In his bewildering but brilliant new graphic novel BodyWorld, Dash Shaw paints a portrait of a loopy botanist, expert in the ways of hallucinogenics, who discovers a superweed capable of triggering intense reactions when inhaled.
A vivid slice of neurofiction melded from a brash array of graphic styles, BodyWorld follows loose cannon Paulie Panther through the small town of Boney Boroughs, home to a creepy sport called Dieball. The pyschotropic fun begins when Paulie starts conducting DIY experiments involving two bright-eyed high school students and a sardonic sex bomb named Jem Jewel.
“I wanted to do a story about what it’s like to be inside of another person,” Shaw told Wired.com in an e-mail interview ahead of BodyWorld ‘s Tuesday release (Pantheon Books; $28). “Most telepathy in fiction that I’ve seen is like a computer burning a disc of information and uploading it to another computer, or a secret whisper being passed between two people. That’s bullshit to me.”
Shaw instead wanted to dramatize a kind of full-body ESP. “I don’t think telepathy would be limited to the brain and I don’t feel that people think exclusively in words, so the levels of telepathy in BodyWorld are my ideas about how this would happen,” he said.
BodyWorld ‘s hard-to-pin-down aesthetic reflects a heap of influences. Shaw grew up in Virginia, where his hippie dad kept a massive stash of underground comics in the basement. Then came the Japanese period. “I went to a lot of anime conventions and read manga for most of middle and high school,” Shaw recalled. “I drew a comic called Demon Carnival that was like Guyver and Devil Hunter Yohko. I liked the American cartoonists who were sort of manga-inspired, like Joe Madureira and Paul Pope.”
Famously meticulous cartoonist Chris Ware also made an impact, Shaw said. “When his Jimmy Corrigan book came out when I was in high school, that shook things up and led to me looking at other things.”
Moving to New York to attend School of Visual Arts, Shaw imbibed deeply from the SVA library. “I basically spent four years digesting Gary Panter, Chester Brown, Heavy Metal, Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby — anything and everything,” Shaw said.
Billy-Bob Borg and Pearl Peach get pulled into wild BodyWorld experiments.
Images courtesy Pantheon BooksFor his new Eisner Award–nominated comic, Shaw deliberately slammed diverse drawing styles together in order to reflect the characters’ intersecting personalities. BodyWorld looks like a mishmash of a million different things juxtaposed with each other, which is what the story is about: Characters being inside of each other.
“To me, all comics are essentially two things that create a third thing,” he said. “Words and pictures, pictures next to pictures, pictures over pictures, pictures inside of pictures, flat color next to textured color, color versus line. The third space that all of these things create has a mysterious energy.”
Next up for Shaw: animation. Following on his IFC web series The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D., he’s now working on Slobs and Nags.
“It’s an animated feature that has some sci-fi elements,” Shaw said, but the artist would just as soon dispense with categories altogether.
“Usually you make something and it’s up to other people to decide what genre it is,” he said. “I don’t know if BodyWorld counts as science fiction. I feel like it’s about the present day, it’s just that our present day is very science fiction–like.”
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