45 Days Of CCS, #31: Coco Fox

Coco Fox's middle-grade quasi-memoir Let's Go, Coco! is a delightful breath of fresh air in the genre. It's not a surprise that Harper Alley is the publisher, considering that they also published quirky quasi-memoirs by Jarad Greene and Colleen Frakes. Fox's is interesting because her expressive but super minimalistic style feels like it should be aimed at emerging readers, but the themes of budding pre-adolescent feelings and complex friendship dynamics put it squarely into middle-grade territory.

I actually saw Fox present this when I sat in on a class at CCS six years ago. What's interesting is that while Fox hasn't altered their style that much from when I first saw it as a draftsman, it's clear that their cartooning is so much more confident and sophisticated. The original title of the book, Right To Left, was a much better one than the generic title used here, and much more visually evocative of the plot. The plot follows young Coco into her sixth-grade year, where she will have to face life without her best friend Blair, who moves away from their small town in Indiana. Coco decides to face her anxieties and joins the basketball team.

Fox manages to delineate each of her teammates clearly. Maddie is a sarcastic bully who is talented. Coco has a crush on Tami, the team captain and mastermind. Vera is a nerdy goofball. Zander is a non-binary kid. A crucial aspect of the book is that Fox takes the basketball portions very seriously. She explains it in such a way that a non-fan can understand, but when she started to explain what a pick was very early on, I knew she wasn't going to shrink away from the importance of the actual game. This was a smart move because team politics and team drama became an important part of the plot. When Coco accidentally has her wrist broken by her coaching when attempting to demonstrate how to block a shot, her dominant hand is put in a cast. Being forced to use her left hand forms the majority of the action in the back half of the book and directly relates to how her cheerful and non-confrontational nature was used against her by those willing to exploit it or ignore her other emotions. 

There's a lot to sort out in the narrative as a result of having several important characters, but Fox never loses sight of Coco as a well-meaning protagonist who has a lot of learning to do about asserting herself. Her cartooning is so wonderfully alive and expressive, as she's able to generate a big emotional impact with simply-drawn facial expressions and gestures. It greatly helps that the color is a fairly muted two-tone affair, focusing mostly on light purples and shades of orange. Fox's line is strong and steady throughout and never gets lost in the coloring. I love that the book doesn't shy away from Coco's feelings toward one of her teammates, nor does it treat Zander with anything but respect. These days, that's a bold move for a publisher. There is a sweetness and sincerity in this narrative that was clearly entertaining for me, but I imagine that it will truly resonate with its target audience.

45 Days Of CCS, #30: Emil O'Melia

Emil O'Melia's The King Of Cats Is Dead is a beautiful, surreal, nightmarish, and colorful saga about a demonic cat named Spider who steals the soul of the King of Cats upon his death. This comic is truly a tour-de-force when it comes to combining deeply powerful & meaningful color with a strong use of line and spotting blacks. While it's a pleasure to just look at this comic, O'Melia uses a propulsive storytelling style with excellent panel-to-panel and page-to-page transitions. The story follows Spider as well as the Prince of Cats, who was supposed to ascend to the throne. 

Spider has to outwit and outlast hordes of followers in order to deliver the soul he devoured to some kind of demonic cat overlord. It's clearly a decision he starts to regret once he's done it, but there's no going back now. At the same time, the Prince delays a search party for increasingly vague reasons, until he declares he no longer intends to be king. This mini does not feature the conclusion of the story, but it's so beautifully made and with such attention to detail that hopefully it will be finished soon. 

Haunted Bathrooms is self-described as "a horror-poetry-comics chapbook," and that's about right. The mix of illustrated text, splotchy paintings, emo horror figures, and a stunningly sad story called "$950 Toilet" about the realities of exploitation under capitalism. The image of "renting a few hundred cubic feet...floating" is such a stark one, and the watercolors here add to the blunt starkness of this realization. "The Men's Room" captures a different kind of horror--the fear of one's own gender expression being literally illegal and impeding a basic human function. O'Melia's skill with color and having the right vehicle for expressing it has really led to them levelling up.

45 Days Of CCS, #29: Michael Albrecht, Ben Adkins

Ben Adkins is a first-year student, and he contributed his two iterations of some time-tested CCS assignments: adapting one of Aesop's fables and doing a comic in the style of Ed Emberley. You can sometimes tell a lot about a cartoonist's future looking at these assignments. In Adkins' case, it's clear that he's a humorist. In The Playful Ass, Adkins introduces the fable with his own characters as narrators, and you know that he had to open with an ass joke of some kind. He has one of his characters condemn the joke as soon as the other introduces it, and this bit of metahumor is effective. Adkins' line is clear and simple, almost deceptively so. He spots blacks very effectively, giving his pages depth and solidity even as his characters are fluid and expressive. In The Tedious Odyssey Of Boring Bob, Adkins uses the Emberley style (all drawings are done with basic squares, triangles, and circles) for another metafictional bit of fun. The story itself is about a boring guy who doesn't look as cool as the other characters (kings with crowns, divers with helmets, etc) he meets. When his boring qualities prove useful, he's made king, which leads him to accidentally trigger a device that reveals that all of the blocky figures are just different versions of himself. It's a fine gag that once again drills into the assignment on a conceptual level. I'm very interested in seeing what Adkins does in his own style.

Michael Albrecht has quickly shown a great deal of promise early in his career, and his most recent minis continue that trend. Rogue is a very funny and surprisingly poignant story about a rogue supercomputer and the security guard who watches it. Nicknamed "Carrot," the guard (unbeknownst to anyone else) secretly boots up the computer to keep her company. Shut down after it murdered its keepers in a bid for world domination, it now sits as a museum piece. The guard, Park, is a hilarious character, as she unreservedly treats Carrot as her friend, including the two roasting each other. There are fascinating twists and turns along with an ambiguous ending that feels like a test of humanity for Carrot. Albrecht's line is wonderfully sketchy, emphasizing gesture for the human character and making the computer feel human. 

Albrecht loves robots, it seems, and Robot Poetry Club goes in a different direction. A computer science student accidentally gives a desktop computer sentience while trying to write a program that counted all the r's in Romeo & Juliet. The computer is very insistent on its own freedom ("Hero's journey and all") and sets out on a rolling cart to seek its destiny. The computer takes the name Jill and a job in an office where they try to figure out the purpose of all of this. They flee, searching for meaning, and come across a "Robot Poetry Club" and a poem read that plunges them into the world of metaphor they had been so desperately seeking. Despite the overall silliness of the comic and its satirical tone, the consistency of the premise leads to a genuinely affecting moment regarding why we make and seek out art. Albrecht's art gets the hell out of the way of the story, enhancing the premise in subtle ways in panel after panel. The inky expressiveness of the final pages, as Jill is finally experiencing real meaning in their life, stands in stark contrast to the functional thin line featured in the rest of the comic. 

45 Days Of CCS, #28: Robyn Smith, Dylan Sparks, Kat Ghastly

Kat Ghastly's I Hunger may be short, but she packs a lot of conceptual power into its very silly punchlines. Its central idea--"What upset Cthulhu's tummy?"--is very dopey but also funny, and her gross-out drawings match the grossness of her puns. "Cult chowder," "Peopleroni pizza," and finally "This comic" are all culprits. This is like a wonderful Lovecraftian Garbage Pail Kids set. The sickly green cover is a nice indicator of its contents.

Robyn Smith's Night Fever won an Ignatz award for Outstanding Artist in an issue of the anthology Gladiolus. This is just an eight-page story, but it packs a wallop. Smith is best known for illustrating other people's stories, but she's actually an excellent writer in any number of genres. Her work has an edge that's certainly evident in this story of a group of college friends who drop acid at an outdoor Halloween party. They invite their friend Leanna to come out and meet them, and through a series of chaotic events, something horrible happens: she is dosed without her knowledge by a man she doesn't know. Smith cuts the story off before the inevitable consequences of this (something she's especially adept at--her own writing is filler-free), but the nightmarish visuals tell the reader all they need to know. 

Gallant Valor is Dylan Sparks' senior thesis, and it's one long play on gender and fantasy tropes. It's about a romance between a knight named Serim and an anthropomorphic dragon named Pet. That romance, as we learn in flashbacks, was born out of controlling and abusive relationships. For Pet, it was the king who treated her as more of a thing than someone who belonged in his court. For Serim, it was her devotion to the queen that obliterated boundaries by using her as a sex object. In both examples, it was a case of unequal power relationships taken to extreme levels. For Serim, the queen's need for total devotion led to the knight's death. For Pet, she defied her surrogate father's control and threats that she'd never fit in so she could find her own way. Finding and accepting each other was the key to their own personal transformations, as they started on their goal of marauding through the kingdoms. This was an ambitious comic, and some of the storytelling felt muddled. That includes some of the character design, which was a bit all over the place, but Sparks' line was also inconsistent. That said, Sparks nails the big shocks in this comic, and the romantic (and unsettling!) ending feels entirely earned. 

45 Days Of CCS, #27: Natalie Norris, Keena

From the very first, the comics I read from Natalie Norris dealt with trauma. Regardless of the assignment, it was clear that Norris had a burning need to work through her trauma through her art. That culminated in the first half of her memoir about a horrific sexual assault titled Dear Mini. She's currently working on part two of that story (about the aftermath of the incident), but she did a mini-comic for Paper Rocket's Mini Memoir Project. It's called Scar Tissue that I Wish You Saw, and it's about what happened when she was sent to an inpatient facility for mental illness. It's laid out plainly on page one: various forms of pain, including endometriosis, along with major depressive disorder. 

At the same time, Norris tells the story from her perspective as a 16-year-old, where her major problem was that she was in love with her older sister's boyfriend Shane. Young Natalie is the picture of the unreliable narrator, as she refuses to discuss her trauma with her doctors and seethes with anger when her doctors take away her Percocet. She sneers at another teen for being an alcoholic because she "ruined partying for the rest of your life," noting that of course, she could "handle my shit." There's a lot of two-track narrative used in this comic as she visually recalls a lifetime of medical trauma while denying trauma to her therapist. Natalie in this story is certain that she and Shane (an older drug dealer) are a perfect match, and she fumes when she reveals that her mom told him to stay away from both her daughters. This is one of Norris' best comics, as her storytelling is subtler than much of her earlier work, and it makes the depiction of her trauma all the more effective. This version of Natalie in the story is wounded but bratty, not capable of loving herself or feeling worthy of love, and the subsequent acting out is captured in such a direct but not overly obvious way.

Speaking of feeling worthy of love, her comic Belles Heures ("Book of Hours") is less a narrative than it is a series of immediate sensory impressions of the early days of a loving relationship with a man named Ima. Generally, someone's diary entries of a loving relationship are as tedious as any anecdote, but Norris is going for something else. These are loose, immediate drawings that are a revelation for Norris precisely because they had never experienced anything quite like this before. It's as though she had to capture these experiences as quickly and directly as possible, not just for fear of forgetting them, but as a way of concretizing them. In this way, it's a sort of way to prove that it wasn't all just a dream. It's a form of devotional study.

Keerthana Srinivasan, aka Keena, is a CCS student who came to cartooning by a rather circuitous path. In her early 50s, she began doing art after a lifetime in IT when her children grew up and her husband took a job in another city. Prior to CCS, she did a book in collage form using basic color shapes to tell this story, and it's called Journey. Despite featuring no drawing, it's actually a well-done piece of cartooning whose meaning is easy to grasp. She's a red shape, her husband a blue shape, and their kids yellow and green shapes, respectively. When the kids go on their own journeys, there's an especially poignant page where the red shape is shown to be old and wrinkled. When her husband goes on his own journey, she finally attempts her own on a turbulent ocean. She sees her children fly away, but her husband arrives again to act as a sail to steady her own, new journey. It's a lovely and touching story. Keena also contributed a two page piece that was more illustrated text than comics about her father near death, wanting to make sure that the suitcase that had represented his livelihood was safe. Keena has a great storytelling voice, and I'm curious to see her make something more in the vein of traditional comics. 

45 Days Of CCS, #26: Anna Sellheim

Anyone who follows Anna Sellheim on Instagram knows that her sketchbook drawings are wildly entertaining and show the breadth and depth of her talent. The Birth Of A Sketchbook Zine covers 2002-24 and sees Sellheim mostly concentrating on what she does best: drawing the female form. That extends to her ability to draw clothing and exaggerate gesture and expressions. The cover story, featuring a pair of sketchbooks getting into a tryst that leads to some unexpected consequences, is hilarious. When Sellheim commits to a particular style and lets her art do most of the talking, her drawings are particularly effective. Sellheim's use of color strongly balances decorative and expressive elements, and I especially like the way she uses deep, rich reds and purples. 

That's a reflection of Sellheim's aggressive style that tends to get in the reader's face. So many of her drawings are seething with emotion--anger, attitude, desire, and many more. While her naturalistic drawings show off her skill, her real virtues shine when she draws in an exaggerated fashion. Her 2023 Inktober Zine took that month of drawing prompts in order to learn how to draw directly from ink without other underdrawing. The results are mixed as Sellheim tries a variety of line weights and styles. Some attempts at adding more detail are muddled, but more clear-line approaches are more effective. There's also a hilarious bit where she came up with a potential story with a pair of young, gay teenaged boys and her boyfriend roasts her as one of many women her age interested in stories like this. Sellheim's nude drawings pack a lot of expressive power and I love the way she spots blacks. I really like it when she uses a thick, chunky and sketchy line, but her thinner line is every bit as expressive. At this point, Sellheim just needs to pick the right style for the right project and stick with it.

45 Days Of CCS, #25: Adrienne Adkins

Adrienne Adkins' cartooning and storytelling are smart and expressive, even if her line is a bit rough at the moment. Adkins certainly has no lack of imagination and a pretty wide range of storytelling interests. Be Not Afraid Of Bella Vol 1 posits a relationship between a person and what turns out to be an angel named Bella. The angel's form is hideous: a giant eyeball with wings, teeth, hands, and feet. However, its personality is like that of a highly insistent dog who's trying to steal meat from its owner's plates. However, this dog can bend time and space (as cleverly personified by the angel reaching around and between panels), until the person relents and hands over some steak. This is a clever, well-paced comic, even if the actual drawing isn't all that interesting. 

XxStarwolfxX is about a girl named Emma playing an online fantasy game with a friend where the characters are wolves. Her Starwolf is about to get revenge on a player named Redwolf for burning down her forest when the player behind Redwolf has to do something for their parents. It's revealed that Emma has been suspended for assaulting a boy at school but won't tell her parents why, and the boy's family is suing. The beauty of this comic is the way in which Adkins provides clues as to why she did it without explicitly saying it, with the metaphor of the forest being burned down echoing the forest design on her shirt. She's desperately trying to escape the rage that led her to beat the boy down and the words he said to her to spark that fury. Once again, the composition and cartooning are excellent, but the execution (especially the lettering) is a little rough. Those aspects of Adkins' work will be sharpened over time, but they already have a lot to say and know how to say it.