Is it possible to write a review for a story about a family of eccentric personalities and the comedy and tragedy that results from the comingling of their individual personal dysfunctions without mentioning The Royal Tenenbaums? Apparently not. Now, with that out of the way: Bottomless Belly Button is a story about a family of eccentric personalities and the comedy and tragedy that results from the comingling of their individual personal dysfunctions –but it's also a bravura performance at comi...

Far and away Dash Shaw's best work yet; the story is a little more straightforward/less surreal than some of Dash's other books, except for a character who appears as a frog, but he continues to play with the comics form, and without doing it in such a way that it distracts from the narrative. A huge thick book that maybe reads quicker than it looks it will, but undoubtedly will reward repeat readings...

We follow a dysfunctional family in great detail as each member goes about his and her daily routine.Nothing interesting, really. This person masturbates. That person has sex. At a point, it gets very repetitive. For some reason, we had to see every single character take a shower. WTH?! No wonder this crap is 700++ pages long.

a massive brick of cartooning, shattering the staid glass window panes of other so-called graphic novels with its "exhuberance" & its visual swagger -- using maps, rebuses & secret codes to detail the tale of a family, where no one resembles another*, impacted by the divorce of the parents after forty years of marriage.It's almost overwhelming, but I totally ignored one of the caveats of this graphic novel and read all three parts all 700 odd pages straight through early Friday morning. But the

This review is kind of like an "it's not you, it's me" break-up, because I should really acknowledge that Dash Shaw's The Bottomless Bellybutton represents a certain side of art-house indie cartooning that just doesn't resonate with me. There is a scene late in the comic when the grandmother is at the grocery store, and the man in line in front of her gives her an angry look for not putting a divider between their items. It seemed like an outrageous response to a fairly common situation, and I r...

Let's see...dysfunctional white family; goofy low self esteemed guy who can't make it with chicks but has a quirky chick quick to go for his sausage conveniently pop up solely for the purpose of going for his sausage; did we mention unsympathetic bored whiney dysfunctional white family...This is the kind of stuff Daniel Clowes and Jeffrey Brown make sing. This does not sing. This is like Parker Lewis Can't Lose compared to Ferris Bueller's Day Off. If Zach Braff were a graphic novelist this woul...

This book doesn’t make you happy. It doesn’t make you feel good at all. The characters are frustrating. But it’s just SO WELL MADE. I loved the descriptions of visual details, motion, even colors or lighting. Those descriptions do not make up for any shortcomings in the drawings, because those are fantastic and lively in themselves. It’s just a great book that needs to be read and reread over and over.

Surely the fastest 720-page read in the bookstore. The faster I moved through it, the closer reading came to watching a film, sort of like a flip book. Maybe reminds me of a sad quirky not-so-funny indie comedy crossed, at its best, with some Ozu-y sweetness? By which I mean it's totally in favor of affectationlessly portraying minor life moments until they seem to achieve "poignancy" and therefore deserve an elevated term like "quotidian" instead of common/dull? The drawings aren't close qualit...

I've been having extraordinary luck hitting on extraordinary examples of graphic novels recently. Here's another one. The semi-primitive drawing and confessional tone put me in mind of David Heatley's 'My Brain is Hanging Upside Down,' although this is a full-blown, even epic narrative (if a week with a dysfunctional family reuniting to inaugurate the parents' divorce can be epic in scope). The weightiness reminded me of Yoshihiro Tatsumi's 'A Drifting Life'--some 700 plus pages--a format that i...

A friend had recommended I read everything Dash Shaw had ever done. I started on his bewildering earlier books THE MOTHER'S MOUTH and GODDESS HEAD, but I put them both aside when I learned BOTTOMLESS BELLY BUTTON had arrived. This is by far the best graphic novel I've read in several years, impressionistic, textured, synechdotal (?). Whatever. It's incredible. I've been putting this book, at once cosmic and deeply personal, in the hands of everyone I know who likes graphic novels. (and also, Das...

This was OK, the drawing is a bit meh, but the author overcomes that with an innovative storytelling. It feels like another attemp to write the "great american graphic novel". Sorry but, in my opinion, Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan is still in the lead. Worthwhile reading but couldn't but feel a bit disappointed, after all the hype, the two different covers... Just another novel about a disfunctional family in crisis.

Fun :p

The things that Shaw does with light, with water, with sand will confound your eyes and uproot your mind. There is detail here. Shaw has paid attention to it and so should you. Note the coming of dusk. Note the one "true" glimpse of Peter. Note how the "x" marks the "spot." Sound is not usually something you think of when you think of comics. Shaw offers up a cacophony. A melodic cacophony. His is a noisy book.Floor plans. Portraits. Cinematic scenes. I felt like I was watching a movie directed...

Most people who like comix will probably like this more than i did and i found it mostly satisfying.As much as i simply enjoy reading comic books, i'm still frequently disappointed that i don't get as much pleasure from the illustrations as from the stories and language. When the plot's intriguing and/or the characters are interesting but the images seem redundant and/or unnecessary, i tend to give 3-star ratings. I haven't read anything else by Shaw so maybe this book's style is deliberate. If

2 stars The art of this graphic novel is interesting at points. There are lots of mundane details worked into a story that’s fraught with a lot of emotional baggage & family dysfunction. I still don’t get the story though. It ended without much resolution, & I’m not sure why it needed to be so long, to meander so much, if it wasn’t clear where it even wanted to go.[What I liked:]•I liked the opening sequence which introduced different aspects of the family dynamic in a non-linear way. It was pit...

The Bottomless Bellybutton is an absorbing mammoth graphic novel for a rainy day or two. There are some great "comic-matic" moments without dialogue and a great use of cartoon space, and a clever use of the lack of color and a fancy use of diagrams and letters and zany gimmicky stuff like that I usually really enjoy. Ultimately, though, there's not much substance to this big thing, a case of style trumping sensation in the end (and by style I mean more book design than the actual art, which is f...

This is alt-comics by the numbers. The obsessive attention to mundane details, the diagrams, the quirky page designs, the daddy issues, the sarcastic and confused teen girls, the general patheticness of the majority of the cast: all these elements come straight from previous books by Chris Ware and/or Daniel Clowes. Fortunately, Dash Shaw knows how to entertain. The dialogue is uniformly sharp, and a few bits are even laugh-out-loud funny. Some favorites of mine include Chill Jill meeting "the n...

Genius east coast family drama. Comics wizardry.

The story of one family - including elderly parents, three adult children, one daughter in law, and two children - as the kids come home for a visit after the news that the parents are getting a divorce. Everyone reacts in their own ways.For one thing, this seemed pretty blatantly autobiographical. The title infers self-inspection, and one character (and only one) is depicted as having the head of a frog in all but one frame (where he is asking a love interest if he looks like a frog). I admire

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 exp...