31 Days Of CCS, #5: The Final Dot

The Final Dot is one of the CCS group anthology projects. This one features Dylan Sparks, Ellie Liota, Michael Albrecht, and Anna Passlick. I was excited to get a copy at SPX, because I've never seen one of these outside of the library at CCS. Looks like the take on the assignment was a take on Harvey Comics characters. The artists, who shared tasks like in an old mainstream comic, chose to do a dark parody of Little Dot. The results, which include multiple pages of fake ads, are absolutely unhinged. Little Dot, for those unfamiliar with the concept, really liked dots and things with dots on them. In the first story, she meets an appaloosa (with speckled "dots"), and it kicks her in the face. In a later story, she accidentally puts her friend Little Lotta in the hospital stirring up a beehive, and her parents take away her dots..

This leads Dot to skin her dalmation, show up to visit Lotta, and realizing that the colors in the strip were actually Ben-Day dots. Dot starts absorbing all of the color dots in a bid to be eternal, but Lotta grabs a shotgun from a hilarious Daisy rifle ad and shoots Dot in the chest. The quartet of artists takes the concept absolutely all the way, using metafictional humor in a way that feels earned by diligently building up not just the basic premise but also the presence of the ancillary material. Some of the line art is a little wobbly here and there, but they otherwise just nail the features of your average Harvey comic before turning it into a sci-fi/horror story. I'm curious as to the division of labor here, especially since I know and like the work of Sparks, Liotta, and Albrecht. 

31 Days Of CCS, #4: Sierra Edwards, Wayne Carter

Kiki is a small departure for the talented Wayne Carter. This 8-page mini is done in full color (I think it's a Risograph comic), and it packs a lot of punch. It's about two brothers who play a fighting video game on a day when the weather forces them to stay indoors. The real action of the comic is hearing a fight between their mom and dad, as the former accuses the latter of cheating. There's a loaded question about why "Kiki" is calling the house, with a response that she's "keke'n" (gossipping) with everyone. The competing narratives (visual vs the unseen fight between the adults that the kids keep trying to drown out with the TV but find it doesn't get loud enough) are heartbreaking precisely because the kids aren't all too surprised. The last page is a splash after a lot of 4-panel grids, and we see police cars pulling up to the house. This is a great example of working around a narrative without showing it; the pink and purple palette is the color of bruises. The visual of a fighting game standing in for the actual conflict, especially as a way for the boys to work out their aggressions and frustration, was extremely affecting. Carter was already good, but this represents a real levelling up.

Man Rock Lake looks like another Riso comic, and it's by Sierra Edwards. Each page is a splash, starting with the titular man on a rock in a lake. From the very beginning, it's an ontological query, as the man wonders if anyone else is there. He receives an immediate answer of "no," which then turns into an eventual negation of reality. It's cleverly done, as the final negation doesn't even have language--it's simply a dark page minus all of the original elements. The cartooning seems pretty basic here, but the real meat of it is more conceptual than visual. I'd love to see more of Edwards' work. 

31 Days Of CCS, #3: Ana Two, Iris Gudeon

Ana Two is one of the most exciting artists to emerge from CCS this decade (and I believe this so fervently, that we will be publishing book by them soon). This little mini, Storm Drain, came from this year's Riff Raff anthology, which in turn is edited by CCS alum King Ray. This is only a 4-page, but so many of Two's interesting storytelling elements are at work here. This is a two-track narrative, with the first arc being about a nameless narrator leaving behind a journal on a napkin that yearned to be drained, washed away, and become a new person. This accompanies the distorted, psychedelic imagery of a body wasting away, becoming skeletal, and finally being reformed. The bottom third of each page is taken up by big text, acting as a sort of call-and-response with the rest of the narrative. Every gesture and statement Two makes in their comics is big. The emotions are over-the-top, bursting out--uncontainable. The desire to live, to die, to control, to be controlled, supercedes everything else, and the exaggerated art reflects. 

I find Iris Gudeon's strange little comics to be utterly baffling in a way I enjoy. The figures (usually animals) are simple and cute, the humor is often corny in a deliberately labored way, and it all amounts to what you see is what you get. There's no larger message, no intricate character work, no intense drawings. It is purely strange and cute gag work, but less in terms of having punchlines and more in terms of one artist's fancy flowing smoothly and freely on the page. All of this is true about Standing Cats, whose sensibilities are somewhere between Dr. Seuss and B.Kliban. Drawn in what looks like colored pencils, there's a vibrancy to these yellow cats going about various activities, including building chairs (with or without a sense of obligation), doing taxes, and staring at the sun. It's just a bit of nonsense, but I always look forward to this kind of nonsense from Gudeon. One thing I did notice is that their line is much more confident here than it was in their earlier minis. 

31 Days Of CCS, #2: Daryl Seitchik & Ellie Liota

Daryl Seitchik has built up an impressive body of work since their first minis over a dozen years ago, and I was especially excited to see another "Missy" comic. These comics are adapted from her childhood diaries, and Seitchik seamlessly works that material into a visual presentation that offers up ironic, funny, cruel, and deeply sad juxtapositions against the original text. As the title suggests, the new Missy 9/11 is Seitchik's impressions of the 9/11 terrorist attack as an 11-year-old in middle school. An entry a few days before the event finds her lamenting her body image and slow going through puberty. The next entry is two days after 9/11, and she's already moved on. The rest of the comic is structured as a news report, starring Daryl as a newscaster clad in a red jacket, first commenting on the school cafeteria's food and then moving on to 9/11 itself. A later story where that particular date had its own family meaning is a fascinating anecdote, and young Seitchik's attempts at creating a sense of gravity with her text are painfully earnest. Seitchik's cartooning, as always, is fluid and assured, and the red, white & blue color palette adds an additional satirical touch. 

Ellie Liota's Foreward is an older comic, done as part of the Ed Emberley assignment at CCS. This assignment calls for students to draw a comic in the style of Emberley: built on circles, squares, and triangles. It's a reduction of line to its basics that asks a cartoonist to focus instead on the cartooning that can be created through this simplicity of form. Liota further constrains things by rendering everything within a six-panel grid. She deliberately plays around with negative space by not introducing any kind of backgrounds--the reader is asked to focus on a tiny figure and what they have to say. Liota essentially turns this into a meta exploration of Emberley's technique, focusing on formal elements as the character brings forth various colorful objects. Later, it becomes meditative, as the figure asks the reader a number of questions. It's playful all the way through, and that sense of play through the motion on the page is the essence of Emberley's work. 

31 Days Of CCS, #1: Colleen Frakes

Kicking off another year of reviews of alumni and students of the Center for Cartoon Studies, it's fitting that I should start with Colleen Frakes. This is the 20th anniversary of the school, which is frankly astonishing. It points to the need for and viability of a focused curriculum for comics, as comics have become a more pervasive medium in the past twenty years. Frakes was one of the first graduates of CCS, and she's maintained a steady practice even as she's had to go through a few odysseys in order to get published. I've always enjoyed her take on fairy tales and myths, as well as her autobiographical material, and she produced quite a bit in the past year. 

After a delay to finish her graphic novel Knots, Frakes finished another long-running project, Iron Scars. That was originally released as a series of short minicomics, but she finished the back half in a nearly 200-page collection. A lot of Frakes' work is informed by her unusual childhood growing up on a prison island off the coast of the state of Washington. Iron Scars reimagines that island as originally having been claimed by faeries until humans stumbled upon it and settled it without permission. In the first book, it's established that faeries were not only stealing human children and turning them into changelings, they were also making their parents forget that they even had children. Opposing them were the witches of the island, including the bizarre, doddering Sea Witch. She was one of many fun character designs, as she was essentially a humanoid pile of seaweed and fish. 

The action of this book starts with some kids who managed to open a portal to the Faerie realm in order to rescue their missing siblings. The more interesting part of the story is the multi-generational conflict among the witches, especially as it's revealed that a war between Faerie and the witches traumatized the family and led to a couple of deaths. Frakes did some very clever world-building in setting up how each witch was different: a sky witch and a wood witch, but also a book witch and a math witch. Frakes never skimps on putting her characters in danger and creates some stakes that have teeth, and the action sequences in Faerie are harrowing and unpredictable. The changelings really play to Frakes' strengths as an artist, as their simplicity is amplified by essentially being little piles of black ink. 

Possibly due to the delay in finishing the book, Frakes' style noticeably changes about halfway through, as she refines her normally chunky line weight into something thinner. The lettering also changes from all caps to mixed-case, and it's also thinner and clearer. The change is a little jarring, and I don't think it was an improvement. Indeed, that chunky line was one of the things I liked best about her art. Iron Scars has a lot of characters, and they're sometimes hard to keep track of, but Frakes keeps the narrative pretty steady even with such a large cast. I'm glad she finished it, especially as it touched on a lot of images from her old Tragic Relief minicomics series. 

Frakes' new series is called Cursed, appearing on her Patreon. You can see her new style in its full form here, no doubt influenced by making Knots. This is in full color, and that thinner line makes a lot more sense with color. The first chapter finds Baba Yaga (a recurring character in Frakes' comics) turning a village girl into a horse after she revealed the girls went to the nearby city to have children.  The second finds a witch rejecting a local woman for fear of what a romance between them might bring, as well as various talking animals and some odd quests. This one's just getting warmed up, but I really like Frakes' use of decorative touches and her use of color. Cursed also feels a little lighter and more whimsical than many of her fantasy stories. 

How Are You Doing? is Frakes' latest catch-up memoir. I've said it before, and it's still true--Frakes' self-caricature is one of my favorites in all of comics. There's a slightly rubbery quality to the way she draws limbs that's perfectly cartoony and fits snugly with her mix of sincerity and cynicism. There's also a sense of how profoundly upsetting and awful the world has become--how does one react? Make comics, raise your kid, try to teach others. There's also a bit of family drama in there, which is rare since Frakes rarely writes about her family in the present tense. As always, I prefer her heavier line weights, and there's plenty of these comics in there. 

Finally, there's Hourly Comics: 2020-2025. I find such comics gimmicks often have limited long-term appeal, but the aforementioned virtues of Frakes' line paired with year-to-year changes and similarities make for a surprisingly cohesive package. For example, one highlight each year was going on a walk with a friend and her dog with a gloriously lustrous coat. We also get to see Frakes & family deal with COVID and watch her daughter jump from being a newborn to a toddler. Frakes has worked on her line, her cartooning, and her storytelling relentlessly for well over 20 years now, and her commitment to her craft and joy in her storytelling are apparent on every page. 

Suzan Colon's Wrasslin' Centaurs

Suzan Colón was a student of mine at SAW (Sequential Artists Workshop) last year, and she hit on an ingenious concept that she's working to bring to a longer form in her series Wrasslin' Centaurs. (Full disclosure, she listed me as an editor of this comic.) The concept is, on the surface, a silly one: a world where mythological creatures like centaurs and cyclopes are real and living in the modern day. This is a possible setting for a high-fantasy narrative; instead, the titular centaurs are struggling pro wrestlers in an independent league. The in-ring narrative does provide a lot of action, but this comic is really a romance narrative above all else. Colón has a strong ear for dialogue, but it's her visual eye for detail that makes this a fun comic. 

Her figures are cartoony and appealing, drawing from a Dan DeCarlo Archie tradition. However, Colón is something of a maximalist, often layering lots of extra gags and details beneath the clear action of the character narrative. That extends to the details on the cover, easter eggs about the extended world they live in, and decorative/humorous details on the inside and back covers. What's most important is that Colón  quickly establishes the set-up and the character motivations, though one of the three centaurs is not named until the very last page. Various romantic configurations are also established, and they are all filtered through a fantastical lens (they are creatures) in a manner that reflects everyday concerns (concern over dating a centaur because he doesn't have a stable job). Within that fantastical lens, Colón draws in a mostly naturalistic style, leaning into exaggeration to enhance humor or action. Upon reading this short comic, one immediately wants to know more about the characters. 

Tanya Dorph-Mankey's Count The Lights #2

The second chapter of Tanya Dorph-Mankey's queer wrestling epic, Count The Lights, ratchets up the tension between the intense heel wrestler Alan Jacobs and his infuriatingly casual rival Ryan Roberts. The story is told from a kayfabe perspective; that is, that the matches and stories behind them are real. Dorph-Mankey works big: big pages, big panels, big fights, big emotions. Wrestling here serves a function not unlike the songs in a musical: when the emotion of a situation is so overwhelming that mere speech no longer suffices to express it. As such, the actual wrestling moves all feel authentically drawn, and Dorph-Mankey is careful to pay a lot of attention to detail in how the men move in the ring. Jacobs is ambitious and clearly has a lot to prove in returning to the East Coast, and he can't stand how Roberts treats things like he's indulging in a punchline only he understands. 

The attraction that one would normally be subsumed in this kind of narrative is made plain and then demystified by the other members of his wrestling faction. The ridiculously bearded brothers Max & Jeremy are simultaneously his friends, his supporters, and also his enablers. The cruel leader of the faction, Caelum, tells Alan to fuck Roberts and get it over with. Roberts starts getting in his head and in his dreams. In one sequence, it's difficult to tell what's an actual match and what is the dream that he wakes up from. It's obvious that the lack of clarity is part of the point, but it felt a bit like cheating to advance their flirtation that far with so little warning, only to negate it. That thread is picked up again more effectively later, even as Jacobs continues to deny not just attraction, but his deeper feelings for Roberts as well. There are also signs of jealousy, as the easy friendship of Roberts' faction is very different than the survival-of-the-fittest quality he has with Caelum. The chapter ends with Jacobs once again trying to sublimate these feelings in the ring and challenge the champion, the mysterious masked wrestler Orion. There's a classic wrestling face-off, as Dorph-Mankey blends wrestling conventions with comics storytelling conventions in a way that feels both bombastic and organic.