Monthly Archive: June 2008

Dash Shaw has a strange habit of defining things, of explaining all the elements of his world in minute detail.

In his new 700-plus page graphic novel Bottomless Belly Button (Fantagraphics, $29.99), that microscopic focus takes on monumental scope as Shaw relates the foibles and piccadiloes of the Loony family when the patriarch and matriarch announce a divorce after decades of marriage.

The family (the parents, their three children, one spouse, two grandchildren) gather at the family’s beach house, and Shaw begins by explaining “there are many types of sand” before giving an eight-page summary of these types.

We’re then introduced to the family through a sequence of diagrams, charts and vignettes, quickly establishing their characters and relationship dynamics. In short, their behavior is befitting of their name.

Shaw told me recently that he uses such definitions to orient readers, and from this point [[[Bottomless Belly Button]]] truly takes off in a story that mirrors The Squid and the Whale while never falling into that film’s cold, intellectual trappings.

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I don’t know when I first saw an English edition of Barefoot Gen. It was probably sometime in the mid 70s, when I was editing for the modest enterprise that has become the mighty Marvel Entertainment. In those days, a lot of stuff crossed editorial desks and we read most of it, if not all. So: Japanese comics? Sure, I’ll give it a look. It was probably my first experience with manga and I remember feeling a mild taste of cognitive dissonance – a perceived disconnect between subject and form. (I am choosing to ignore, because it’s a bit off-subject, the hybrid of cartooning and illustration that’s most superhero art.)

The subject was grim. Barefoot Gen is the autobiographical tale of a child who witnessed and survived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. But it was presented in a visual style I would have described as “cartoony.” Like most American pop-cultch consumers, I associated bright, simple, exaggerated drawings – cartoons – with material that was at least supposed to be humorous, and there was nothing remotely funny about Barefoot Gen. It was, and is, a powerful anti-war document and, because it is that, deeply humane.

It’s creator, who did both art and copy, is named Keiji Nakazawa, and Barefoot Gen is his story. He had this to say about it: “People should be told what happened. If you live through something like the A-bomb, you know that war is too horrible not to be avoided at all costs, regardless of the justifications offered for it.”

The work first appeared in 1972 as a serial in a mass market Japanese publication, Shukan Shonon Jampu (and perhaps some kind reader will translate that for us). Later, it migrated to smaller magazines, and later still, it was published in English as a paperback book series. The most recent English iteration appeared in 2004, with an introduction by Art Spiegelman.

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