Blurry. Dash Shaw. New York Review Comics. 2024. 480 pp. $34.95.
Dash Shaw is one of our most interesting, and fearlessly experimental, auteur cartoonists. At this point in his career, any new book is a big deal, and deservedly so. Blurry is quintessential Dash Shaw with its moody and enigmatic vibe, a refinement of what began with his debut graphic novel, the family saga, Bottomless Belly Button, back in 2008. What new tricks will he pull out of his hat this time? Shaw is someone who takes his work seriously, almost as seriously as his followers. I say this because I think he operates with a healthy dose of irreverence and gets on with making the work and lets the comics cognoscenti do what they do. Comics, the actual creation of comics, has a way of keeping you honest. If you roll up your sleeves and just dive into the art process, any sense of preciousness should fall by the wayside.
As much as some comics scholars talk about comic strips as the source to the comics medium, they rarely pay much attention to contemporary cartoonists who do comic strips. The conversation quickly turns to something that is thought to be more high-minded. These same comics scholars view an elegant and mysterious version of comics by someone like Dash Shaw, and their delicate antennas go straight up, gravitating to the latest big score of “art comics” to pontificate over. Anyway, it’s good to bring this up since Shaw, you can’t deny it, is one of the most celebrated artist-cartoonists. With that in mind, what often turns out to be the most intriguing thing here is how the story is told rather than the story itself, much like a poem. In this case, Shaw presents the reader with a disparate group of individuals, all engaging in their own quiet and subtle ways, with no obvious throughline connecting everyone to each other. This is a story as much about mood as it is about motivation, which makes perfect sense to me. Shaw has, throughout his career, maintained a deceptively simple style which, I think, acts as a good ballast to offset the more esoteric nature of his storytelling.
But a story takes shape as you plunge into this nearly 500-page comics tome. Shaw has a penchant for the sprawling saga, sprinkling it with the less obvious bits of flotsam and jetsam of life. By its very nature, “flotsam and jetsam” keep a low profile until perhaps a precocious storyteller makes hay out of it. And Shaw makes excellent hay. Keep in mind that this graphic novel is a collection of stories of seemingly random individuals who, bit by bit, become more and more interconnected by seemingly random bits. Given that Shaw is determined to evoke the chaos of real life, some of these stories fall flat in their quotidian understatement. But that is the whole point, like a sadder than sad Chris Ware comic. Still, like in real life, gems emerge. Shaw is among the best in employing the tools of comics. You could create quite a heated panel discussion at your next comics art festival on his use of the four-panel grid. So, if you’re a follower of such comics connoisseurs as Frank Santoro, there is much to love here. That said, with Shaw’s keen satirical wit and overall social observation, there is much to love here too on that level alone. Enjoy it as a rad soap opera if you wish. There are enough pages here to have you feeling like you’re bingeing your latest favorite show.
The writer’s life.
My favorite gem among this collection of character vignettes is the plight of professional writer Christie Oliver, something of an alter ego for Shaw. Among all the characters who are scrutinized here, it seems to me that she manages to pluck the most out of her situation, which isn’t all that bad: a writer who gains some success from being picked up by a prestigous publisher and then must navigate her way to sustaining her early promise. Christie ends up using a technique to get out of a rut that is also utilized by a different character, Fiona, in a modest yet stressful place in her own life. So, each character, in their own way, no matter how meaningless their life may seem, is up to something, trying things out, doing interesting things.
Along with Dash Shaw, Derek Kirk Kim is another cartoonist I greatly admire. Recently, Kim told me that one of the most satisfying works in comics can involve bringing together parties that have no obvious connection–and then finding it. He was referring not only to his own masterful graphic novel, Same Difference, but also to Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese. Both books revolve around a group of disparate characters who, at first, don’t seem to share anything in common. And so it is with Blurry. For a long and extended amount of time, Blurry takes us down one existential rabbit hole after another. It is a series of prolonged moments which brings to mind another favorite auteur cartoonist, Paul Pope. Part of his bag of tricks includes this stretching of time, which is most prevalent in manga and anime. Shaw presents us with characters who are having trouble with an assortment of life struggles including the most simple of tasks, like deciding on a flavor of ice cream, which becomes an endless pondering, requiring a good deal of stretching of time, a predicament that keeps popping up and actually runs through the entire length of the book. You can’t miss it. All these characters, at least at first, seem to lack the fortitude to contend with anything substantial but that is exactly what they will need to acquire in order to make more sense of each of their lives–and there lies the bigger picture, the whole shooting match, and what will connect each and every one of these characters. Well worth sticking around to see how that turns out.
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