31 Days Of CCS, #19: Leeah Swift

Leeah Swift is an interesting talent, as an example of a cartoonist who already has a highly-developed personal style as a young cartoonist but is clearly still figuring out what kind of cartoonist she wants to be. Initially springing out of the Minneapolis scene, Swift's comic Meet Cedar The Giraffe was published by Caitlin Skaalrud's Talk Weird Press. This is a comic that deliberately plays with social conventions, as the unseen interlocutor who attempts to engage Cedar is a role that Swift inherently questions from the beginning. Cedar is a woman, writing a note, sitting in a booth, but in some ways, the "giraffe" part of the title comes from the narrator treating her as though she were an animal in a zoo. Cedar's reluctance to engage and general guardedness regarding her name and past both seem more like well-established defense mechanisms than the sign of a disaffected character. However, this understanding for the reader comes slowly, as Swift slowly subverts the cheerfulness of the narrator and Cedar's prickly response into something much darker and more personal. Ultimately, however, Cedar is reluctant to let go of the conversation, needing a connection of some kind, any kind at that moment. 

In terms of the drawing, Swift's character stylizations are deeply rooted in a thorough understanding of gesture and body language. The wooden booth, drawn as old and deeply pitted, anchors each page, giving Cedar something to play off of. There's a fundamental sense of restraint in both writing and drawing, even given the subject matter and Swift's character design. 

The opposite is true in her Aesop assignment, the classic The Tortoise And The Hare. Subtitled "Race Through A Silly Metaphor For Depression," Swift is highly self-aware that this comic is all over the place. It's less a narrative and more a deeply personal pause at the fork of a road. The first three pages are devoted to the story proper, and they're a showcase for Swift's increasing skill as a draftswoman, with tight hatching and fine details. Swift has a confident and bold line and has a great sense of comic timing as well with regard to visual gags. 

The back half of the story is Swift relating to both tortoise and hare. She felt the malaise and depression of the tortoise but also understood that slow labor was the only way she could make the kind of art she wanted. She related to the hare's energy, confidence, and ambition, but recognized that it also led to an overinflated sense of self and arrogance. I think for a cartoonist like Swift, CCS is an ideal environment because it likely forces her to draw on on the positive aspects of both of these selves. It puts her in a supportive environment but also one where collaboration, deadlines, and the expectation to publish are all expectations of the program. She has to do the work and thus avoids the impatience of the hare. She has to do the work and thus avoids the malaise of the tortoise. What will be interesting is when Swift is ready to tackle a more ambitious assignment in her second year and what that might look like. 

31 Days Of CCS, #18: Reilly Hadden

Reilly Hadden has long been one of my favorite CCS cartoonists, even as his work is hard to classify. It has fantasy elements, to be sure, but it's a sort of alt-comics fantasy: rough around the edges, filled with moments of weird humor, and frequently absurd. Despite that absurdity, there was always a terrifying edge to his work, where horrible things happened to innocent people for no reason. 

Since ending Astral Birth Canal and after just a couple of issues of Astral Forest, his fantasy series, Hadden has spent much of his time on a different project: the adventures of Kricket The Cat. These are all-ages fantasy comics with a wonderfully gentle sense of humor that rely on the reader's desire to hang out in this particular world. Indeed, the plots, such as they are, are cursory at best. Instead, we are presented with the things Kricket does on a particular day and the people that he meets. An early version of this from 2017, Krikkit Goes Outside (note the different spelling) is drawn with a spareness resembling John Porcellino, as young Krikkit meanders around the forest. He searches for mushrooms, chases a frog, and rides down the river on a raft. The only use of color is a hand-drawn yellow for Krikkit's fur. There's a simple pleasure to be found in just seeing how Hadden lays out each page, leading the reader on in some pages dominated by their negative space and on others with simple drawings but a dense layout. 

Hadden has refined and changed the character a bit, releasing other minis in full color. Kricket The Cat introduces him as a "gentle young man" who "loves mysteries," so Kricket sings to periwinkles on the beach to draw them out, waves hi to the ghost in the forest, and meets the monstrously large Old Man Catfish. The color strips remind me a bit of Pablo Holmberg's Eden strips a little, as the narrative wanders from character to character. His friends Joey and Jenny get the spotlight, then we follow the ghost at home, worrying about a growth on their faces, and finally follow Kricket down into a well-labeled dungeon where a mimic gives him onions as his treasure. There's a light, easy, self-consistent logic at play in these strips, where everyone is languid to the point of inertness at times. When Hadden counters this slowness with actual action, it perks up the reader. The strips also knowingly play on fantasy tropes without mocking them, it's as much a part of daily life as laying in the grass is. His line is a little more developed in this mini, ut Hadden mostly keeps it simple, prefering to let the color fill in gaps and give the pages weight. 

Free Boots follow Kricket on a single adventure, as he puts on a pair of free boots but discovers they are full of slugs. He doesn't seem to mind, however. Indeed, he becomes obsessed with them, and the slugs not only start rapidly multiplying, they become a single, belligerent consciousness. Only the intervention of Old Man Catfish saves the day. The nature of his adventure and the fight make it seem like something that wouldn't be out of place in one of Hadden's old series, but it still retains the essential gentle quality of the character. 

The Tower Underneath is entirely in black and white, printed on yellow paper. It starts as a take on tourist traps, turns into a dungeon crawl that subverts expectations (the big, sword-wielding lizard man is actually quite nice), goes up the stairs of the Tower of Destiny, meets the Wizard in the Wall, and learns that his fate is to be entirely average. Hadden pulls off the trick of wrting a fun fantasy narrative that subverts the genre at every turn without mocking it entirely. This is the heart of his work right now, as he's slowly assembling a beautiful body of work that's easy to glide through, yet immensely satisfying to read. 

31 Days Of CCS, #17: Kit Anderson

Kit Anderson brings a completely different set of skills and experiences than most of the other CCS students whose work I've seen. A graphic designer and illustrator, Anderson is applying these skills to cartooning. What's interesting is that Anderson has the eye of a formalist, paying a lot of attention to elements like page design and panel design, and how the two can be related to theme. For example, in Crossings, there's a page that starts with a single horizontal panel of mountains running across the first quarter of the page. The second panel is a smaller map of that territory, also in a single panel. That map is inset as part of a larger image of a car driving toward the mountains, with other panels strategically placed to reveal the driver of the car. The other comics here are similar in intent, although this one was the most effective. 

Minis 2020 is four different one-page strips, each with a different narrative done in a different style. One emphasizes the passage of time in the same place by using different gradations of light and color. Another is a black and white experiment about someone using a match for light in a dark basement, met only by the reflective eyes of a rat. Another used a stark black and white contrast to ultimately express the seriousness of leaving a biosphere behind and the choices that led up to that. The final strip is a COVID commentary, where the text consisted of typical sentiments about bingeing TV and reading books, only each image is that of a scene in nature, oblivious to what humans were doing. Anderson is a thinker as a cartoonist, combining word and image in a deliberate manner to create a feeling, rather than concentrating on a narrative.

With The Snow Well, Anderson went way out of her comfort zone in a number of ways. This was the CCS Aesop's fables assignment, and she chose to adapt "The Fox And The Goat," wherein a fox trapped in a well lured a goat into it with promises of delicious water and jumped on its back to escape, leaving the goat there. This is an old West-style story set in winter, wherein a messenger appeared at a bar, and a man who knew her sat down for a drink and a story with her. She told a story about a messenger who took refuge in a cabin in the middle of nowhere during winter, thanks to the kindness of a woman living there, only to find that the woman stole her horse and left her there.

This comic looks like it was drawn mostly by hand, and it seemed like Anderson tends to do everything with electronic tools. She went all out in terms of various drawing tricks, with grayscale shading, dense hatching and cross-hatching, and her typical use of highly contrasted light and shadow. It's a cleverly-told story with a slight variation on Aesop that provided a clever twist. The one area where Anderson seemed less confident was her figure drawing. They were stiff and she didn't have a tight grasp on how bodies interact in space. Her thin line seemed ill-matched for the material and made her characters look wobbly. There's a great deal to like about Anderson's cerebral approach, especially with regard to panel design and page-to-page transitions, and it's clear that this mini is the first step of many in merging her formal sophistication with more basic character drawings and narrative.  

31 Days Of CCS, #16: Denis St. John

Denis St. John is one of a small number of CCS grads who has specialized in monsters and horror, and he touched on both things in his recent work. Quarantine Dreaming Comix is a cut above standard dream comix in that St. John took intense, lucid dreams and turned them into brief but compelling horror narratives. As always, there's a touch of the absurd in his work, like in the story where he heard howling coming from the walls; the pose of his character, wearing goggles and determinedly using a drill, made me laugh out loud. The next image, of dozens of babies in the walls, screaming their hatred for him, was both unsettling and absurd. 

There's a running theme in his dreams of good things turning horrible, like a sexual encounter leading to rot and decay, or taking care of a kid leading to the child being covered in disgusting, diseased skin. Sometimes he's the victim of a horrifying event and sometimes he's perpetrating it, like when he tricks a beautiful park ranger into going to hell with him. Another strip has him fending off a murderer in Toon Town, which allowed St. John to really show off his range as a draftsman. His use of spotting blacks, silhouettes, dense hatching and cross-hatching, and other techniques gave his work a high level of sophistication without losing that raw dream energy. 

The Mesozine Era is a zine dedicated to one of St. John's favorite things: dinosaurs. A number of other CCS alum are in it as well, including Donna Almendrala, Russ Wood Studlar, and Bryan Stone. Most of St. John's own contributions were detailed dinosaur drawings, though he did include a dream strip wherein his drawing new interpretations of dinosaurs got him yelled at by people trying to play baseball. Joey Weiser's strip comparing dinosaur hunting to getting recognition as a comics artist was amusing. Another St. John strip had an amargosaurus battling an alligator; St. John is especially imaginative in depicting the kind of movements and damage each might do. Studlar's strip about the dangers of a watering hole highlighted his skill in drawing nature. For those who like dinosaurs, this is a fun fanzine to check out. 

31 Days Of CCS, #15: Filipa Estrela

Filipa Estrela sent me a lot of comics last year for this feature, and it was clear that she was developing a number of interesting ideas all at once. Her entries for this year are further developed versions of several of her better original ideas that show off not only her ability as a cartoonist, but also as a crafter and graphic designer. 

Grow is a fascinating art object. Tucked away inside a cover with a velcro seal and the title letters laid out in glitter and glue, this is a reboot of a project about a magician who gives sentience to a beautiful mushroom, which in turn decides to become a sort of mushroom farmer. However, instead of the comic being drawn, it was done entirely by way of needlefelt and then photographed. The effect is astonishing, creating a fuzzy, magical aura on each page. Estrela maintained a rock-solid hold on the cartooning aspect in every panel in order to establish clarity and also was careful to balance aspects of the page like the relationship of bodies to each other in space. That was the most impressive thing, because it could have easily looked like things hanging in space. Instead, Estrela even introduces foregrounds and backgrounds in a number of panels without compromising the reading experience. The only thing that would have improved the experience was for the pages to be bigger and slicker, to let the colors really shine. I could easily see Estrela pursuing something like this as a hardcover in the future. 

Rioteens! is a magazine-size expansion on her Rioteens characters that she introduced in minicomics. They were actually born as characters she invented for a superhero role-playing game, but they were clearly so much fun to think about that she invented a teen magazine for them to inhabit. If the Rioteens were characters that could have appeared in the old Action Girl anthology comic, then this magazine is the sort of thing that Sarah Dyer would have delightfully reported on in her old zine. 

There's a ten-page adventure comic, wherein Kitty Swipe tries to raise money for her non-binary sister Bubblegum Hop. There are word searches, fake ads, paper dolls to cut out, question and answer sessions with the stars of the book, drawing exercises, fan art, an advice column, and extended bios for all of the characters. Estrela went all-out and did the entire thing in color, which made her characters just jump off the page. Her character designs were already clever and varied; for example, Kitty Swipe is a fat character, and this is presented in an entirely matter-of-fact way. BH is still the best, as he's a sentient black hole who wears a yellow hoodie, and he keeps his hands in it most of the time. Estrela's comics all have a delightfully upbeat quality to them that's still rooted in real-life concerns. 

31 Days Of CCS, #14: Leda Zawacki

I was well aware of Leda Zawacki's work before she went to CCS, and the comics she submitted all have a level of sophistication and polish that's indicative of an artist with a style that's close to fully-formed. That's not an accident, considering that she's been making comics for a while. Zawacki has a delicate but highly stylized line that reminds me a little of how Lilli Carre' approaches the page. There's a flat, cartoony quality to her characters that aggressively emphasizes their two-dimensional nature such that every narrative has a dreamy, magical feel. Each of these three comics provides variations on that approach.

For example, The Swinging Bridge, a story adapted for comics from Mari Navarro, emphasized its two-tone colors as the primary driver of the narrative. The dark blue-green not only represented the story's nighttime setting, it also served as the color of clothing. The brief shocks of bright yellow were narrative interjections, representing key emotional turning points. Zawacki's line is a thin one, relying on color to do most of the heavy lifting and fill up negative space. The story, following a teen and a friend who is obviously acting out against a lack of parental engagement, sees Mari go to her friend Rosana's house for her birthday. Rosana demanded that they play with a Ouija board, which freaked Mari out, but also seemed to be a strange, chaotic outlet for Rosana. The story culminated in a dangerous bike ride across a bridge and a shocking encounter that could have been much worse, especially for two Latinx girls. Zawacki mixed dread, anxiety, and confused personal identities into a visually dense but narratively clear story. 

Pomegranate Heart was Zawacki's CCS application comic, which of course meant that it had to include a snowman, a robot, fruit, and the artist in the story. Zawacki wove a sad, sweet story about using a red, fleshy pomegranate as the heart for for a robot and then for a snowman, and then had to find a way where they could be inside together without the snowman melting. This was an experiment in leaning entirely on her line art, and while it looks wobbly in some places, Zawacki's commitment to that clear line backed up by selective uses of hatching, spotting blacks, cross-hatching, and even some stippling gave the story the weight it needed to counterbalance that essential lightness of the narrative.

The Visitor was Zawacki's very loose take on the traditional Aesop's fable assignment. Based on Aesop's fable "The Astrologer," it's ostensibly about someone being so fixated on reading signs that they ignore what's around them. Zawacki, employing grayscale shading to add weight to her thin line, hit on a strong visual formula in this comic. The story was about a lonely seer doing online tarot readings when a demon came through a paid political advertisement. Being a seer, she rejected its attempts to fill her with dark thoughts, but she invited it to dinner as she noted that while she was looking at the cards for fun, she knew she had to engage the outside world eventually. It's an elegant metaphor for quarantining against the pandemic and being wary of intrusive thoughts and isolation. 

Zawacki still works best using color and obviously leans toward philosophical and thoughtful fantasy and mythology as her go-to genres for expression. She's done longer work before, and I'm curious as to how her CCS experience will alter her eventual career trajectory. 

31 Days Of CCS, #13: Ashley Jablonski

Ashley Jablonski's is just starting out as a cartoonist, but from the short works she sent me, there's already a great deal of promise in her work. While her visual approach is completely different, her early student assignments remind me a bit of what Natalie Wardlaw did, in terms of using her art to directly address her trauma. 

For example, her CCS application comic (the one that requires a robot, a piece of fruit, the artist, and a snowman) was titled Change, and it's an intense but brief meditation on the trauma that she understands she's been through because her father has paranoid schizophrenia. She detailed how cold he was growing up, then discussed being put in a caretaker role at an age when she couldn't understand what was wrong with him, then described a harrowing incident where he threatened Jablonski and her sister with a knife. She astoundingly managed to stick to the assignment when she described her father's behavior as robotic. She compared the ripening of a fruit to a snowman melting as a metaphor to talk about the changes she went through growing up with her father. The final page, which is in black and white, is a howl of a drawing: it's Jablonski herself, where "the color was taken out of my life" as she was just trying to survive.

Jablonski was ambitious in this strip, and it paid off in that drawing but cost her some clarity in other panels. She didn't quite trust her line or her use of color enough to lean on either to carry the narrative, and the result was a muddle at times. The actual page composition and ideas behind the drawings were all solid, especially the clever panel-to-panel transitions, but the actual images lacked the clarity she was going for. That said, that final page had a perfect chiaroscuro balance while highlighting the resolute but weary quality of her face. 

In The Tortoise And The Hares, Jablonski took the Aesop's fable assignment and turned it into a personal diary of her first semester away from her home state. Once again, Jablonski took a specific premise and made it personal while deftly exploring the depths of that premise. This time around, Jablonski opted for a dense visual style with a heavy line weight as she drew herself as a tortoise, slowly adapting to life around her and recognizing her own bravery in completely uprooting her life. Jablonski allowed for just enough negative space to let her drawings breathe, while still establishing the immersive quality of her drawing.

Jablonski also submitted a number of one-page comics. These range from sketches to gag work to personal reflections, all experimenting with line weights, grayscale shading, and stylistic flourishes. There's also a strip that gets at the central issue of all of her strips: the guilt and paralysis she feels toward her father. On the one hand, he not only traumatized her with threatened violence, he also witheld affection as she was growing up. On the other hand, knowing that he has a serious mental illness, one that creates paranoia and delusions, means that he wasn't in command of his faculties. It's a difficult decision to make regarding her future relationship, but it's clear that working through them on the page is as much a part of her overall process and project as an artist as figuring out her best visual approach. It's all part of the same thing, and it will be interesting to see how Jablonski continues to explore and expand on both her own outlook and mental state as well as the most rewarding ways to express herself.