CCS Appreciation Week - Post Graduation: COMICS!
Originally published at RKdia Comics. You can comment here or there.
Unfortunately there are no weather pictures to share today, but I will say that the drive in this morning was absolutely magical! Ice still covers everything here in Hartford Village and with the low sun filtered by high, thin clouds ahead of the approaching low pressure from the west made for a spooky, sparkly and ethereal atmosphere! I felt like I was on another planet! Or at least it felt a lot like the Crystal Forest from the SNES Classic, Secret of Mana. “A Wish” by Hiroki Kikuta would have been perfect….
Anyway, for today’s CCS Appreciation Week post, I’m going to appreciate exactly what CCS is all about: COMICS!!!
I’ll start by pimping CCS Inagural Class Alumni Colleen Frakes’ latest Graphic Novel The Trials of Sir Christopher which just returned from the printers and is available for sale at her Etsy Store.
Details:
6×9″, 204 pages, black and white interiors, full color cover.
“The Trials of Sir Christopher” is a collection of two graphic novels, each completed as a part of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November of 2009 and 2010. Each chapter is 100 pages, and was completed in one month.
The story is about a bumbling knight, Sir Christopher, and the monsters he battles.
Colleen is just another fine example of a CCS graduate who is out there and just DOING IT. She’s making amazing comics and producing at a blistering pace. A Xeric grant winner (another fine CCS tradition as my fellow 2010 Alum Melissa Mendes is a recipient this year!) and all-around good person, Frakes is the last remaining member of her Inaugural Class still living and working in White River.
CCS Offers probably the best variety in the kinds of comics being produced in any one place in the US today. Despite the small class sizes, each person who attends CCS is bringing a different skill set, and different desires to the table. Those desires all result in some amazing comic producing, further resulting in a rich supply of comics for anyone’s reading tastes.
It all begins with the amazing comics students make while still in attendance at CCS. They are usually the launching points for both future individual and collaborative works. From the Anthology Project to the Golden Age Project (for collaborative efforts,) to individual journal comics and Senior Thesis’s, most projects seen after graduation have their seeds planted while still attending the school.
Let’s focus on a few such examples of both in-school comics and resulting outside school comics (and the variety within:)
GOLDEN AGE PROJECT.
Each year the freshman return from Winter Break and face the most daunting of tasks: a 2-week, full color, 34 page, golden age style comic book created in teams of 6 plus one hard-pushing editor! Most CCSers agree, this project is the single best assignment that is executed at the school yearly, and the books will serve those who work on them very well for years to come!
Collaborations/Anthologies
Many anthology groups have come out of CCS and several have seen both success and enormous popularity and recognition each year at all the local and not-so-local independent comics conventions. These groups all click together around a theme or style of story telling (or not) and despite the range of visual styles, the cohesion and collaborative efforts become further hot-beds of artistic development when time in the bubble of CCS is over.
Here are some GREAT CCS anthologies that continue to feature talented storytelling, from old and new faces:
Sundays
4-Square/IKJK
Werewolf!
MegaManthology
Thesis Projects
Thesis projects don’t always become what a CCSer works on after graduation, but for many of us, they do. My own Thesis, a 34 page b&w world-building fantasy comic called Citadel, is the comic project I continue to work on, and hope to turn into a weekly-updating webcomic, as time permits. Again, each artist comes from a unique background with unique sets of storytelling and artistic skills and desires. All original and all amazing, here’s a look at some CCSers who continue to work on the projects they launched as their MFA Thesis:
Web Comics:
Life is Good
Billy The Dunce
Mermaid Hostel
Series Print Comics:
Only Skin
Amelia
Snake Oil
Zines/Mini Comics/Experimental Comics
Polite Fiction
Unpopular Comics
Clare
And this of course is only the beginning! It’s almost unfair to only link so few of the many, many amazing comics that come out of CCS and it’s Alumni every day! This is just a small sampling of the variety of styles you can find! Please check them out and then go beyond and hit the links section for even MORE CCSers and their work!
-RD