New Realities: The Comics of Dash Shaw

by Greg Hunter, Dash Shaw (Artist)

Overview

Dash Shaw is one of the most restless cartoonists of recent decades, constantly evolving in how he approaches the comics page. In the years since his breakthrough graphic novel Bottomless Belly Button, he has continued to create acclaimed, idiosyncratic comics, varying his uses of line and color as well as shifting from domestic realism to sci-fi farce to historical fiction. But some concerns in Shaw’s work remain constant. His characters live within their own personal realities, often failing to connect or even communicate. Comics as different as the dystopian spectacle BodyWorld and the geek-culture comedy Cosplayers become sites of clashes between incompatible mindsets—with Shaw adapting his cartooning to capture new varieties of confusion, alienation, and more. In New Realities, critic Greg Hunter (The Comics Journal) follows the through-line across this adventurous body of work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941250471
Publisher:	Uncivilized Books
Publication date:	04/25/2023
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.50(h) x (d)
Age Range:	16 Years

About the Author

Greg Hunter is a writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He edits graphic novels for young readers and has contributed comics criticism to The Comics Journal, The Rumpus, and other publications.

Dash Shaw lives in Richmond, VA. He was a 2010 Sundance Labs fellow and a 2014–2015 Cullman Center fellow at the New York Public Library. A cartoonist, animator, and illustrator, he was born in Los Angeles and attended the School of Visual Arts. He is the author of Discipline (2021), Bottomless Belly Button, Body World, and many other comics, and graphic novels. He is also the director of two animated films, My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea and Crypto Zoo.

Editorial Reviews

08/09/2021

Comics critic Hunter debuts with a perceptive survey of the idiosyncratic oeuvre of Dash Shaw, a “changeable” cartoonist whose “stylistic leaps have become his most obvious constant.” In essays that dissect each of Shaw’s major works—beginning with his massive 2008 graphic novel, Bottomless Belly Button—Hunter chronicles Shaw’s evolution as a cartoonist, his unwavering commitment to experimental storytelling, and his fascination with the subjectivity of human experience. “His comics explore... the ways people can occupy the same spaces but regard them with different ways of seeing,” writes Hunter before diving headlong into the plots, themes, and array of visual formal tricks that connect Shaw’s disparate works. While 2010’s visually complex BodyWorld takes a stylistic departure from his other books—with a “vertical (not right-to-left) page turn”—it still deploys color as a “major tool” to advance chronological and emotional narratives. Likewise, the 2014 graphic novel Doctors differs from its predecessors in depicting consciousness in a “near-literal sense,” but its preoccupations with the “inhabitability of the mind” is a common theme throughout Shaw’s milieu. Though Hunter’s analysis of Shaw’s animated films feels rushed, it succeeds in illustrating how Shaw has never limited himself to one art form. It’s a great starting point for anyone wanting to know more about the work of this restless and relentlessly curious artist. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Comics critic Hunter debuts with a perceptive survey of the idiosyncratic oeuvre of Dash Shaw, a “changeable” cartoonist whose "stylistic leaps have become his most obvious constant." […] It’s a great starting point for anyone wanting to know more about the work of this restless and relentlessly curious artist."—Publishers Weekly

"A 'must read' study for the legions of Dash Shaw fans, New Realities: The Comics of Dash Shaw is an impressive presentation of the graphic novel style artwork of this unique and iconoclastic artist. New Realities: The Comics of Dash Shaw is especially and unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, and academic library Comics/Graphic Novels, literary criticism collections, and supplemental curriculum studies lists." —Midwest Book Review

From the Publisher