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Crazy crazy, literally trippy book.For one thing, it's challenging to read this book. The content is sideways, so that the spine is at the top of the pages. Also, you have to fold out a flap at the top (and bottom?) of the book with a map of the community where the events take place.It's about a small planned community in a futuristic world. A ne'er-do-well comes to town and does research on a new plant found in the woods there. The plant causes consciousness and identities of people to merge. A...
Entertaining saga of high school, the near-future, and psychotropic plants, innovatively designed and packaged. Not so much in the panel layouts (mostly a static 12-squares-per-page) as in the odd spatial attention (maps and map references), mixed-media art style, and dense-ly packed panels with chaotic overlays as a window to characters' mental states. In fact, the art style is beautiful despite often fairly perfunctory character drawings: somehow the simple-messy line drawings gain a kind of e...
Body World by Dash Shaw is one of the weirdest and most experimental comics I have ever read. Shaw plays around with our perceptions on almost every page, and the various mixed media sequences and collages are more so inspired to challenge us than to tell a coherent story.On the face of it, the book is about a drug addict professor named Paulie Panther who travels around the country (in a not-too-distant future America) to try new drugs that have been discovered to write about them, and he comes...
Are you a drug addict botanist with above-average writing ability? Get paid to travel the world trying to get high off of new botanical species and reporting on their effects. This is an experimental graphic novel, with character shape-shifting and interesting visual effects, as the author tries to impart the experience of a new drug, a leaf, that causes a person to feel the memories and bodily sensations of other people in their immediate physical proximity. This new kind of leaf has been found...
BodyWorld’s art style, and the beginning of the story, both suggest that it’s going to be a certain type of “alternative” comic: focused more on weirdness and humour than on depth, characterization or plot. In fact, the story starts out quirky and enigmatic in a way that reminds me of Like A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron by Daniel Clowes, its oddball characters, opaque dialogue, absurd comedy and occasional cartoonishly over-the-top events priming me for a comic without much real story (or with a to...
I have the feeling that from time to time I will need to look at all of the Dash Shaw books I have read and not appreciated and rethink my evaluations of them. This one I think might be my favorite so far, though it may just be that I am starting to gain a greater appreciation for what he is doing. I never know exactly what to think of him. Is he bold and innovative or just doing crazy stuff for the sake of doing it? This one is about, among other things, the representation of mind while on drug...
Roughly ten years ago, a little book by Chris Ware called Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth brough me back to comics after a nearly ten year hiatus. It took some bold choices both in story and art, and really stretched the boundaries of comics. Now Dash Shaw's Bodyworld has done it for me again, taking those next steps into the future of comics.Now that I've tossed out the hyperbole, let me explain. Set in year 2060, the US underwent a 2nd civil war that's never really explained. The mai...
I'm rather confused by all the middling Goodreads reviews about this one. This is exactly what I want in a graphic novel: visceral, haunting, dark, grotesque, experimental, and with fold-out maps! I particularly loved his use different media (oil paint???) in the more erratic illustrations. Sidebar: I just Googled Dash Shaw and he's kind of a babe.
I’m not even going to pretend I know exactly what the hell is going on in “Bodyworld.” Dash Shaw’s work is wholly unique and you either drink the Kool-Aid or you don’t. If you liked the cringe-y family drama of his breakout graphic novel “Bottomless Belly Button,” the irreverent lunacy of his animated film “My Entire High School Sinking Into The Sea,” or the deadpan humor of his recent “Cosplayers” series, there’s a lot to like in “Bodyworld.” Me? I’m fully on board.“Bodyworld” is the story of P...
a slice from the 80's as raw revisionism takes root in the mainstream. taking equal parts panter and burns with another equal of archie comics, shaw spins botany conspiracy and robo-controlled outerspace zombies and mixes them in a not so riveting soap opera. read it once and you've seen it. if someone is going to pawn themselves off as a graphic novelist of merit, you gotta insist the work is readable more than once. it has that seen it been it done it quality. if i were gary panter i'd sue thi...
A visionary book, not without some faults. The plot with its drug-induced mind melds and alien conspiracies is merely there to prop up Shaw's experiments with panels, color and representation of states of overlapping beings. The pacing is brisk and the book is damn purty, though the dialogue is uninspired. I was left wondering why bother setting a book so far into the future when the main character speaks in contemporary lingo. The characters are only fun to look at when Shaw goes into full expe...
Awesome beginning, but then it kind of fell off a cliff.
Colour me fuchsia, red, teal, lemon, green, and impressed. Dash Shaw alchemizes Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, Ed the Happy Clown, Acme Novelty Library, Gilbert Hernandez's Birdland, Frank Miller & Lynn Varley's maligned The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Charles Burns, Harry Potter, and probably some sci-fi thing I haven't read; and turns them into something new and surprising in the world of comix. BodyWorld experiments with form and technique on nearly every page, filters these experiments thr...
I really want to like Shaw's work. I feel like he and I have some comics interests in common. I love the druggy weirdness of this premise and really enjoyed the way he visually played with the concept of identity, ego, shared experience, telepathy, etc. He also did some unconventional and cool things with color. I guess my issue with the work is that it feels very arbitrary. It all felt like it was made up as he went along and was peopled with uninteresting characters that were puddle-deep at be...
This isn't just my favorite graphic novel or even book, but my favorite work of fiction in any format. I actually have a signed hardback copy from when I met the author in person at the Small Press Expo.The story follows Professor Paulie Panther, whose job is tracking down and experimenting with newly discovered hallucinogenic plants to add their effects to an encyclopedia of drugs. To be honest he's a bit of a shitty person. He travels to Boney Borough to experiment with smoking a plant that tu...
This was a really really good book. Not something I would have imagined liking so much because I'm not into futuristic/sci-fi-ish/drug-trippy stuff. This is futuristic, sci-fi-ish and drug-trippy, but it's also funny and familiar. The characters are all ordinary, trope-worn (?) folks in a story that is for the most part one I've seen many times before. I love that Shaw brings run-of-the-mill high school drama into this very not run-of-the-mill book, marries the all-too-mundane with the totally w...
Professor Panther's job is to update a guidebook to the mind-altering effects of drugs. When a new plant is discovered in the forest next to a school in Boney Borough, Panther is sent in to evaluate it. Boney Borough is an experimental planned community, developed after an unexplained civil war - this story takes place in 2060. Panther slowly discovers this new drug has some very strange effects - when smoked in proximity to another person a strange sort of mind-sharing telepathy develops. Much
This book is a fantastic experiment and a major contribution to the comic art form. It should be in any collection of remarkable new work. What I value and respect in this book is the astonishing use of colour (aha- you can see i am English!) and the overall palette, the design of the book itself especially the mirrored cover (part of the new maturity of graphic novels is that the books are becoming artforms in their own right, not just fat comic books), the idea of creating grid references for
A very quick read. This has many flaws, it's not a masterpiece, but parts of it are very interesting and show promise. As many others here have said, the humans come out looking uncomfortable and stiff and cramped. A big part of this is just the grid format - the panels are NOT big enough to comfortably fit 3 characters plus props in a wide shot, so of course things end up looking awkward and it seems as though the characters have no room to move. The artist isn't untalented, but he hasn't quite...
literally the best comic/graphic novel i have ever read, highly recommend to anyone, seriously funny and dark, interestingly stylized.