August 3, 2006

Wakka Ciccone draws her comic book illustrations over a light board in her home studio in Yellow Springs. The second volume in the Sihm comic series was published in May.

By Lauren Heaton

In many ways, local resident Wakka Ciccone is just what one might imagine a comic book artist to be. She goes by the name of a comic book character and works in a restaurant washing dishes so that she can stay up and draw in the quiet of the night. Her black clothes, spiky bleached hair and rectangular glasses all say “edgy artist” even before you meet her intense blue eyes.

Explaining her philosophy of the world in quick jagged speech, Ciccone, who graduated from Antioch College last year, said that she draws comics because she can say it better on paper. Her first comic book series, Sihm, named after its heroine, is set in a Hell based heavily on what Ciccone has seen in a recurring dream since she was in high school, she said. Sihm dies and gets sent to Hell, where she begins a training with Leonegrus Post on how to rely on her senses to fight for wholeness in the universe. The antagonist, Lord Zanthusa Pale, is aligned with the devil. He embodies the opposite, over-thought, human logic that tries to make Sihm doubt herself and fear death.

Ciccone was 6 when she drew her first comic strip, “Fishy,” about a cat. She and her sister Miranda, whom she calls “Tails” after the cartoon Sonic Hedgehog, grew up reading Garfield and Bloom County and drawing comics together about fuzzy animals, she said. In high school they became fascinated with the manga-style Japanese cartoons that were just beginning to appear on American television in the 1990s, shows such as Astro Boy and Sailor Moon, the controversial comic whose characters wore skimpy clothing and displayed subversive behavior.

“All the weird, dirty kids watched Sailor Moon,” Ciccone said.

Ciccone preferred Japanese comics, whose characters’ extremely wide eyes and small noses were borrowed from the Disney characters. While American cartoons focused on superheroes, she said, Japanese comics were about ordinary people living regular lives, which appealed to her.

While Ciccone’s comics, whose winged characters fly around the rings of Hell lopping each other’s limbs off, are hardly about the everyday world, they contain elements of the mundane, as well as humor. All the characters frequent Hell’s bar, and when Sihm learns there are only five kinds of beer, three of which are light, Leon tells her, “That’s why they call it Hell, kid.” Ciccone’s characters can also brandish things out of thin air and continue talking even after their heads are chopped off.

“I wanted to create a hell governed by cartoon logic,” Ciccone said.

The process of creating a comic book begins with a script, followed by laying out the story with blocked thumbnail sketches, Ciccone said. She does large-scale pencil drawings and then traces them with ink on a light table, reduces the pages and then adds screen tones, lettering and the indispensable “Fwam” and “Vwwsshh” sound effects. She draws 48 pages, double the normal length of a comic, because of the complicated storyline, and then has 200 copies printed by an offset printer for $1,000. The whole project is personally financed.

It’s hard for Ciccone, who as a student was editor of the Antioch Record, to say whether she is an artist or a writer first, but she has always known she wanted to publish comics. Drawing comics gives her an excuse to write and draw monsters at the same time, she said.

Ciccone completed the first installment of Sihm in a mad two and a half months and presented it as her senior project. She printed 200 copies and sold out within months. The second volume she completed while working at the Winds Cafe, where she exhibited a show of her original ink drawings in April. Copies of the second volume are still available at Dark Star for $5. And she has plans to continue the story in a series of perhaps 10 more graphic novels, she said.

She is just mastering facial expressions, she said, and now she hopes to develop her skills in drawing motion. She wants to avoid characters who look like they’re posing. “I’m going for a more naturalistic style,” she said.

Most of the ideas for her work come to her while she sleeps, she said. And as long as she has time to put it down on paper, she expects her work will keep flowing.

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com