The final point is one of the anthology projects of the CCS group. This one features Dylan Sparks, Ellie Liota, Michael Albrecht and Anna Passlick. I was excited to get a copy at SPX, because I’d never seen one of these outside of the CCS library. It seems that the interpretation of the task was an interpretation of the Harvey Comics characters. The artists, who shared tasks as in an old conventional comic, chose to make a dark parody of Little Dot. The results, which include several pages of fake ads, are absolutely deranged. Little Dot, for those unfamiliar with the concept, really liked dots and things with dots. In the first story, he encounters an appaloosa (with speckled “spots”) and it kicks him in the face. In a later story, she accidentally takes her friend Little Lotta to the hospital by stirring up a beehive and her parents remove her stitches.
This leads Dot to skin her Dalmatian, show up to visit Lotta, and realize that the strip’s colors were actually Ben-Day dots. Dot starts absorbing all the colored dots in an attempt to be eternal, but Lotta grabs a shotgun from a funny Daisy rifle ad and shoots Dot in the chest. The quartet of artists take the concept absolutely all the way, using metafictional humor in a way that feels earned by diligently building not only the basic premise but also the presence of the ancillary material. Some line art is a little shaky here and there, but otherwise it just reflects the characteristics of your average Harvey comic before turning it into a sci-fi/horror story. I’m curious about the division of labor here, especially since I know and like the work of Sparks, Liotta, and Albrecht.