45 Days Of CCS, #12: Ellie Liota, Clover Ajamie

Clover Ajamie is a CCS student whose comic Bar Back is a lovely little slice-of-life romance featuring queer characters. This isn't so much a story as it is a brief character impression. It follows Cass, a trans man and bartender who's about to go on their shift. Some romantic possibilities are immediately implied, as Cass's partner Andie asks if a cute bartender named Ryan will be there. This is a great example of a comic that uses color to advance the emotional narrative of a story. The base color wash is a coral-pink, and the accents are a lime-green. That's an interesting choice as an accent, because that particular hue tends to be associated with sickly images. Ajamie reimagines it as a sort of loose neon energy (the bar's sign is in this color) that gives emphasis to the romance later in the comic between Ryan and Cass. There's no real tension or story in this book other than romantic tension; nothing bad happens, nor do we learn much about these characters. That's not the point of the story, however; it's a moment in time, the sort of perfect moment that embeds itself in our consciousness, and Ajamie's use of color emphasizes this. 

Ajamie's Fairies, self-described as a work in progress, builds on the romance aspects of Bar Back in the context of a village of fairies that focuses on the teens. The black and white pencils are delicate and almost fragile, using a thin line designed to play up the fabulist qualities of the forest. Ajamie goes back and forth in time, cutting between different characters and winding different stories into each other. It reminds me a bit of Robert Altman-style scene flipping, as Ajamie builds character narrative into the world-building aspects of the story. Every detail we learn about the fairies is part of learning something else about one of the characters. For example, we see one fairy grow angry at her friend for making fun of her grandfather, who builds a device to help him take a shower. The plot focus of this part of the story, a dance for young fairies, is integrated with the embarrassing (to a teen) overattention from a mother, the boasts of fairies as to their attractiveness, and nerves about dancing. Ajamie succeeds by turning the fantastic into the mundane, as the fantasy trappings recede into finding out what makes each character tick.

Ellie Liota's Lamb To Slaughter is the kind of horror comic that at its heart is based on a really nasty gag. The style and boldness of its gore recalls Emily Carroll, but Liota's voice and style are uniquely hers. A big part of that distinction is Liota's immediately establishing this as a story about class as much as it is anything else, and she uses the anthropomorphic animal characters for both literal and metaphorical purposes. It's fiendishly clever, as the story's final, shocking swerve is entirely earned, with any number of clues establishing it along the way. In this story, we see a wolf coming back to her noble family's elaborate and extensive manor house. She's greeted by a rabbit servant and then her mother, who is disappointed by bringing back just two sheep. The reader is then introduced to house intrigue, as the rabbit is the wolf daughter's lover, and they are planning to run away together. However, something is off about the whole thing, even as the wolf mother kills the rabbit after overhearing the conspiracy. That leads the wolf daughter to nearly peel off in fear, until she sees the bust of a ram above the door; with renewed purpose, she trudges back to set up the amazingly clever climax that immediately reveals the title has a double meaning. Liota's cartooning is appropriately visceral, with the soft color tones giving way to the deep red of blood. It's rare that a cartoonist can successfully keep a protagonist's motive hidden for the majority of the story, but Liota pulls it off by shifting the narrative sand with such a fine level of detail that the reader never knows what hits them. 

45 Days Of CCS, #11: Daryl Seitchik

Anyone who's followed my reviews over the years will know that Daryl Seitchik instantly became one of my favorite cartoonists from the very beginning of her career. Her storytelling sensibilities, her fragile line, her deadpan sense of humor, and her interest in mysticism and aesthetic wonder are all very much my sort of thing in a way few cartoonists are. (Side note: I feel so strongly about this that Daryl was one of the first artists I approached when Fieldmouse Press started soliciting books for publication, and her NOW AND OTHER DREAMS remains a proud achievement as a publisher.) 

Seitchik works in a number of different styles. Her Missy comics may be my favorite, as they are thinly-veiled memoir from the point of view of a child and later a teen. Seitchik has a deep understanding of that voice, and that's carried over to some of her more recent projects. She's taken her experience as an after-school teacher for kids and spun that into some interesting comics. 

Class From Hell describes a hilariously bad day. Teaching in Vermont means that kids often get their socks wet and are bundled up to go outside. The art here is scribbly, as Seitchik was clearly trying to dash these down as quickly as possible, and the immediacy of the line contributes to its frazzled energy. Seitchik's deadpan sense of humor is also on display, as they're barraged by questions. When asked when class is over, they reply, "in 25 years" with the biggest look of resignation ever on their face. Later, total chaos reigns at snack time as the kids (including one too young to be there) put their pretzels in water, yell loudly, play with Pokemon cards out of turn, refuse to draw, and start throwing tennis balls. That concludes with Seitchik having to yell at them, taking the very last of her reserves, reducing her on the page to a puddle with hair. Seitchik took a series of anecdotes and constructed several narratives around them and threw in references to her own mental health and a potential desire to have children. 

Interview With A Unicorn Expert was done in Seitchik's usual style, and it also picks up a thread from teaching. This time around, she notices the ubiquity of unicorn imagery. T-shirts, hoodies, horns, you name it. Seitchik decides they want in on this secret society, and so they interview what appears to be a leading expert. The result is a series of questions with funny answers that are taken with grave seriousness. This includes Seitchik interrogating them on how they survived the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, and the girl spins a yarn about a cave the unicorns hid out in. Once again, it's Seitchik's deadpan sense of humor and total willingness to go along with the story that makes it work. Seitchik's skill as someone who is always observing and listening is at the heart of their work as a cartoonist. 

45 Days Of CCS, #10: Ana Two

Ana Two's comic Playtape is a masterful example of psychological horror that evolves into CNC kink. There's an attention to detail that heightens the tension of the comic from the very beginning, dipping deep into the comic's narrative and thematic references to film. Starting with the translucent cover of a DVD that's filled in with an image beneath it, Playtape explores hidden layers and secrets that are only exposed after enormous stress. 

The story follows Uma, a film editor who receives a DVD on her doorstep without her knowledge. The bizarre video is of a masked, hooded figure who's created a dummy version of her. It's creepy and invasive, and Uma immediately sets out and accuses her assistants and ex-boyfriend, who are baffled as to what she's even talking about. She continues to receive DVDs that are increasingly creepy and sexual in nature, and it finally breaks her in an unexpected way. Even as the most recent DVD includes the hooded figure introducing rope and getting increasingly graphic, it leads Uma to take control of the situation in a surprising way. The end of the comic, which includes the identity of the stalker (which is almost completely unimportant) utterly reframes every interaction seen in the comic in terms of BDSM power relationships. In the end, the Uma transforms being the object of desire into something very different. Ana Two's cartooning excels in capturing this transformation, including a clever use of the De Luca effect when Uma walks up the stairs and into her apartment, feeling inexorably drawn to getting the next video, "like I was being led to the guillotine." This is a smart character study that constantly pushes and redefines the protagonist on nearly every page, and each new detail builds on the next. 

45 Days Of CCS, #9: Wayne Carter

Wayne Carter's Ben is a hilarious takedown of a character that the reader slowly learns is not exactly what it might seem at first. On page after page, an unseen narrator warns us that this fellow Ben is "the worst," and lists a litany of sins, missteps, bad taste, and just plain obnoxiousness. Ben is drawn simply--circular head, conical hat, and no mouth. The simplicity of the character design and drawing is key to the actual jokes/accusations, which get increasingly absurd. Stories like "Baby Ben would give himself homework and grade it. e would later call this his 'genius era'" reflect the astounding specificity of Ben's generally obnoxious behavior. 

However, about halfway through, the reader starts to wonder, "Why am I reading this? Who is giving this one-sided account of this asshole?" In a scene where his attempt at karaoke is a failure, we see a mysterious figure in the background taking notes. After several more pages of this (including one laugh-out-loud mention that Ben only reads books written by millionaires, with Gwyneth Paltrow being his favorite author), we are introduced to Pamela, who "sees through it all." She's following him around, recording every dumb and regrettable thing that he does. The exact nature of their relationship isn't revealed until near the end, and it's a credit to Carter that he sustained this long series of insults for as long as he did. Ben is sort of a shaggy dog story, but it's a really good shaggy dog story, and the back cover has a follow-up to the narrative that pretty much confirms everything we see in the story. 

Carter's comic Candy Confessional is even funnier and shows off both his comedic and conceptual chops. The characters are anthropomorphic pieces of candy, and the lead character is a young woman concerned that she is "going sour" because of something horrible she did. Going to confession, she tells Father Carmel (who barely seems interested, as he's playing with a ping-pong paddle with an attached ball) about a bar fight she got in. Furious at a pushy ex at the bar, she threw a bottle at him after a cutting remark. The whole has Carter's highly stylized line and bright color scheme, but it's his commitment to the bit that makes it work. Carter also submitted Nowhere, an illustrated zine that features a different compliment or insult he received throughout his life. This is done in a completely different visual style, as Carter shows off his drawing chops in frequently disturbing and even horrific images, with lots of splattered ink and moody shading. 

45 Days Of CCS, #8: Kristen Shull

One of the things I like most about Kristen Shull is her genuine sense of curiosity about the world. She's not one to make assumptions, and this leads her to being open to a number of possibilities. In her mini Creative Spark, she talks about being around a bunch of programmers who thought using generative AI to create art was a marvelous thing. Shull spends the duration of the mini pondering if AI is just another tool that creates new possibilities, or a blatant appropriation of the works of others. She gets deep into the idea of which is more important: the creator or the creation? She applies this to problematic creators and how we should approach their work. At heart, however, she hits on the concept that art is a means to connect and communicate with others something from their own consciousness. AI isn't capable of that; it's like taking someone else's words and claiming they are your own expression. There is a fine line between influence and plagiarism, and AI, as currently constituted, absolutely bulldozes that line. 

Shull is quick to note that the urge for a shortcut to make the labor of art easier is hard to resist. She works exclusively digitally these days, something she started doing toward the end of her three year run doing a diary comic. When she started doing it, you could see the quality of the work immediately improve and on a consistent basis, as she was no longer running herself ragged drawing the other strips too quickly. However, working digitally erased some of the more interesting quirks in her drawing when she actually took the time to do them; you can see this in her fantasy work, which was done on paper. While her comics overall are pretty consistent in terms of drawing, they don't quite have the same liveliness they once had, and that might be related to her thinking of fantasy comics as a completely different kind of process. 

One thing that's certainly true of Shull is that she has a knack for creating a compelling personal narrative in the form of anecdote and connecting it to deeper feelings. Uphill is about her learning how to snowboard. She discusses being a skier in her youth and an athlete as a rugby player, but trying to snowboard absolutely kicked her ass. That feeling of wiping out in the snow again and again, of seeing no progress, brought her back to a rugby game where a superior opponent just mauled her team despite her best effort. Shull is at heart an action cartoonist, and the sequences where she's snowboarding and then playing rugby are not only exciting, but they work in perfect concert with the emotional narrative. At the end of the day, it was encouragement ("You're doing so well!") in both cases that kept her going, even if she didn't believe it. The design, the coloring, the placement for lettering, all contributed to this mix of dynamic action and thoughtful contemplation. 

For a bit of fun, Shull gave me a copy of Left Handed Shrek, a sketchbook zine featuring artists drawing Shrek with their non-dominant hand. There are some fun artists in here, and I tink I liked Coco Fox's drawing best, although Natalie Norris' was also quite cute. 

45 Days Of CCS, #7: Colleen Frakes, Coco Fox, Mary Shyne, Carl Antonowicz

Today's entry features short reviews of very short minis by a number of creators. Most of them are in the middle of longer projects, and these minis represent something they can have at shows. 

Starting off with Colleen Frakes, she's from the first CCS graduating class and is still at it. Her first major-publisher book, Knots, will be coming out in September of 2024. For SPX 2023, she did a mini called Where Have You Been?, and it's a funny little autobio comic that talks about the past few years. While Frakes usually does variations on fantasy stories, her self-caricature has long been one of my favorite in comics, and I enjoy the exasperated body language in these comics. Frakes flashes back to how the past few years have felt lost for a lot of people. During this period, Frakes had a kid (who is nearing kindergarten age) and had a book dropped from a publisher. There's a hilarious anecdote where an editor told her that the book was dropped not because Frakes got pregnant, but because her "art was bad." Frakes' pen line remains a joy to look at; she has a keen understanding of the in-between spaces in drawing big scenes. 

Another artist working on a longer book is Mary Shyne. Her brief but funny mini Robbing O'Hare's Weed Box features the main characters from her upcoming book, Graduation Day. It's a time loop story involving two best friends in high school on their graduation day. This fragment is about their wanting to rob the Cannabis Amnesty Box in Chicago's O'Hare Airport, and the various shenanigans they get up to in order to do it. Shyne loves crazy page composition, and even here, she uses a page with slanted panel lines (including the rare trapezoidal panel in the middle of a page) and an open page layout. That doesn't detract from her winning character design, because even in the span of these four pages, Shyne gets across a strong sense of self for both of them. 

Coco Fox also has a book coming out titled called Let's Go, Coco! Fox has leveled up as a cartoonist as much as anyone I've ever seen from CCS, and she did a quick mini for SPX called Just Kitten'. It's a beautifully designed mini with a bunch of cat puns that are awful, but Fox milks each joke with an elaborate visual set-up and doubles down on the pun. The one about "Caturday Night Live" is especially well-done, as she layers three levels of puns in the punchline. 

Carl Antonowicz is an artist who is fascinated by multimedia presentations of comics with performance and music. He did a performance of his upcoming book The Ardent (full disclosure: it's coming from Fieldmouse Press and I'm editing it) at SPX in 2023, with a full array of props and sound effects. His brief mini Open Casket Soundsystem: The Great Beast is paired with a set of musical pieces that can be found on Bandcamp or his patreon. It's the usual sort of Antonowicz comic and it continues to follow his extensive interest in cults and how they operate on a psychological level. Here, the cult in a postapocalyptic setting is following the Great Beast, a monstrous creature indifferent to their presence. He is unthinking and unyielding, devouring all of the detritus of a former civilization that's in his path, with his followers eating his waste. It's bleak and once again points out the utter uselessness of rigid belief systems in the face of a nihilistic and uncaring world. Antonowicz's ratty line is perfect for depicting charred, decaying flesh and piles of bones. 

45 Days Of CCS, #6: Go Press Girl!

Today's entry is the initial output of an exciting new publisher, Go Press Girl! Spearheaded by Violet Kitchen (editor) and Rachel Bivens (designer), they already have a lot of publishing experience in resurrecting The Ladybroad Ledger, the broadsheet anthology featuring women and non-binary folks from Vermont. Both of them lean toward poetic comics with strong emotional narratives, and their initial entries here are no exception. 

Ugly Bread is from Bivens and done on a Risograph. It's a beautiful comic about the creative process and te goals that matter most: how it connects to others. What's especially clever is the narrative style: it starts as a kind of narrative recipe before easing into more general commentary on baking as a highly personal craft. The emphasis is on the connections made: the smell of the bread, sharing it, nourishing yourself and others, and above all else--repeating it. It is the repetition that hones craft. It is the intent that creates meaning, even if it is not "perfect." The process is physical and deliberate, and the results of getting better in public as a baker are more important than what the bread looks like. It's a wonderful metaphor for cartooning or any kind of creative process, but Bivens' background as a baker is uniquely suited to executing it. There's a beautiful sequence where flour billowing up is represented by line erasure, an ingenious solution that shows how minimalism can be used so effectively in cartooning. Her cartooning throughout is nuanced and sensitive, with an emphasis on gesture and facial expressions. 

How To Fall In Love. is by Kitchen, and it sees her truly leveling up in terms of the dynamism of her line. Printed in landscape, Kitchen takes advantage of all that left-to-right space using second-person narration, even as she's writing about her own stand-in character. This is a story about how the desperate need to connect can lead to losing one's own self. Writing "you are a space to be occupied," there's a brilliant sequence where the figure turns herself into a welcome mat, desperately seeking the attention of the people who come into her space, even as their presence also revolts her. Later, there's another sequence about being touch-starved, and how they must resist the urge to fall in love with their hairdresser. That segues into another brilliant sequence of an intimate encounter where the stand-in is drawn in red and the other figure is in black, and she can't quite touch him or be touched. The ending is a howl, as the figure ignores the narrator in search of their own solutions, walking into a crimson sea of hands. Kitchen is so clever as a cartoonist, constantly finding new visual solutions to solving the emotional narrative of this story that deeply resonate with the reader. Kitchen's talent has been obvious for a long time, but she's upping her degree of difficulty in a way that doesn't feel ostentatious; instead, she's expanding her visual toolbox in exciting and innovative ways. 

Finally, fellow CCS grad Cathy Mayer's The Last Time I Saw Deborah is also emotionally complex and visually compelling, but she does it in the confines of a more conventional narrative. This one is a slow-burning mystery, and the fact that it's a mystery isn't even apparent until the end. It's about a camping trip to a lake undertaken by two women who are childhood friends. The nameless narrator is clearly worried about her longtime friend Deborah, whom she calls Dee. There are some lighthearted shenanigans surrounding a B&B, swimming, and camping, but there's a lurking darkness underneath. It starts when the narrator asks Dee about her old car, and it's revealed that Dee's malignant husband Ted wrecked it while drunk. Other questions about her life are deflected, even as Dee reflects back on "Bernadette," the playground boat they used to play on that offered infinite possibilities. For Dee, all of those possibilities were clearly whittled down. The central mystery of the story is one that Dee can't confess to her friend, but she finds a number of different ways to clue her in, the final one being giving her the keys to the car to look for something and the narrator opening up the trunk. Mayer's green wash and beautifully sketchy line are wonderfully expressive, and her character design was perfectly evocative of the narrator who was emotionally open and Dee, who was closed off. It's Mayer's use of restraint--the lines she doesn't draw, the character details she doesn't reveal--that make every emotional clue feel so much more potent.