Thirty Days of CCS #13: Reilly Hadden

Reilly Hadden has an intriguing series called Astral Birth Canal, which reminds me a bit of the early Chuck Forsman Snake Oil series. There are interlocking, nightmarish fantasy stories that weave in and out of each other. One follows a girl who appears in a forest and is immediately surrounded by giant crows, one of whom places a noose around her neck. She becomes friends with a bird girl and ends up in an even worse situation, in the sky house of a demonic figure on stilts. Then there's a narrative that features a young boy waiting for his warrior father to come home, but when the event happens, his father ignores him. A third narrative involves a peaceful race creating a warrior to avenge their yearly disaster when a monster comes around to raid their city. The warrior is surprised to find that the monster robbed them to build a staircase to the sun--and she is invited to join the monster.

All of this happens in just the first issue, and the other three issues follow from this. I'm not sure how much of this was planned out and how much of the storytelling wound up as improvisation; either way, there's an appealing looseness to Hadden's line without sacrificing coherent narrative structure. If it is improv, then he's following the rules of long-form improv, a story-based art that keeps adding on to an initial premise while creating surprising links between sketches through callbacks. The second issue (in glorious color) features the stubby young boy, Edward (son of Bork) trying to find his dad and winding up in a series of caves suspiciously shaped like his father. The third issue finds the female warrior going up the stairs, only to have the narrative pulled back to reveal that the demonic feature was reading a story to the girls--and literally ripped the face off of the bird girl when she tried to escape. The fourth issue is a cosmic adventure featuring Bork that ties back in with the second issue.

What's immediately noticeable about this series is that it has so many possible but disparate influences that it's impossible to really isolate them, because Hadden has created his own style and visual language. I mentioned Forsman before, but there's touches of Jack Kirby, Josh Simmons, Chester Brown and possibly Jesse Moynihan as well. Horror and absurdity are mixed in equal measure, often in the same panel. The effect is disorienting, even dizzying, at times, as Hadden's aim is to keep the reader off-balance while still keeping his various narratives afloat. In many ways, Astral Birth Canal feels like a comics PhD project, where Hadden is exploring different styles and techniques while attempting to expand his limitations. There are still plenty of rough spots as he doesn't quite stick the landing on some of the drawings, and the line between loose cartooning and sloppy cartooning can be a thin one. That said, Hadden's greatest attribute is his understanding of effective and memorable character design, putting weird characters into strange situations with a great deal of restraint. Every issue expands on the ideas more and more, as each of the characters must deal with being out of place and in a totally insane new steady-state. While there are lots of fantasy and horror trappings to be found here, it's all in the service of a greater psychological probing of his characters and not just dumb fun.

Thirty Days of CCS #12: Angela Boyle, Melissa Mendes, Kane Lynch, J.D. Lunt

A big thanks to Craig Fischer in lending me the following minis for review, from his excellent show At The Junction Of Words And Pictures: The Tenth Anniversary of the Center for Cartoon Studies at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. Craig was kind enough to invite me to do a talk with grads Beth Hetland and Rio Aubrey Taylor, and I had a great time. Thanks to Craig, I was able to flesh out my CCS feature this year, because missing SPX meant missing a number of potential contributions.

Final Frontiers, by Kane Lynch. This is comics reportage about highly dedicated Star Trek fans who have built their own sets and have continued the original series from where it left off. Lynch uses a multicolor approach free of black ink lines that mimics the absurdly bright color patterns of the original show. Lynch gets at the sense of creativity and passion of the fans who want to break out of simple cultural consumption and want to be part of something collaborative. He also dutifully reports on how different fans have different aesthetic interests in the show, and how that's led to a number of rifts.

Coping Mechanisms, by J.D. Lunt. This is an excellent if rough comic about mental illness, both with regard to the artist and those he served. It kicks off with his job as a person who takes shift with people who are on suicide watch. He meets one woman named Nicole who was given a guitar, and he saw that being able to play and sing about her life (as well as silly things) has a tremendously therapeutic effect. A strip about dealing with his PTSD is fascinating, as Lunt discusses the mechanics of how making abstract art proved to be a soothing activity for him, partly through the influence of Lynda Barry's writing about how putting pen to paper can be therapeutic, even if it's just doodles and spirals. The same was true for him owning a dog, taking care of it, going out in public with it and forming a bond with it. The heart of the matter that he got at was that despite his own fears induced by PTSD, he could be brave for his dog when the dog was afraid of so many things in the world. Lunt gets at the idea that nurturing a pet that has come to trust and love you unconditionally is enormously therapeutic, because it gets you out of the headspace of trauma and into something active and positive. Lunt's draftsmanship is still functional at best and he suffers from over-drawing and over-inking at various points, but it's clear that he's learned how to tell a story and has a lot to say.

More Than You Wanted To Know About Horseshoe Crabs, by Angela Boyle. This is a light-hearted but informative comic about the titular arachnids, which combines her interest in sequential storytelling with scientific illustration. Indeed, while there are plenty of cute panels where the crabs engage in silly activities, Boyle places a premium on anatomical accuracy throughout the comic. It's a comic that's maybe a shade too technical for a young reader to enjoy due to the nature of some of the terminology, but certainly would be great for middle schoolers and above to enjoy. I think the comic's greatest virtue is that while Boyle is interested in accuracy, each of the drawings is cartooned and has a life of its own, rather than the more static nature of a more detailed illustration. The story was the thing here, even if that story was simply the horseshoe crab talking about itself, and that's why the comic works.

The Weight #3, by Melissa Mendes. Mendes has distinguished herself as one of my favorite storytellers from CCS, especially with regard to the real empathy with which she treats her characters. There is a tremendous amount of affection demonstrated on the page for them, which makes it all the more emotionally powerful now that she's stretching out more and more with what's happening with her characters. This issue follows a girl growing up in an abusive family on a military base and her relationship with her best friend. We see the girl and her mother go over to a friend's house after an especially vicious incident and the delightfully quotidian rituals the girl and her friend engage in the next day. That leads to an encounter with friends that looks like it might lead to tragedy, but it only serves to stir up rage in the girl when it proves to be a trick. That brush with death portends a real tragedy at the end, serving up a powerful emotional shock that works so well because of the way that Mendes established the comic's relationships. Mendes' powerfully expressive style has become more confident and richer as she's expanded her storytelling range, but its overall spareness emphasizes the emotions of her characters above all else. This will make a powerful impact as a book when it's collected.

Thirty Days of CCS #11: Anna Selheim

Anna Selheim is a senior at CCS (class of 2016), and she's demonstrated an emotionally raw style of storytelling. Let's take a look at her recent work:

This Isn't About You is the most bracing, difficult and emotionally honest of her comics. It's about being bullied as a child and becoming so angry that she just snapped one day on her abuser. A few years later, the tables turned and Selheim became the bully. While it started with verbal taunts that made her ever-more popular because of her sense of humor, it escalated into actual physical abuse. Despite her own regrets and shame over her behavior, it was as though she was addicted to the practice, humiliating a substitute teacher and threatening to make someone's life hell who dared to stand up to her. Time, therapy and medication eventually curbed this constant state of rage, though Selheim reveals a couple of telling points when her former bully sent her an email message, and Selheim started to write a reply that took the moral high ground regarding the situation, until she realized she didn't have a leg to stand on. A session with her therapist that revealed her numbness to her bullying behavior that culminated in the question, "Hey, am I a sociopath?" is played for laughs but also showed the extremes of her problems. The final vignette shows how she's come to terms with her past; in many respects, this comic is less a confession than an acknowledgment of past behavior. Unlike some of her autobio comics, which features less a self-caricature than an avatar, Selheim fully discloses everything going on, including her own appearance.

Everything Is Fine is a series of color strips, this time depicting Selheim's face as a series of twisting lines, regarding mental illness and its manifestations. The strips about catastrophising--imagining a worse-case scenario spinning horribly out of control--are especially pointed and powerful, because they show precisely how these sorts of negative fantasies take over one's train of thought and eventually can have a physical side-effect. Many of the strips use Selheim's initial denial of problems as a repeated set-up for the punchline of realizing that the things she's trying to ignore are real problems. The strips act as a way of venting resentments out loud, allowing her to contextualize how self-centered some of them are. There's an amazing strip about how being on an antidepressant can make it incredibly difficult to actually cry--even when one is feeling sad. One by one, Selheim humorously addresses her difficulties with her body image and subsequent purging, intrusive thoughts, and her need to vent. It's one of the better approaches I've seen toward dealing with mental illness.

Petty is an 8 page work of fiction that pairs an extroverted girl and a shy boy together as an unlikely but happy couple. Selheim has an astute understanding and ear for teen dialogue, so when the boy is warned that his new girlfriend "is a slut", there's an uncomfortable level of verisimilitude in the speech patterns and rhythms. What I liked about this comic is that both the boy and girl are troubled in their own way and seek each other out as a potential safe harbor. The boy in particular accepts her so unconditionally that he quietly punishes the guy who told him about his girlfriend by stealing from his store. Here, Selheim's line is ragged but expressive, reminding me a bit of Chuck Forsman's comics. I like that the title of the comic refers both to the petty crime committed by the boy as well as the petty nature of gossip.

Wasted is another comic whose title is a play on words; it refers both to the heroine's tendency to get drunk as well as the time she wastes in trying to become a playwright. She's visited at night by a creature who tells her that she's wasting time in how she's approaching things, urging her to get lost in her goals--and face a horrible final fate. This features some of Selheim's most confident-looking art: bold and crisp.

Their Souls Are Fleeing is a brief but brutal comic from a World War I anthology. In just a few pages, Selheim gets at the almost absurd reality that was life at the front in that poorly-planned war. In particular, the extremes between incredible tedium and the sudden presence of mutilated bodies. That the main character is jealous of the dead is not surprising. The story is perhaps not quite as visceral as Selheim intended, but she didn't have the chops to nail down all of the details.

Sisters. Based on one of Aesop's fables, this is a funny story about two mermaid sisters. One has a beautiful human top half and a fish's tail, while the other has a fish's head and human bottom half. Naturally, the latter mermaid has trouble attracting sailors to eat, until she cries to her father and is told to use her sense of cunning. That leads to a hilarious final page. In this strip, Selheim used a much finer line that allowed for greater embellishment; it looks far more work-intensive than later approaches but it certainly was effective here.

Selheim's development is typical of many CCS students: producing work for anthologies, finishing small projects, trying a variety of storytelling approaches. There's a great deal of emotional power in her work to go with her sharp sense of comic timing. Her approach mixes cynicism and idealism in the same package, along with bitterness and hope. That thematic complexity will lend itself well as she continues to develop as a cartoonist.

Thirty Days of CCS #10: Tillie Walden

Tillie Walden is the rare CCS student (she's class of 2016) who went to the school straight out of high school. She's also the even rarer beast: the young comics prodigy. With two books under her belt (both from British publisher Avery Hill) in the span of a year, she's shown the voracious desire to get better in public demonstrated by the likes of Dash Shaw, Michael DeForge, Sam Alden and other recent cartoonists who started publishing serious work as teenagers and rapidly cycled through influences to evolve their styles.

Walden's first book, The End Of Summer, has all the assets and pitfalls of an ambitious first work. It's a book about an insular royal family of some vague Scandinavian descent that is preparing to lock down the palace for a three-year period. It centers around Lars, an eleven year old who is all too aware that the sickness he suffers from will take his life before the end of that period. His relationship with his siblings and parents and the distance between them takes center stage, along with the close relationship he has with his twin sister, Maja. Walden's greatest asset as a cartoonist is her sense of restraint. She only gives vague hints as to what's happening in the palace and why, leaving the reader to connect the dots. That restraint allows the reader to understand that beyond the plot and its machinations, the important thing in the book is the relationship between Lars and Maja, and the ways that relationship is disrupted but ultimately cherished.

Walden's draftsmanship is impeccable, and it's not just to show off, either. The vast ceilings, the precision of the detailed domes and arches, the overwhelming majesty of the palace's construction are all rendered to demonstrate how emotionally empty it is. Filled with small children, it threatens to swallow them up and drive them insane. The problems with the book arise in the last third or so, when there are several key moments that are depicted silently. There's not enough differentiation between her character designs to let the reader know what's happening, and to whom. Her choice of not over-writing and providing extra textual clues as to the action was a sound one in terms of storytelling, but she didn't quite have the chops to pull it off here. Walden wanted a story about twins and wanted it to resonate with mythology (there's a long sequence tying things in with the Norse creation myth) and have an apocalyptic feel, all while maintaining a strong emotional through-line. That she doesn't quite get there speaks more to her ambitions than her weaknesses as an artist.

Her second book, I Love This Part, is different in every way from her first except in that it explores a loving relationship between two people and the obstacles they encounter. If her first book was overstuffed with imagery, then this book is far more spare and lyrical in its approach. We are introduced to two teenage girls who are schoolmates. Early on, in a series of larger-than-life images, the reader learns that they are also soulmates. Those early images depicting them as giants using mountains to rest on as they lay down together, of using skyscrapers to lean on as they kvetch about homework, of embracing in the areas between brownstones. It's an inspired visual metaphor for the energy that flows in the early days of a new relationship, especially one that doesn't quite have an identity yet. Everything feels bigger and more important somehow.

As the book unfolds, it continues to deliver one character moment after another, each one filling up a single page. The anecdotes range from private jokes to body anxiety to daydreams about future recipes. Through these snippets of quotidian dialogue that feel so remarkably authentic, she also slips in their love for each other and the notion that they probably can't tell anyone about it. The book's climax is actually in the middle, when one of the girls breaks up with the other, saying "I'm not like you. This is wrong" as she's weeping on the phone. Walden made this a continuous sequence, breaking up the flow that she had established earlier in the book as a series of perfect moments. There are two extended flashback sequences from the girl who's just been dumped, and they are notably almost entirely in black and why, in contrast to the shades of purple that add to the dreaminess of the earlier section of the book. The ending is heartbreaking, as only here do we even learn their names, and the girl who feared their love and broke up sends the other girl some music. There's weeping on both ends, as the purple is used to depict a blustery sky in the final pages. Walden pulls off their connection and the heartbreak of their breakup with a minimum of melodrama, as the emotion and sentiment depicted here is hard-earned with her careful character development.

It's hard to source Walden's character design style. There are hints, however; the giant cat in The End Of Summer is named Nemo, and that immediately connected the work to Winsor McCay. There's a delicacy and almost fragility in her line that also resembles that of Chris "CF" Forgues, or perhaps more accurately, resembles CF's direct influence Henry Darger. What is certainly true is that her work doesn't resemble that of the peers in her age group, nor really of any contemporary cartoonists working at the moment. Thematically, I'd say that Alden and perhaps Daryl Seitchik are the closest to doing what Walden's doing right now, involving the occasional fantastical element into stories deeply rooted in a young person's attempt to understand the world and their place in it.

Walden was tapped to do the Annual Appeal comic for CCS this year, a plum assignment that she deftly knocked out of the park. Titled Q and A With Tillie Walden, it's done in a manner that's now familiar with her: restraint in the use of text, all in service of both the image as well as the formal layout of the comic. In doing a Q&A about being a cartoonist, she revealed her own passion, her fear in leaving home, and a powerhouse pictorial display of why she loves its location of White River Junction--all done in an ingenious fold-out spread that Dan Zettwoch would approve of. The end of the pamphlet shows that she's one of the rare individuals who understands that they are a comics lifer at a very young age, as she grasps that the form is capable of anything. She's grounded in her tools and the fortunate mindset of still being able to enjoy the sheer act of drawing while being tasked to draw. Walden has a long and promising future ahead of her.

Thirty Days of CCS #9: Amelia Onorato and D.W./Kevin Uehlein

Ultima Thule, by Amelia Onorato. Onorato has largely made fantasy her genre of choice as a cartoonist, albeit with a very specific point of view and aesthetic. Onorato has merged dark but fantastical concepts largely from a feminist perspective, all while closely hewing to whatever overriding idea is present in the plot. Ultima Thule is something of a departure in some respects, as a Roman engineer named Marcellinus (of African descent, which I thought was an interesting touch) gets exiled from the mother country and gets shipwrecked. He washes up in Ireland, in a remote village that depends on its sheep and rappelling down cliffs in order to steal birds' eggs. He's viewed as a sort of curiosity, unskilled in any of the activities that kept the tribe alive, until he engineers a plumbing system that drew water down from a mountain stream to the village. Onorato neatly ties together a village custom, Marcellinus' increasing affection for the village and his initial rescuer in particular and a tense moment to bring the short story to a neat close. It's an incredibly effective little story, thanks in large part to Onorato's increasingly confident character design and remarkable efficiency. The mark of a maturing artist is that their work has little in the way of filler or overdrawing, and this exercise certainly shows that Anorato is at that point.

KJC #2, by D.W. and Kevin Uehlein. Written by D.W. and drawn by Uehlein, this is a slick, engaging and wordless anthropomorphic story about a bull-headed male sent off on a mission by an alluring female. Its virtues lie chiefly in Uehlein's dazzling use of blacks and fluid panel-to-panel transitions, speeding up and slowing down the action as the narrative called for at the time. Given no information other than what was on the page, we start out believing this to be a hero's journey, as the bull-headed male has to think and fight his way through all sorts of obstacles. What appears to be an undersea adventure in the wild suddenly turns into a city adventure, where the reader starts to get clued in that not everything is at it seems. Then the story takes an almost Tarantino-esque turn for the violent, as the reader understands that this is a delicately-balanced caper that simply needed one last man for the job--and he and his crew wind up taking their just reward in the end. It's a well-paced, clever and simple story whose twists are eminently satisfying.

Thirty Days of CCS #8: Iona Fox and Anna McGlynn

Iona Fox is a recent CCS grad (class of 2015), and her autobiographical Almanac Comics Annual picks up on the first day of class in September of 2014 and goes from there. She's the perfect example of a cartoonist with limited draftsmanship who nonetheless manages to come up with a working style and method to tell stories. This comic was initiated as part of a class assignment to record and draw one's dreams, but Fox's inability to remember her dreams at the beginning saw her spin out in other directions. There's a delightful, weird energy that suffuses her comics, from the tight spiral of her hair to the odd angles and sketchiness of her daily life. Above all else, these diary comics are quirky in a manner that's entirely natural, which may well be an outgrowth of the oddness of her daily life. She split time between Burlington and White River Junction (home of CCS), and co-owns and works on a farm in the former location with her boyfriend. It's delightful to see Fox experiment with different kinds of drawing styles throughout the book, alternating between a thicker line and her more quickly-scrawled out daily strips. She alternates between cartooning in a grid and using an open layout. There are quotidian descriptions of her day as well as meditations on particular incidents, like wading/floating further and further out into a lake, making some on the shore wonder if she was trying to commit suicide. There's a funny strip about getting dressed up in a bear outfit in order to trick a bear into thinking it was spring already. It's interesting that she chose to draw a couple of special guest-speakers in her class: Dame Darcy on one day and John Porcellino on another. That's because there are echoes of both cartoonists in her work: the scratchy weirdness of Darcy combined with the poetic focus on one's own mind and the natural world.

Anna McGlynn is another class of 2015 grad whose sensitive, perceptive work is reminiscent of another CCS grad, Melissa Mendes. Both took a number of cues from the Lynda Barry school of personal but fictionalized storytelling, especially in how they tell stories from the point of view of kids. The Puddle And The Sea follows the episodic observations of a girl named Allie in a Catholic school. McGlynn is typical of many CCS grads in that her draftsmanship is functional but unexceptional, but her storytelling chops are well-developed. Like Barry, each episode is organized under a single thematic title, narrated by Allie in caption boxes. The results are frequently poignant, poetic and achingly real. Strips like "The Abandoned Sock", which talks about the ways in which children build worlds with each other, some of which are taken more seriously by some kids than others, fall into that realm of familiar because of the specificity of its details. "Ladybird" juxtaposes a child's rhyme with the pain of seeing one's parents in emotional agony as they split. "The Van" is about going to some kind of group therapy session for children of divorce, where she's asked to choose a painful image that represents her family dynamic--a concept she was not yet ready for. There is also camaraderie and magic moments with friends who seem to know things she doesn't and boys willing to share their time, time that she wants to slow down to a crawl. Despite the many bleak themes in the comic, there's an essence of hope and resolve in the character of Allie, one that allows her to keep her sense of wonder. McGlynn's poetic chops are already well-developed, and her career will be one where she simply needs to further streamline her drawing style.

Thirty Days of CCS #7: Beth Hetland

Beth Hetland (and writing partner Kyle O'Connell) continue to add depth and mystery in the fourth issue of Half-Asleep, the story of Ivy, a genius-level teen being taught (and to some degree, exploited) by her parents, who are researchers into the relationship between dreams and reality. As this issue reveals, Ivy is being prepped to be a sort of dream explorer, with the potential results bringing revolutionary changes to the world. At the same time, her mother has been keeping her at arm's length as a parent while doing crazy things to keep her on task in particular ways. In the prior issue, Ivy was essentially compelled to move into the basement of her house and sleep on the floor. When she was reunited with her father in this issue, it wasn't exactly an emotional moment; indeed, it was more a case of mutual intellectual curiosity.

What O'Connell and Hetland make clear in the comic is that everyone has a slightly different agenda, and said agenda is slightly different from what they tell the others. Ivy's mom built a device that she claimed was designed to duplicate Ivy's thought patterns and predict her future research. As the beginning of the story revealed, what she was really after was access to Ivy's dreams, which her child kept hidden from her. Ivy follows along with regard to the expectations put upon her but with a strong amount of disdain and a degree of her own secrecy. Her father is at once the most transparent and the most mysterious, as his grip on reality and society has slipped as he's spent most of his time working with dreams, away from other people.

It's not an accident that the most human character in the book is "Uncle", a sort of ape creature that Ivy's dad brought back from a dream. He has a poetic sensibility that appeals to Ivy and brings out a sense of compassion in her that's absent from the other characters. One gets the sense that one of the reasons why she's going along with all of this is to explore her dreams in her own way, for her own reasons. While Ivy's mom does love her, that love is impinged upon by the almost desperate nature of her research, as though she's racing against time for some kind of discovery.

In service to the story, Hetland's techniques are becoming more and more clever. The dissolve at the beginning of the book to what appeared to be another one of Ivy's dreams into revealing that it was her mom trying to force her way in was jarring, especially in the almost nauseating use of color at the end. Throughout the story, the characterizations are all in the eyes--Ivy's mix of bright-eyed and side-eyed, Uncle's Little Orphan Annie-eye dots that nonetheless twitch and pulse with passion, Ivy's mom's mix of intensity and weariness, and her dad's somewhat manic and somewhat dopey wide-eyed expressiveness. Throw in techniques like using a soft pencil effect for Uncle's dreams, Ivy touching him and color exploding off of her fingers and an effective use of both tight-in and wide shots, and Hetland aids the story by allowing O'Connell to be restrained in terms of what is explained. In this, O'Connell and Hetland avoid the typical writer-artist team snare of a writer overwriting on the page and an artist being crowded out as a result.