Liz Barker’s first-year CCS comics are very interesting variations on two time-tested endeavors. The first, Fox Chicken Seed Bagis the task of Ed Emberley, who uses simple shapes such as squares, triangles and circles to tell a story. This is a fun expansion of the old problem of the farmer who has to cross a river with a fox, a chicken and a bag of seeds, but can only carry one at a time. The logical piece that Barker adds is the chicken who saves the fox in the first part of the story, thus incurring a life debt. This bit of ridiculousness extends to the chicken owing a life debt to a bag of seeds, and a quest ensues that somehow also gets wrapped up in the old “a guard lies, a guard tells the truth” trope. What makes the comic work is Barker’s talent for dialogue and comic timing.
The rooster and the maidens It is a variant of Aesop’s fable. Here, Barker works with dense pencils in this story of an imperious woman and the three young women she employs as servants. The maids first blame (and kill) the rooster for waking up their employer, then realize that she is completely unhinged and apply the same solution (the axe) to her. The dense pencil shading in the margins serves to emphasize the loose expressiveness of Barker’s gestural drawings. The entire presentation feels clunky in the best way possible: lots of first lines, best lines.