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, #2: Natalie Wardlaw

Calling an autobiographical cartoonist "honest" as a virtue tends to be a misnomer, because how can one possibly know just how honest a person is in describing their own life? For that matter, is it even possible for a person to tell their own story objectively? As noted elsewhere, a better descriptor is "open," which gives access to many intimate details and their context, and "closed," which carefully smooths out one's narrative or else simply omits contextual details. Neither is an inherently better or worse approach. "Honest" also tends to be a substitute for words like "intimate," or "bracing," especially when the author is open about sex, trauma, mental illness, and/or substance abuse. In that regard, autobio is a way of working through that process.

That is certainly true for Natalie Wardlaw, who started writing about trauma and abuse in virtually every CCS assignment. The best descriptor of her work is "fearless," or rather, the work of someone willing to confront her fears. Oblivion is a silent, beautiful painted art object. I believe it's appeared on Wardlaw's Instagram account, but that format fails to capture the intensity of the color as well as the downward-scrolling (spiraling!) accordion-fold format. It depicts a young woman (presumably Wardlaw) looking fabulous at the beginning, smoking pot and drinking. Then she literally walks off a cliff, spiraling downward as she encounters a man and later a woman who enable and encourage her substance abuse while trying to take advantage of her. 

She loses everything on the trip down, including her shirt and her dignity, as she vomits and urinates on herself. The final panel is the literal rock bottom, as she hits the ground and is left with a broken bottle, a keen grip on what just happened, and an important decision to make as to what to do next. It's a brief, visceral account of both the thrills and the inescapable price one must pay for addiction. People often cope with trauma and addiction by literally spinning a new narrative for themselves, but that narrative always encompasses exactly how they got there. This seems to be Wardlaw's main project right now in general, and the fact that she's not afraid to share her story in this way in public is both an impressive work of art as well as a way of acknowledging to herself that this happened.

31 Days Of CCS #6: Natalie Wardlaw

Natalie Wardlaw is a second-year student at CCS with a fully-formed voice for memoir and a willingness to spill some ink when it comes to telling her story. Her comics mix a desire for an almost delicate decorative touch with raw, powerful, and ugly emotions and experiences. She knows what she's doing; at this point, her development will come through the refinement of her line (simplifying it just a little will lead to greater overall storytelling clarity) and getting ready to tell longer stories. It's clear that she wants to, although she has fully invested in the process of writing short stories. Let's take a look at some recent examples.

Origin Story is taken from her mother's pregnancy diary from when she was carrying Natalie. Writing eventful and even painful stories from the perspective of others has clearly been useful, because it allows her to be even more blunt in terms of presentation. The diary contained huge gaps in time that proved useful from a storytelling perspective, with the reader imagining what happened during these lacunae. Much of the story is very difficult because her mother was horribly sick throughout much of the pregnancy, but there are also sweet moments like the way her husband took care of her and their toddler daughter Alex. Wardlaw likes drawing gaunt and angular figures, perhaps because it makes for dramatic and sharp poses. The comic ends on the thoughtful note of her mother regretting losing the diary for a while, because she wanted to focus on Alex as an only child while she still could and record it. But that moment was gone.

Fence Girl was written by her friend Lily Giles about a misadventure that she had as a freshman. In a small, square minicomics format, Wardlaw uses a single image on each page to tell the story. It's a departure from her usual style, but it works in establishing this as a single, dynamic event. It's cinematic in that respect, and she takes extra care in establishing the decorative aspect of each page. While the story is funny on the surface, it's also kind of terrifying. Giles overcame her severe social anxiety by getting really drunk and/or before meeting people, and at a particular party this backfired when she realized she was way too high to be there. She left, got lost, and climbed a barbed wire fence that she though was near her campus. Instead, she was lucky that the guy who found her in the morning was nice and dropped her off at school. She also bled quite a bit and had to go back and get her phone. It's an interesting story to tell, because it speaks to the way that people, and young women in particular, feel they have to play down trauma.

A Decade Of Loving With Mary Jane is a poetic, beautiful take on her relationship with marijuana over the years. She started smoking it as a freshman in high school, and it made her feel confident--until she had a flashback to a sexual assault when high. This is as frank and honest an assessment of one person's experiences with drugs as I've ever read, both in terms of positives and negatives. It's clear that smoking pot helped her a great deal with some aspects of her life, especially some difficult problems with regard to eating. At the same time, the ending was ambivalent and open-ended; she didn't know what she wanted to do with regard to smoking. While Wardlaw tends to write her stories about trauma with an eye toward distance and healing, it was an interesting move to make this story more open-ended.

Full Moon was her final first-year project at CCS, and it's beautifully designed. It's about her going streaking with a close friend the night before she left to go to "cartoon school". The cheeky cover reflects the whimsical nature of deciding to go streaking with your best friend, but body trauma seems to follow Wardlaw around, even if it's not her suffering it. Her friend Ceci tripped and fell on the unforgiving asphalt, emerging with all sorts of cuts and bruises. She insisted on getting to the end of the street before they went back inside and she had to pull out her nipple ring from nearby swelling tissue. It's a visceral comic to be sure, but the trauma here is ameliorated by the genuine level of caring between the two friends. It's an experience that left scars, but at least they could be thought of as mementos. The use of color on the cardstock cover and the inclusion of a pair of red-colored plastic glasses were nice flourishes. In terms of the figure drawing, her naturalistic style isn't quite sharp enough to capture all of the elements of gesture and bodies in relation to each other. A slightly less realistic style might have conveyed some of those feelings more smoothly.

Mermaid Parade is her most recent comic, and I think it's her most accomplished as well. Once again, the cover cardstock images are strikingly beautiful and clever; I hope at some point Wardlaw considers experimenting with full color work in her comics. This is an emotionally complex comic about grief, trauma, and violations of trust. It's about sexuality and guilt. It's about art as a way of negotiating trauma. I mentioned Wardlaw needing to refine her style, and this comic shows subtle examples of her tightening up her line in general. It's a little finer and she looks to have greater control over it, and while keeping with her naturalistic style in general, she's developing a stylization in her character design that is highly effective in expressing emotions.

The story refers to Coney Island's fun, raunchy Mermaid Parade and how she planned to wear a tight pair of shorts with scales on them as she marched in it. She and a friend crashed at a male friend's apartment, one that she trusted, and he wound up groping her. Not too long after this, he died. That mix of grief, betrayal, and trauma is powerful, especially as she processed it as being her fault. This comic doesn't seek any easy answers. It's just blazingly honest about what happened, how it made her feel then, how she feels about it now, and a mix of grief for her dead friend and anger at what he did. It's a finely-crafted howl at the unfairness of it all, of her sheer anger at having to deal with this abuse from men again now that she was older. It's a first step to coming to terms with it though certainly not the last, and its impact is powerful in part because of how she's fine-tuned her approach.

31 Days Of CCS #2: Gilmore Girls Fanzine and Doug Catches Up

A time-honored CCS tradition is creating fanzines for favorite TV shows, bands, and other pop culture. It's a very CCS thing to do, as it's collaborative, it's project-oriented, and it provides a fun way to blow off creative steam when not working on one's thesis. Considering that all of the equipment needed to whip out a comic is available at their fingertips in CCS's amazing lab, the urge for a project like this can be satisfied quickly. It also seems like fellow Keren Katz is at the center of a lot of these projects these days, be it comics or wacky dance performances or musicals. One person can mean a lot to a community as a catalyst, and Katz is truly a miraculous walking whirlwind.

Most of the fanzines from CCS have been about shows I don't know. However, the Gilmore Girls Fanzine (edited by Katz and Jess Johnson) is very much in my wheelhouse as a show I both love and love to hate. Of course, living in a small, quirky Northeastern town like White River Junction makes it easy to relate to the small, quirky setting of Stars Hollow in Gilmore Girls, with its vast array of cranks, weirdoes, dreamers, and artists. The heart and soul of this comic is Jess Johnson, who edited it but also provided a lot of interstitial material to bind its stories together. There's a funny segment imagining Lane, the childhood best friend of Rory, one of the main characters in the show, going deep into different kinds of manga to read in the same effortless, encyclopedic way she knows about rock. Johnson even ties this into Lane joining a comics circle in the same way she joined a band in the show.

Natalie Wardlaw zeroes in on Rory's romantic life and all of the horrible men she dated. She turned up the angst and even the undercurrent of physical threat presented by her Stars Hollow boyfriend Dean, based on a scene where he tangled with a bad boy at Rory's private school.  Rachel Ford's funny story digs in on the small character details and makes fun of the way that Lorelai, the mother of Rory, pretends to be humble but secretly revels in her relative glamorousness in town. Julia Alekseyeva talks in all seriousness about how seeing a bookish girl on television was very important to her as a teen, and she longed to have the same kind of relationship with her mother that Rory did with Lorelai. Pop culture and simply having the feeling of being seen can have a powerful effect.

Of course, funny strips by Emma Hunsinger and Kat Ghastly balanced that devotion as they imagined what the show was like, having never watched it. Ghastly imagined that cannibalism eventually would become a plot point. Isabel Manley and Ortal Avraham both get at the heart of the show: that putative protagonists Rory and Lorelai are both self-centered narcissists in the same way that Lorelai's mother Emily is. The tenor of this fanzine is at once loving, devoted, skeptical, and mocking: a perfect description of the Gilmore Girls fanbase. Now, pardon me while I start my essay on why Rory and Lorelai were the real villains of the series...

Kori Michele Handwerker and Pat L's Doug Catches Up is less a fanzine than it is fan-fiction, imagining an older Doug Funnie returning to his old town of Bluffington years after he had moved away. Doug was an interesting cartoon in the way that it addressed pre-teen angst and issues in a direct, honest manner, even if its visuals and details were absurd and cartoony. That's lost a bit in this black and white comic (although the cover preserves it), but the creators otherwise remain true to the spirit of the show. Doug has a long talk with his former bully, Roger, where he reveals that he's bisexual and engaged to another old friend of Doug's named Chalky. The entire comic has a tone of gentle forgiveness, understanding, and self-examination. As Handwerker notes in the afterword, the comic isn't a manifesto about the true nature of the show's characters or about forgiving bullies; rather, it's a logical extrapolation of how some of the kids might have turned out and dealing with issues that are more openly spoken about in today's culture (like coming out, or coming out as trans and using different pronouns). The artists really nail the visual style of the show to such a degree that this could easily serve as an updated version of the show.

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 #10: Natalie Wardlaw, Emily Zea and Alexander Washburn

Full Bore, by Emily Zea. This comic is only four pages line, but Zea offers up a lot of clues as to what kind of cartoonist she is. This brief story is the first part of a longer saga about an outlaw family in the old west. There's a nice swerve in this story, as what seems to be an innocent victim is actually the newest member of the family, helping her father rob a train. Zea has a loose, expressive line and a strong command of page composition. Her varied line weights add an emphasis to her characters in motion and her mix of difference perspectives makes this a visually interesting comic. For something so short, Zea packs a lot of information into this comic and makes it a single, satisfying unit. 

The Tortoise and the Hare, by Alexander Washburn. I believe a story involving the tortoise and the hare is a regular early assignment at CCS. This one involves martial arts (a ninja tortoise?) in addition to the classic race. Washburn goes all-in on using a thick line and over-the-top expressiveness in telling this story. It's all about flop-sweat, arched eyebrows, clenched teeth and emotions yelled out loud. It reminded me of something like Naruto as much as anything, only on a much smaller scale. I have no idea what Washburn's interests as a cartoonist will be, but he definitely has the fundamentals to do an action strip in the vein of a Stan Sakai. 

Rehabgiving, Chronic, The Princess In A Suit Of Leather, Run, Trigger Warning, and Just One Branch, by Natalie Wardlaw. This is an astounding suite of comics by an excellent young talent. The order in which I read them worked out well, as more and more of Wardlaw's frequently traumatic life was revealed in each subsequent zine, as well as her process of healing. Just One Branch is her version of the Aesop fable "The Man and the Wood", and like Issy Manley, she provided a feminist take on it. However, the take was a bit different; in her version, the lumberjack is a seductive man slowly but surely insinuating his way into the life of the tree (who is feminized with a human face) until he cuts her down and rapes her. The reaction of the nearby tree: "Well, she did let him have her branches". It's a brutal story that illustrates how consent can be given but then brutally overstepped, leading to a reaction of "she was asking for it."

Similarly, her take on the story The Princess In A Suit Of Leather finds her own attitudes toward the ending shifting as she aged and understood that men and relationships were not going to save her. In the story, a girl who was raped by her father runs off to the woods and manages to put herself in the skin of a fierce animal. She winds up with a prince who cuts away her skin. When she was younger, she thought the prince freed her, but now she looks at the story as a man cutting away a woman's defenses before she was ready to give them up. It's a cogent critique, and one that makes sense in terms of the tone of the story.

Chronic has a medical intake form as its cover, which is filled out on the third page. It's a story about Wardlaw's chronic pelvic pain suffered from age 15 to age 21. It's especially brutal and poignant because it's not only true that modern medicine has a horribly limited understanding of women's health issues, it actively ignores symptoms and information in favor of throwing ibuprofen at it. Wardlaw had to suffer through three operations before they got it right and she was freed from a life of pain, though she notes that the reminders of pain are something she holds on to, because in a time when she had no voice of her own, the pain was all she had. Her naturalistic art is simple, effective and powerful.

Run was inspired by the simple Ed Emberley technique of drawing with basic geometric figures and building on them. This is done as a fairy tale where Natalie goes out to the desert and things seem to be going well, but a guy moves into her house who is violent and abusive. Of course, everyone makes excuses for him, and he keeps threatening to get her. The metaphor of fear as a little animal in her head telling her to run is a powerful one, especially at the end where she kills it. There's a common thread in these comics of numbing and detaching herself as a way of coping with extreme trauma, and that carries over into the next comic, Trigger Warning. 

This is a brilliant, harrowing piece of art told in six separate anecdotes. One shows images of trying to pretend fear wasn't there by pretending she didn't feel it, until she was proven horribly wrong. Another is the swing between feeling suicidal and homicidal as she goes through emotional swings, as well as the cycle of whether or not autobio comics about trauma are helpful or harmful. There are strips about feeling like she had "asked for" sexual assault and/or manipulation because of substance abuse, strips about her shifting body image, and a funny and awful strip called "The most truthful thing I ever said after sex". In that one, a guy asks her if she wants to be his girlfriend (in so many words) after sex and she replies, "I'm sorry, I can't...I have problems". This is an emotionally raw comic with delicate, assured drawings and a powerful emotional narrative, one that doesn't have an easy or pat conclusion. Indeed, being in a place where trauma was no longer actively happening had its own set of difficulties, making her wish for that time when all she had to concentrate on was trying to survive in the moment.

Finally, Rehabgiving is about checking herself into a clinic where she was treated for addiction, among other things. The interesting thing about this comic is her focus on other people's issues in terms of narrative. It makes sense, so most addiction recovery groups focus on group work and being there for others, caring enough to hear their stories in a non-judgmental way. The beginning of the comic is a tarot reading that outlines a road to recovery and strength, while the end notes that the clinic did not "cure" her, but started the process of recovery in a powerful way. It's a strong statement of its own in a remarkably coherent way. Wardlaw has a powerful narrative voice, and as she refines her already-strong storytelling skills, she has the potential to turn her life into an unforgettable comics narrative, if that's the path she chooses.