protagonist, Andy, learns at age 20 that he has type-1 diabetes; and his whole life changes. This comic is less about the disease than the way it made Andy feel like his youth was over. By the end of the story, his earnest recklessness felt out of place, but he was no happier being forced to grow up so quickly. Gaskin eschews the more textured approach of his other work and instead uses a minimalist approach: clear lines, sparse backgrounds and iconic character work. Gaskin is trying to get across a lot of pain here, and I'm guessing he went this route so as not to overdo it. He also intersperses some of the heavier moments of depression with quotidian anecdotes about the mechanics of testing for blood sugar and injecting insulin as well as funny anecdotes about how and why he started smoking marijuana. That actually winds up as a significant plot point when he and his best friend are caught smoking by a policeman, the single event that effectively ended Andy's whimsical childhood. This is a comic without a neat and tidy ending; Andy feels trapped and the comic ends with an absurd fantasy sequence about becoming a subsidy farmer, living a quiet life. This isn't so much an ending as an escape, a denial; Andy has a long way to go to becoming a fully-realized person.