At the Speed of Thought Balloons By Douglas Wolk - review

BODYWORLD

Written and illustrated by Dash Shaw

Unpaged. Pantheon Books. $27.95.

“This book is for ‘ideal readers’ only!!!” declares the copyright page of Dash Shaw’s new graphic novel, “BodyWorld.” He’s kidding, of course (the same page goes on to request, “Please read in bed naked”), but it’s a clever way to point out that this isn’t a particularly straightforward piece of work. “BodyWorld” is a psychedelic, romantic, science-fictional high school melodrama, the sixth book by a 27-year-old cartoonist who made his name in 2008 with the ambitious “Bottomless Belly Button.” A hard-core experimentalist, Shaw enthusiastically tosses one dizzying visual technique after another at his readers, because his story constantly heads into territories where simple narrative artwork isn’t enough.

The first sign that “BodyWorld” doesn’t play by the rules is that the book’s spine is at its top. The overall motion of Shaw’s story becomes a downward scroll rather than a rightward stroll. The climax of that slow 380-page dive is a remarkable sequence toward the end — seven pages devoted to a single gigantic panel that pulls the reader’s perspective downward across the architectural landscape of a future megalopolis, after which the movement of the story bounces back up into the stars. This is a disorienting, distracting funhouse of a book: there are long hallucinatory passages, near-abstract images, drawings overlaid on one another until they’re nearly incomprehensible.

That said, Shaw is as eager to entertain as he is to mess with the parameters of his medium, and he goes out of his way to guide readers through the obstacle course he’s laid out. On the inside covers of “BodyWorld,” there are fold-out flaps with gridded maps of Boney Borough (the post-future-civil-war planned community where most of the action happens), as well as reference images of the major characters. There’s always some kind of high-spirited slapstick or engaging gross-out or emotionally fraught interaction to keep things entertaining. And whenever Shaw gets a funny idea, he runs with it. One blackly daffy subplot involves “dieball,” a game that’s not quite as fatal as its name suggests — it’s a kind of cross between football, curling, Dungeons & Dragons (the ball is a gigantic 10-sided die) and glue-huffing (players cover themselves with addictive, brain-damaging “Diegunk”).

Originally serialized online, and revised for its print incarnation, “BodyWorld” centers on the downfall of a crazed botany professor named Paulie Panther. An impotent, drug-gobbling creep who thinks of himself as a sensitive, romantic soul, Panther comes to Boney Borough to investigate a newly discovered and potentially psychoactive plant growing in the woods near the town’s high school. As it turns out, the plant does indeed have some unusual properties: inhale its smoke, and you can experience the sensory perceptions and thoughts of anyone else near you. Smoke it with other people, and you’ll not only feel what they’re feeling, but feel them feeling your feelings of what they’re feeling, and so on.

If that sounds creepy, it is, and Panther’s successive plant-fueled, erotically charged entanglements with the high school science teacher Jem Jewel, the 18-year-old naïf Pearl Peach and the star dieball player Billy-Bob Borg lead “BodyWorld” into increasingly dark, unsteady-underfoot territory. (Yes, every character in the book has an alliterative name. Why not?) Shaw’s cast members all have the broad, improbable features of old-school comic-strip heroes and villains — with his broken nose, 80-degree-angle chin and zigzagging sideburns, Paulie Panther could be a visual remix of Chester Gould’s design for Dick Tracy. As the characters’ physical perceptions melt into one another, Shaw pulls out the stops to show us what that blurring of identity could mean. He mixes and matches their features, superimposes drawings of characters on one another, adds raw splotches of color to his coolly composed lines and flat tones.

Shaw isn’t yet much of a draftsman, but he’s a hell of an artist, constructing vivid, uncanny compositions with a spectacular sense of color and space. (When he can’t quite communicate with images what’s supposed to be going on, he sometimes just writes it in. One panel, for instance, includes the note “feeling sheet on back.”) His sense of pacing is odd but very effective — a shift to nine panels from 12 per page midway through the book kicks its tone into a higher gear. And he seems to have fully absorbed the visual vocabularies of whole schools of cartooning that barely took notice of one another: old Japanese adventure comics, the art brut Fort Thunder scene, animation storyboards. A sequence in which a human-alien hybrid offloads a chunk of exposition is a bravura pastiche of off-brand ’60s horror comics (right down to the off-register color effects), if something of a cheat as far as plotting goes.

To read “BodyWorld” for its plot, though, is to be sidetracked by one of its lesser pleasures. (It’s also more fun if you read it a few times, to catch the early images and lines of dialogue that seem like idle decoration until you’ve seen what comes later.) Shaw devotes great chunks of the book to evoking both intense and less-intense bodily experiences — feeling textures, sensing heat, climbing, sweating and itching. His characters cough and tickle and stretch and clench their guts and strip leaves off fallen twigs. There’s so much sensory input involved in being a person, he suggests, that sharing someone else’s senses could be unbearable.

What the mysterious plant of Boney Borough does, in fact, is communicate the incommunicable: not just the part of someone else’s perceptions that language and visual art can suggest, but other people’s entire experience of being in the realm of the senses. That’s nearly impossible to get across on the page, but near impossibility isn’t going to stop Shaw from taking advantage of comics’ symbol-making potency to try. More often than not, “BodyWorld” doesn’t quite get there: Shaw’s alliterative characters are too two-dimensional to rise from the page. But there’s so much gusto and invention in his attempt that it’s more rewarding than any number of more modest successes.

Douglas Wolk is the author of “Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean.” He writes frequently about comics for The Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/books/review/Wolk-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3&pagewanted=print