Dash ShawResenhas

During the Civil War, many Quakers were caught between their fervent support of abolition, a desire to preserve the Union, and their long-standing commitment to pacifism. When Charles Cox, a young Quaker from Indiana, slips out early one morning to enlist in the Union Army, he scandalizes his family and his community.

Discipline is told largely through the letters exchanged between the Cox siblings—incorporating material from actual Quaker and soldier journals of the era—and drawn in a style that combines modern graphic storytelling with the Civil War–era battlefield illustrations of the likes of Thomas Nast and Winslow Homer. The result is a powerful consideration of faith, justice, and violence, and an American comics masterpiece.

The graphic storytelling is also sparse, simple, and "silent" illustrating the ideals of Quaker spirituality quite literally.

A marvelous feat of storytelling.

A nifty little murder mystery with an Agatha Christie vibe based on the characters from the classic board game -- which I have never played. Thankfully, Tim Hodler provides an article after the story explaining the history of the game and its appeal.

Alternative artist Dash Shaw was a surprising but inspired pick to create this media tie-in. He has fun with the art and plays around with the expectations of graphic novels and murder mysteries, even dropping in a few activities and puzzles along the way.

FOR REFERENCE:

Contents: Candlestick / Dash Shaw, story and art -- On Murder Considered as a Recreational Activity / Tim Hodler, writer -- [Cover Gallery] / Dash Shaw, Jed McGowan, Sophie Franz, and Kevin Huizenga, illustrators -- Shaw in the Studio with the Candlestick / Suzette

4,5

Loved the belly button book. Not so much this one. Didn't finish.

A 17-year-old Quaker boy from Indiana forsakes the pacifism of his religion to enlist in the Union Army and take up arms against the South as part of Sherman's March. In this historical fiction, he and his sister exchange boring letters full of angst and religious claptrap with an excess of -eths, thees, dosts, and thous lifted from actual letters from real people written during the war. Much of the story is told in pantomime around the blobs of cursive text, often contrasting or unrelated to the words, but sometimes supplementing.

And I found all of it quite boring, having seen much the same stuff in Glory and other Civil War dramas. The manner of presentation and opaqueness of the characters do little to make the Quaker angle significant or interesting.

The art consists of minimalist sketches that the back cover dares compare to Thomas Nast and Winslow Homer. Copywriters apparently do not look at art very much.

Quirky. Some fun moments but the main characters are a little mean-spirited and manipulative. I like the episodic stories and some parts feel like they're going to touch on something deeper, fanboys projecting personalities/creating romance where there is none onto cosplayers, feeling aimless, being a black(?/ Verti appears to be black, but idk) person/minority in the cosplay/anime community, and the seedy side of the film industry (I really thought it was going to go there with the Hulu project. Maybe I'm glad it didn't. At first, just the way the producer guy came about was a little creepy...)

I'm not sure I understood the point of this. Is it to make cosplayers more sympathetic and understandable? Is it making fun of them? Or it just cashing in on people who are titillated by the concept of cosplay? It fails at all three of those and offers only bland stories with bland art about bland characters.

The book starts s-l-o-w-l-y, but stay with it, because in part 2 what began with isolated pieces weaves a compelling picture of how families fragment and regather. By the end, both the reader and the characters have experienced alchemical changes. Much of the book’s charm is in that slowness as it documents the daily, forgettable dialog that cements relationships.
10 days after I put down the book I got the joke of the title. Self-indulgent metafictional navel-gazing with literal interstitial exploration. Did I include enough buzzwords? And it works. At least it worked for this reader, partly because of the slow burn it ignited in the back of my brain.
I read this book after having seen Dash Shaw’s vibrant animated film, “My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea.”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5538568/?ref_=nv_sr_2

What a great read.

Maybe I just didn't get it, but I didn't like this collection. It was a struggle to finish.

Another depiction of a family falling apart, so no points for originality on the subject matter. There are a few lovely sequences that span a page or several pages, but other than that I'm not too taken with the (purposefully crude?) art.

Dash Shaw's Bottomless Belly Button takes its navel-gazing seriously, as its title suggests. In it, grown children deal with their elderly parents' decision to divorce late in life, and (to varying degrees of self-consciousness) how the end of their parents' marriage illuminates their own relative states of indecision -- and a grandkid gets in on the act, too. May the circle be unbroken.

If the main character didn't have a face like a frog, and if occasional forays into the literal architecture of storytelling (schematics of scenes, trips behind and between the walls of the house in which much of the story takes place) didn't hint at the diagrammatic fever that was Shaw's Bodyworld, this would be a fairly straightforward, indie-cinema vision of familial dysfunction.

One thing that's clear from the book: its considerable size gives an impression of effort exerted, and perhaps it therefore serves as a reminder that restraint requires as much as (if not more effort than) does production.

Amazingly good. Reading it felt like watching a really good indie movie.

A pretty trippy graphic novel. A "professional" scientist who studies mind altering drugs of all kinds (chemical and organic) comes to a small town to discover some mind altering leaves. Disruption ensues in the personal affairs of the people in the town, and the ending is a mind bender. The drawings are great, and fit the story perfectly (more mind bending).

BodyWorld is a pretty amazing achievement from Dash Shaw, one of the more interesting comics artists on the scene today. His narrative this time around has echoes of Philip K. Dick, featuring experiments with drugs, altered states, and a futuristic setting that has mild elements of science fiction, although (as with Dick's best works) the sci-fi angle is not a huge part of story.

The physical design of BodyWorld is rewarding by itself, with a vertical orientation to the pages and fold-out character guides and a scenario map tucked inside the book cover. This unique layout makes the act of reading BodyWorld surprisingly fun, and the kooky, colorful story lives up to the standard set by the attractive packaging.

Shaw has given us a complex but easily readable twister of a plot, sprinkled with an interesting array of characters with alliterative names (Jem Jewel, Paulie Panther, etc). Whatever else he may be doing, Shaw is creating challenging comics that are well worth the reader's time, and BodyWorld is sure to shake out as one of the most interesting books of 2010.½

Gary Groth draws a sad and haunting tale of family dysfunction. When aging parents announce their divorce their adult children try to make sense of their roles in this fractured family.

I kept hearing great things about this book so i finally read it. it was good, not fantastic, but i like reading it a lot. i'd like to read it again, it seems like the kind of book that reveals more once it's reread, which is good also because although it looks HUGE it took me about 3 hours to read if that.

The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D. is a wild ride through the world of Dash Shaw, who is certainly one of the more interesting young comics creators on the scene today. Some of these pieces previously appeared in the Mome series from Fantagraphics, but the title piece is new and exotic, and even more interesting when read in conjunction with watching the animated series of the same name that Shaw created for IFC.com. Shaw's comics are not always 100% lucid, but they're certainly always interesting, and The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D. provides a great waypoint to review the work that he has done to date.

Really good story about a family and their dynamics. There were some crude moments but I thought they fit into the story. I really like how the author would put these very minute details into the story. The drawings were also really good.

A frog tells the story of a young disaffected twenty-something alienated from himself and his family. He attends the last family vacation with his parents, older siblings, young niece and todler nephew. On this vacation he experiences the end of a life long love -- his parents announce their divorce -- and what appears to be the beginning of a romantic relationship with a young beach comber. The angst greatly outweighs the profundity but the tale is compelling and fast moving. Despite the sad outline the drawings are curious and the story is revealed with some suspense. The reading made up an enjoyable afternoon real life.

I seem to remember reading an online profile (or something) where Dash Shaw described his work in indie comics as exploring the effects of "putting one thing next to another." I've been unable to relocate the exact quote, but The Mother's Mouth is testament to this as an aesthetic. At its most straightforward it tells the (fragmentary, partial) story of an emerging romance between Virginia (a sunken-eyed, heavy-set librarian) and Dick (a gaunt musician). But this story is intercut with other kinds of visual material--from cutaways of geological formations to dance instructions to the drawings of children in therapy --which expand the context and deepen the narrative in intriguing and evocative ways. Recommended.