Every week on “Sunday Page” an author has to choose a single page from a comic book. It could be for sentimental reasons o for a particular technical achievement. The conversation could lose itself in the open water of the comic book world but it will always start with the questione: «If you had to choose a page from a comic book you love, what would you choose and why?».
This Sunday I’m out with Dash Shaw, artist and animator, author of Cosplayers, Doctors, New School and Bottomless Belly Button. His latest effort is the animated movie My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea. Like his Wikipedia page says: «His comics are known for their emphasis on emotional, lyrical logic and innovative design».
This is a page from Arsene Schrauwen by Olivier Schrauwen. I wanted to pick something recent, by a cartoonist closer to my age, just because we already know that the greats are great (Krazy Kat, Ware, Bechdel — I love them too), but there is a lot of newer work that deserves discussion as well. This book came out in 2014 and, as a cartoonist, it really exhilarated me. It was a single, sophisticated narrative that carried a lot of ideas and questions. It didn’t provide trite observations or conclusions, or regurgitate preexisting plans or genres. He chased his own vision, devoted to the book for its own sake, with remarkable discipline. It was complicated and messy, but also a single, whole piece. This was a mature, experimental novel, made by someone working at a completely self-imposed, extremely high level.
Also, you asked for a single page, and this one is radically important to the book… In one page, everything that happened before is cast in a different light. What was a surreal tale, was actually reality, but filtered through Arsene’s (unreliable) eyes. We realize that this book is about our world, not a fantasy world. The colors have become naturalistic. A vendor sells leopard skins, which was previously a fantastical creature in the story; and the vendor is drawn in a more naturalistic way than we saw him before, when strangers were drawn with circle heads (one man begins drawn with a circle head and then becomes a more specifically delineated man — a bespectacled Caucasian with a mustache — as the reader learns more about him.) Arsene now speaks the same language as the locals, which he did not before. So, in one page, the reader’s understanding of the meaning of the book shifts, and we concurrently see the shift that the main character has undergone.
Plus, this is all done in a subtle manner. It’s just six panels of a man at a street vendor speaking in a language we don’t know. It’s one of the least formally unusual pages in the book, which I believe was intentional. If something so seismic was done in a bizarre manner, it’d be “hot on hot.” The cartoonist knew to play it “cool” for such an important scene.
What’s the meaning of the book for you?
I appreciate that the book is messy. It’s not executing a game plan. The covers of the book poke fun at discerning what the book itself is “about.” “Is it about this, or about this?” I think it’s an exploratory book, that’s circling around the idea of someone being in a foreign culture and still being inside of their own head. So it’s about opening up to the larger world. Also, in an obvious way, it’s about speculating on your family history… The book begins and ends with Olivier explaining how facially he is similar to his grandfather, and there’s a running plot line that hints that it’s about his parent’s birth, although that finally derails in an interesting way. The premise of the book being the author’s grandfather was both silly (because it clearly didn’t have to be his grandfather), but I also found it very moving, and I was surprised by how moving it was, since it’s such a simple framing device.
Did you actually wait the one and two weeks he asks the reader to wait before moving on?
Nope!