Tag Archive for: comics

Cryptid Club by Sarah Andersen

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It’s that time of year again–the 2023 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards (better known as the Eisner Awards) will be held on July 21, 2023, in conjunction with Comic-Con International: San Diego. The pinnacle of comics accolades, they are named for Will Eisner who was a cartoonist, as well as a pioneer of the comic book industry and of graphic novels. Eisner valued high-quality work within his field and championed both works and creators to the public at large. The annual awards honor excellence in more than two dozen categories over the previous year. 

Even though I never quite make it through the entire list of nominees, I enjoy delving into the current nominee list and reflecting on some old favorites. This year, I find myself loving the 2023 “Best Humor Publication” nominee Cryptid Club by Sarah Andersen.  

Andersen is the author and illustrator of the popular “Sarah’s Scribbles” comic strip which uncovers the life of “an adulting introvert” which is full of delightful, awkward weirdness.  In Cryptid Club, she turns her lens to an imaginary social club composed of creatures whose existence is unproven.  Bigfoot, Slenderman, the Loch Ness Monster, Mothman, ghosts, space aliens, and a host of other characters gather to share stories of human encounters, to hassle each other and humans, and to carve out a place for themselves in the world.

Arranged primarily in single-page spreads, Cryptid Club offers a full-color mini-story on each page.  The text is tight and concise as are the jokes.  A four-panel page shows two space aliens complimenting their art skills, “Omg, you DREW that?…You are so talented…I can’t even draw a stick figure” then pulls back to a long shot of mysterious shapes carved into a hillside of chalk.  One of my favorite pages offers two vertical panels–the top a closeup shot of a famous creature of the deep shouting in a scary font, “RELEASE THE KRAKEN!” and the bottom one a wide shot showing a fenced-in baby kraken next to its mother who is reading a newspaper while deadpanning, “You’re staying in time-out, Benjamin.”  In the two-panel page “The Call of Cthulhu”, the title character stares down at a cell phone while steeling itself to answer, “Come on, Cthulhu. Pick up the phone. Your anxiety does not control you. You can do it.”  Andersen’s quirky humor shines in a spread introducing Mothman to the audience. Bigfoot describes Mothman to a ghost saying, “Have you heard the legend of Mothman? He only appears to humans before a disaster.” Then, we see a woman preparing to cut her hair exclaim, “These bangs are gonna be so cute!”

Sarah Andersen offers a delightful, funny take on the anxious moments of adulthood in a title that’s fantastic for adults and many teens.  Whether you’re into comic strips or the weird unknown, Cryptid Club is a hoot and well worth investigating.  You can find it through our e-resources Hoopla and ComicsPlus. Happy reading!

Joplin High School Cartoonist Club titles

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This was almost the shortest book review submitted here: “Read them!  They’re wonderful!”  Because that’s all you really need to know about the books published by the Joplin High School Cartoonist Club.

It’s easy to gush about the delightful results of local students’ creativity and hard work.  And, it’s loads of fun to see a new batch of artwork every year then watch audiences enjoy it, too.  Forgive my shameless fangirling, but these books are the most consistently fun, intriguing, surprising series I’ve read in a long time.

The JHS Cartoonist Club, helmed by sponsor Seth Wolfshorndl, is in its thirteenth year and has grown tenfold from a starting group of five students.  During the school year, club members meet to learn new drawing techniques, stretch their creativity, and explore storytelling through pictures as well as words–all while having fun in the process.  Each spring the Club publishes a new volume in its two ongoing series.

Clash of Champions, perhaps the more visible of the series because it plays out annually on the Club’s Facebook page, is the culmination of a lengthy comics tournament.  Beginning in the fall, club members create teams of characters who are matched against each other, bracket style, in weekly duels.  Members draw panels of “smack talk”, comics which are designed to show how and why a particular team would win a duel. Each duel’s outcome is voted on by club members.  The last team remaining at the end of the tournament wins.

Volume 8 of Clash of Champions showcases the 2019-20 school year’s tournament which was completed prior to the pandemic shutdown.  In it, 16 teams and 41 creators showcase their talents during a storytelling battle of epic proportions.  Introductions come first via the “Team Gallery” where characters’ poses hint at their personalities and where readers discover the artists behind the teams.  I love how the gallery pages are bordered in what looks like an embossed metal frame that lends a goth-steampunk vibe at the start.  The team names alone made me want to keep reading: Krankenhaus Hoodlums, Beam Battalion, Sparkle Sqawd, The Four Crustmen of the Apocalypse, and Why Not?   The battle panels reflect a wide range of aesthetic influences (from anime to He-Man to 1960s beach party movies) and a variety of media (inked-in pencil sketches to digital drawings).  After the winner is declared, the final chapter gathers fan art that club members have made of each others’ work.

There’s no playing favorites in the competition although I’m a fan of the smack talk segments.  For me, the best part of Clash is following the growth of the artists, watching their work develop over the semester, seeing who is on their game and who is challenged by the deadline in any given week.  A black-and-white format can sometimes lay bare too much when compared to the distraction of color, but here it’s an opportunity to learn and to appreciate the skill involved in creating new material quickly.

Scribbled Stories takes a different approach to self-expression and storytelling.  Club members submit tales with subjects and characters of their choice.  Although Scribbled Stories publishes an issue annually, every four years the issues are gathered in a single volume.  The students choose a theme for the bound volume and often reflect the theme in their submissions.

Also published in the 2019-20 school year, Volume 3 of Scribbled Stories collects works from 2016-20 under the theme of surrealism and shows off a new twist.  This time the Cartoonist Club collaborated on a story and main character.  Club artists made a cast of minor characters and brainstormed a plot which became a script written by Mr. Wolfshorndl.  Pages of the story were assigned to the students, and the result is a rollicking, action-packed spin through dreamland amid a host of artistic styles.

It’s the variety, ingenuity, and scope of the work that pulled me into Volume 3.  The “Character Sketches” section highlights a cast including a monocled soap bubble sporting a top hat (Mr. Fancy Bubbleman), a talking cup of coffee (Joey), and a rosy-cheeked doll who looks Rainbow Brite-meets-Chuckie (Surrealist Sophie) and is anything but boring.  Scripts of the student-submitted works are witty and poignant, thought-provoking and heart-breaking.  Although “Wake Up” uses only one word, it conveys the horror and pain and isolation of a person consumed by screen time.  “Just for One Day” explores memory and loss by arranging photographs comic-panel style with brief, superimposed text.  “Nightfall/Daybreak” spins a myth of the sun and moon with poetry in words and pictures.  There is so much to see and enjoy here!

I highly encourage you to try the fun, awesome comics by the Joplin High School Cartoonist Club.  Whether it’s Clash of Champions or Scribbled Stories or both, read them!  They’re wonderful!

A Pair of Comics–Classics and Cats

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Long Story Short: 100 Classic Books in Three Panels by Lisa Brown

Cats of the Louvre by Taiyo Matsumoto

I had a chance to reduce my “To Be Read” (TBR) pile by a handful of titles over the holidays, including some comics and graphic novels. Two of the books took an interesting approach using art to comment on other creative works.

Author and illustrator Lisa Brown’s Long Story Short: 100 Classic Books in Three Panels left me in stitches. I love her ability to distill hefty literary works into a trio of illustrated boxes and a sharply-penned sentence. C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe becomes “Don’t take Turkish delight from strangers.” Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire is boiled down to “It’s all fun and games until you have a kid.” Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle shows all the gory details of sausage making with a single word in each panel, “DON’T. EAT. MEAT.”

Brown’s pen is equally sharp when it comes to illustrations. She uses india ink on paper then colors digitally with a muted palette of earth tones, grey, and dusty blues, reds, and olive greens. When she uses a bright color–as she does for The Scarlet Letter–it’s with great effect. Picture two panels in drab browns and blacks except for the pop of white collars and a bright red “A” on the subject, “Adulteress” for Hester Prynne and “Apostate” for Rev. Dimmesdale. The payoff is in the last panel bathed in a bright red background with a white “A” for “Aftermath” above Pearl’s blonde hair and bubblegum-pink dress.

Long Story Short packs volumes (and massive spoilers) in only 65 pages. There’s a lot to take in, including amusing cross-references to other chapters. (In case you’re wondering, it’s “horror” for The Jungle.) The book’s well worth a return trip or two or three if only to catch all of the little touches. While it’s no substitute for reading an assignment, Long Story Short works as a humorous accompaniment. Give this book to a favorite English major or someone who appreciates dry wit; suggested for high school and up.

If I were giving the same treatment to my second selection, it would sound something like this, “Paintings are real. Life is surreal. Also cats.” Cats of the Louvre by Taiyo Matsumoto is not about a feline photo shoot or real-life museum cats. It is a gorgeously illustrated, surreal meditation on time and the nature of art itself.

The narrative structure–calling it a plotline is a stretch–weaves multiple stories into a surreal tale following a group of cats living in the museum’s attic, an art conservator restarting her life after a loss, a little girl who has lives in a painting, and a night watchman searching for his sister who mysteriously disappeared in childhood. Each story threads its way through the world of the Louvre where characters intersect with each other and with the art. Dialogue and visual metaphors point to Matsumoto’s thoughts on time’s fleeting nature and art’s immediate and lasting beauty.

Matsumoto’s black and white inkwork looks a lot more like a sketchbook (a refined, very accomplished one) than a graphic novel for a commercial audience. Panel lines appear hand-drawn, slightly uneven and varying in thickness while his shading and crosshatching lend the stories a hazy, dreamlike quality. He creates charming, lifelike cats who take on a slightly disturbing human appearance when the story is told from their point of view. (The effect is not nearly as bad as those in the recent Cats movie.) Adding to the surreal experience are loads of extreme closeups of everything–eyes, faces, hands, paws, paintings, architecture, desktops, papers, art supplies. Even two large cat eyes look out from the book’s spine.

Reading Cats of the Louvre is like stepping into a hushed, contemplative funhouse. It’s weird. It’s surreal. It’s overflowing with metaphors and symbolism and hidden commentary and deep thoughts. It’s not meant to be pigeonholed. There is more than meets the eye; it will reward readers who come with an open mind. A good benchmark might be The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery; if you like it, try this title.

Originally a manga (Japanese comic) series, this single-volume, English edition of Cats of the Louvre is accessible as a whole or with a pause after each chapter. Like other manga, it’s meant to be read from right to left and the book begins at what Western books identify as the back cover. Give this title to teens and adults who like the surreal and have the patience to travel over 400 pages of it.  Happy reading!

Comics Fun

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Heart and Brain: Body Language by Nick Seluk

Making Comics by Lynda Barry

Buried treasure can pop up in all sorts of places–on a tropical island, in an attic trunk, at a garage sale, or in this case, on a bookshelf.  I found these delights while looking for something else.  Isn’t that the case with a lot of things in life?

If you haven’t seen cartoonist Nick Seluk’s popular webcomic “The Awkward Yeti”, find it now.  Seluk’s humorous take on the relationship between human anatomy and human nature guarantees a chuckle.  He explores life through the eyes of Lars, a socially awkward, blue-furred, and bespectacled Yeti, who is the unwitting host to a community of cheekily entertaining internal organs.  Lungs wear sweatbands and jogging gear and are ready for anything other than exercise.  Gallbladder pleadingly offers its handmade “gifts” to everyone.  Spleen resembles a glowering ninja.  Bowel is an irritable conspiracy theorist who communicates in brown speech bubbles.  It’s the back-and-forth between charmingly optimistic, emotional Heart and pragmatic, rational Brain though that fuels the fun.

In Heart and Brain: Body Language, Seluk fills the pages with relatable inner struggles (budget vs pizza, anxiety vs relaxation, planning ahead vs living in the moment) and amusing dialogue that leave readers laughing.  Heart and Brain are the engines driving Lars and the book.  One of my favorite strips shows Heart filling Brain from a jar labeled “New Experiences” then shaking Brain vigorously; Heart then turns a tap attached to Brain and fills a bucket labeled “New Ideas”.  The magic lies in seeing Heart and Brain: Body Language for yourself because trying to capture the comic’s essence is like trying to parse comedy–dissection distracts from enjoyment.  Give this title to adults and teens who like “The Far Side” or “Calvin and Hobbes” or quirky humor in general.

Although I love to read comics, I never thought I’d be able to draw them–I know my limits.  That is, until I found Making Comics by Lynda Barry.  Barry, a nationally-known comic artist, educator, and MacArthur Fellow, is on a mission to enable everyone to discover their own creative spark.

Making Comics looks like a composition book full of doodles that’s been carried around in a backpack for half of the school year.  Each page, whatever its content, is covered in drawings and border designs and lettering in dusky watercolors lending a feel of sepia-tone except in blues and reds and yellows.  Drawings–some from Barry, some from her students who range in age from preschoolers to adults–are spontaneous and raw like those found in a sketchbook.

Barry believes that everyone is capable of art, of drawing, only that some folks have lost fluency in the language of image.  According to her, children “speak image”, “this language [that] moves up through your hand and into your head”.  She notes, “we draw before we are taught.  We also sing, dance, build things, act, and make up stories…Everything we have come to call the arts seems to be in almost every 3-year-old”.  For a lot of us, something happens along the way that separates us from creativity, especially drawing, and Lynda Barry aims to rectify that.

Following the content of Making Comics in sequence is similar to Barry’s comics class, but taking the activities out of context or in a different order is just as useful.  After an introduction designed to inspire, Barry opens concepts in “Lessons” then offers lots of exploration prompts in “Exercises”.  “Assignments” are longer, more involved activities that build on previously introduced ideas, and “Homework” takes those concepts to the next level through more intricate designs.  Thoughtful passages, hints, and tips are packed into each page; read everything!

Whether you want to reclaim that innate, easy creativity or know someone who does, this title is a great choice.  It’s also a fantastic way for teens and adults to explore particularities of the comic format.  Making Comics is a rich resource for students of all ages learning at home.  Give it a try–it’s fun and freeing.

You never know what gems you might find when you’re not looking for them.  Stop by the library and discover the treasures waiting for you!