“You know how to read a comic. But what is your eye actually doing? That’s something I think about all the time.” Dash Shaw is not only talking about the mechanics of comics but a way of seeing. He goes on: “A classic example would be where you have on the right side of a two-page spread some sort of splash, someone has shot at something. And on the left side you have a six-panel grid. We know the rules of reading comics tell you to start reading from the left side. But your eye will go directly to the right side to see whatever the surprise happens to be.”
Dash Shaw is a cartoonist and animator. His new graphic novel is Blurry, published by New York Review Comics (review), is a story about various characters going about their life struggles who perhaps share an amorphous connection of sorts. Nothing obvious is going on here. Nothing is either too funny or too sad; it’s life at a moderate level and it’s within this world that the characters navigate. To evoke this in a graphic novel is a daunting task but, for Shaw, Blurry turns out to be a tour de force work, an evolution of the multi-layered storytelling many readers took notice of when Shaw’s first major work was released in 2008, Bottomless Belly Button.
From small insignificant moments . . .
. . . a life unfolds.
Creating comics at this level is a constant looking to see where the eye is going: what is being observed; who is saying what to whom; what is really happening or imagined. And it’s also just as much about setting a tone. “Nothing is too low or too high in this comic. It’s an ambient tone, like a Brian Eno album. I wanted it to be a pleasant environment with nothing too dramatic happening, a place you could enjoy inhabiting.”
Towards the end of our conversation, I cut to the essence of what was running through my mind before, and during, our chat: the tension between the earnest and the ironic. In Shaw’s work, from what I can tell, there’s a very real conflict between an inclination to tell a sincere story and a compulsion to throw a little water on things with a bit of irony. Shaw responds: “That tension of the ironic and the earnest. I think about it all the time. It’s the story of my life.” Well, ultimately, Shaw is no fan of biting satire. That’s just too much. But a little bit of irony can add some spice, especially certain formal devices that give the reader a slight nudge. In the end, however, a meaningful story must emerge. And so it does with Blurry.
