31 Days Of CCS, #7: Ruby Arnone

What's most interesting about Ruby Arnone's Frankie & Jam is that, despite its origins as a formal cartooning exercise with some formal constraints, the actual comics are fluid and funny. It follows a trans woman anthropomorphic bunny named Frankie and a hoodie-wearing kid named Jam, with most of the strips featuring their observations, gags, and general quirkiness. One of the reasons why the comic is so enjoyable is that Arnone doesn't force things. Some of the strips aren't funny; they're just small but important moments in the lives of the characters. It reminds me a little of certain Peanuts strips that have small epiphanies, or like Pablo Holmberg's book Eden.

There are absurd and surreal strips as well, like the anthropomorphic college professor dog whose academic specialty is the habits of staplers, which he views as sentient entities. There's the imperious and threatening Lizard Queen, who is reduced to washing her clothes in a laundromat and eating at cheap restaurants after ruling a kingdom. Arnone's cartooning is sophisticated, but I also see a lot of experimentation here with grid vs no grid, multiple line weights, and silent strips that depend on flow vs gags that depend largely on the text. This is fertile ground for future ideas, as Arnone generated half a dozen characters and ideas that could be explored for a long time. 

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. 

45 Days Of CCS, #39: Ruby Arnone, Clover Ajamie, Taylor Hunt

Ruby Arnone's And The Bat is their version of the Aesop's fable assignment. Like many who have taken it on, they have chosen to bend it to their own interests and concerns rather than a more straightforward adaptation. In this case, Arnone did a take on "The Birds, The Beasts, And The Bat," the fable about a bat who sits out a war between the birds and beasts by not identifying with either side but gets shunned as a result. Arnone abandons that narrative to examine the genocide in Palestine, noting that war is rarely a conflict between morally equivalent sides. This is an unapologetically didactic comic with some lovely pencil drawings.

Clover Ajamie's Healer's Tale is a beautiful, wordless story about a medicine woman of some kind who goes about her days in the forest. She's looking to heal trees but encounters signs of a mysterious and benevolent magic that's clearly healing the forest she loves so much. There's a delightful sense of the methodical as she goes about her day, munching on toast as she digs around the mushrooms. The encounter she has at the end feels entirely earned in its warmth and intimacy, and all of this is heightened by Ajamie's use of browns, yellows, and oranges. 

Tyler Hunt's contribution last year was very funny, and this year's God's Away On Business mixes humor and existential discovery. Done as part of the Ed Emberley assignment (made mostly out of squares, triangles, and circles), it's about a despondent priest who kills himself in order to get an audience with god. Despite that angle, this is actually a funny comic. The priest winds up in limbo, guided by a skeleton bureaucrat through a dizzying environment before meeting the creator. He's told by god that he just got burned out because Earth was especially annoying. The priest steals god's pen and is ready to right some wrongs before being asked by the skeleton, "Do you think you won't get tired, too?" Hunt really goes to town on the cartooning details, even if those turn out to be a shaggy dog story. The best thing about the story is its pacing, as Hunt keeps the reader engaged from the very beginning, and the priest's case against god is very compelling.