Dash Shaw's Unlikely Imagery

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on December 5, 2006 Sign up now!

by Sunyoung Lee, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 12/5/2006

Dash Shaw, 23, is known for eclectic, inventive, and technically sophisticated comics that often work along the same principles Ezra Pound expounded for poetry: place two seemingly unlike things together, and readers will create a relationship between them. With four books and countless self-published minicomics under his belt, he's both talented and incredibly eclectic, earning a shout-out in The Comics Journal as "the scarily young and skillful Dash Shaw."

Shaw's most recent work, The Mother's Mouth, tells the story of ex-librarian Virginia, who travels to New Orleans to visit her mother, who's dying of Alzheimer's in an assisted living center. Originally planned as a joint music and comics project (Shaw is part of a band called Love Eats Brain), The Mother's Mouth also features Richard, Virginia's new boyfriend, a wanna-be rock and roll star who manages to channel both Michael Jackson and the Pixies in his search for an authentic sound, and Virginia's childhood boyfriend Dick, who died in a tragic accident. The story might sound straight forward enough, but in Shaw's hands, it becomes an extended, almost abstract reverie on sexuality, identity and the dangers of regression.

Virginia-raised Shaw now lives in Brooklyn, where he told PWCW about his interests, influences, and approach to storytelling.

PWCW: What was the starting point for The Mother's Mouth? The story? The idea of regression? The characters? The planned music?

Dash Shaw: I went to college in New York [at the School of Visual Arts], and the summer between junior and senior year, I stayed at my parents' in Richmond, Va., and started dating my high school girlfriend again, whom I hadn't spoken with for a few years. We would do the same things we did senior year of high school. If you have the opportunity to relive any time that you feel sentimental toward, and you seize that opportunity, you'll find that it's a creepy, unpleasant experience. Obviously, it's not the same. That led to The Mother's Mouth.

PWCW: You've said in the past that you spend more time thinking about comics than drawing them.

DS: That's not really true anymore, as I spend 24-7 drawing comics now.

PWCW: Well, you manage to generate quite a bit of emotion through visuallyputting dissimilar things together and having your readers create meaning between them. How much of your comics are planned and how much come together serendipitously?

DS: It's all planned with sketches. Two pages don't come together randomly. But it's sometimes difficult to explain why I find two juxtaposing images beautiful and other ones less so. It shouldn't be necessary for the reader to create a meaning to enjoy it—if that makes sense. I have a meaning there, but it's hard to put into words the meaning of a page of panels of a woman's perspective in a shower stall facing a page with a man getting dressed with a pin-up of a hot girl showering on the wall behind him. I'm not trying to make a social/political statement; I just thought those facing images had some humanity.

PWCW: You seem to have quite a wide range of illustrative styles and techniques, and lettering—how do you choose which one to use when?

DS: It has to feel right and make sense in context. There are a lot of cartoonists that use different illustrative styles and lettering. The other day someone showed me this Kent Williams book, The Fountain, and I suddenly thought that this must be what people feel like who don't get why I would change drawing styles. Why is there a computer font designed to look like handwriting over this painterly stuff? Why is there a scribble and a little photo over there? I don't get it. But I do get, and really responded to, Keith Mayerson's Horror Hospital Unplugged—that uses a lot of different drawings, and it turns some people off.

The book I'm working on now, The Bottomless Belly-Button, varies in a subtle way, unlike The Mother's Mouth.

PWCW: What prompted you to go with a more cartoony look for the main characters of The Mother's Mouth?

DS: I love the way those characters look. None of my friends do. Virginia has these big, weird eyes and she's so round, and Dick has these little eyes and he's so angular. They're like my Laurel and Hardy. They look funny next to each other.

PWCW: What kind of editing process do you go through on your graphic novels?

DS: The Mother's Mouth had a long editing process. [I] finished the book and months later rearranged scenes and added some new things, condensed two pages to one page, etc. I was concerned that it seemed too somber, and drew some more entertaining, humorous scenes, but then eventually went back to how it was before. It felt like I would be adding humor just to protect myself from appearing too serious. Serious things are more open to criticism than humorous things. But it wasn't the right book for that, so I cut it out.

PWCW: What ambitions do you have for your graphic novels? In other words, at what point are you satisfied with what you've done and ready to move on to the next project?

DS: There's usually some overlap between books. The Mother's Mouth came out recently, but I've been working on The Bottomless Belly-Button for the past year or so. Usually when I'm four-fifths through a book, I start getting excited about the next one.

PWCW: What were the first comics that you ever read that made you feel like this could be something that you could consider doing seriously?

DS: Luckily, my dad is a huge comic fan and raised me with the idea that comics are a legitimate art form—not that I have a concern for being a "legitimate artist." But he encouraged me to make comics and continues to encourage me. It wasn't like I discovered Maus and it opened doors for me.

PWCW: Did you come to SVA hoping to do comics? Were you a part of their comics program?

DS: Yes. I was in the comics program freshman year and transferred to the illustration program, although I continued to take mostly comics classes. My senior year thesis class was Gary Panter's cartooning portfolio class.

PWCW: You've described your influences as ranging from [Iranian film director] Abbas Kiarostami to Chris Ware. What usable lessons do you find in artists who are not working in the comics medium?

DS: I can give you a specific example. The most recent Kiarostami movie available in English, called Tickets, has three directors doing short films that all take place in a train. Kiarostami directed the second, middle section. The other two directors had stories that felt like scripts "forced" into a train setting. Kiarostami's felt like he was on the train and the story, and the beauty of the sequences naturally unfolded in front of him. He has a way of capturing something that appears to be completely unplanned and undirected, just seen through his lens, and it just happens to be the most beautiful thing in the world that you—the viewer— notice and, in a way, take credit for discovering. In my opinion, Kiarostami is the greatest artist of all time.

PWCW: What do you pick up from comic artists that you wouldn't be able to find from other kinds of artists?

DS: Well, I love comics. I'm just a fan of the medium. I have The Essential Godzilla next to Amy and Jordan on my bookshelf. Probably since I've been reading and making comics for so long, I have a geeky love of the medium. Like a middle-schooler looking at a Dungeons and Dragon's "Monster Manual." They just love it. I can't get that from any other medium. Obviously, specific artists and books have really changed me, but the medium as a whole gives me something.

PWCW: Did Japanese comics or manga culture influence you when you were in Japan?

DS: For a while I was completely obsessed with shoujo manga, Japanese comics for girls, as well as some of the weirder Japanese comics, things that appeared in Garo or the minimal scratchy-stuff. There are so many kinds of comics in Japan. You can pick up a weekly and find a comic that looks like Astro Boy in the front and something that looks like Panter's Cola Madness in the back. I'm skeptical of American artists who say they adopt manga into their work—which manga? Manga isn't a genre. It's a whole world of different artists and storytelling styles.

PWCW: What's been the most frustrating thing about the publishing process for you? What has been the most rewarding?

DS: It's awesome to hold a copy of the book in your hands, but if there's one mistake or a dozen in there, you regret it for the rest of your life. Lying awake at night, thinking "why was the paper so thin?!!" Seeing it at the store and feeling like you're going to throw up. Or seeing something you self-published in high school still sitting in the comic store, like running into an ugly ex-girlfriend you're so ashamed of.