New School

By Dash Shaw (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-644-7

Dash Shaw is an extremely talented creator with a singular authorial voice and a huge repertoire of styles to call upon. Born in 1983, he is a leading light of a â€œnew waveâ€ (please note no capital letters there) of multi-tasking cartoonists, animators and web-content originators whose interests and sensibilities have heralded a renaissance in graphic narrative.

Like so many fresh and cocky creators, he began young with independently published comics before graduating to paid work, and his previous successes include Love Eats Brains, GoddessHead, Garden Head, Mother’s Mouth and the superb and haunting Bottomless Belly Button and Bellyworld.

In 2009 the Independent Film Channel commissioned him to convert his short series The Unclothed Man In the 35th Century A.D. (from comic arts quarterly Mome) into an imaginative and compelling animated series which then translated into an incredibly impressive graphic novel/art book comprising not only the evocative, nightmarish and tenderly bizarre tales but also the storyboards, designs and scripts Shaw constructed to facilitate the transition from paper to screen.

And now with New School Shaw’s bold, broad experimentalism finds a forward-looking yet chaotically nostalgia-generating fresh mode of communication for the oldest of information-storing, emotion-generating devicesâ€¦

Here is another unique and achingly visual exploration of family, relationships and even the art of telling stories, at once dauntingly challenging, emotively ambivalent and metaphorically obfuscatory even as Shaw impossibly pulls an authorial sleight of hand trick which renders this colossal chronicle surprisingly accessible.

Danny is a smart, content, obedient boy who worships his older brother Luke and he is telling us about his life. As our narrator he only speaks in declarative and pompously declamatory, almost mock-heroic idiom, although his emotional underpinning is oddly off-kilter, like a high-functioning autistic.

He speaks solely in the present tense even though his story begins with memories of 1990. Moreover Danny believes he has prophetic dreams such as that one day there will be a movie called Jurassic Park or that the TV actor who plays Captain Picard will one day be the leader of the X-Men in a filmâ€¦

Their highly-strung father publishes Parkworld – The Quarterly Journal of Amusement Park Industry News and Analysis and is justifiably proud of his sons’ artistic gifts and family fealty, but their solid lives begin to change in 1994 when Danny takes the credit for a dinosaur drawing Luke created and the devoted boys have a tremendous fight. As a result of the tussle Danny is temporarily rendered deafâ€¦

Even though his hearing returns, things have changed between the boys, and soon the rebellious Luke is despatched by Dad to the nation of X where an amusement park genius is setting up an incredible new entertainment experience called â€œClockworldâ€.

Ashar Min AKA â€œOtis Sharpeâ€ is the greatest designer of rides on Earth and with the backing of X’s government is turning the entire Asian island-state into a theme park tourist trap. To that end Sharpe is hiring Americans to teach the X-ians to speak English and learn Western ways – and Dad wants 17-year old Luke to go thereâ€¦

Three years younger, dutiful obedient Danny feels betrayed and abandoned, even as he guiltily noses around in his brother’s now empty room. Two years pass and Luke has not communicated with the family since his departure.

Danny’s future-dreams are troubled and he is apprehensive when Mother and Father inform him he is to visit his brother on X, with the intention of bring their silent first-born homeâ€¦

However when he arrives on the bustling strange shore Danny is shocked by how much Luke has changed. Even his speech and dress are lax, debased and commonplace and the once-shining example of probity drinks, swears and fornicatesâ€¦

Shock follows shock however as the newcomer is shown the burgeoning economy and infrastructure growing in the wake of Clockworld’s imminent completion. Moreover after visiting the NewSchool where Luke teaches, Danny’s joy in reuniting with his beloved brother is further shaken, when he realises how much he has changed and has no intention of returning to America.

Worse yet, the influence of X and its people also begins to increasingly infect the appalled boy, forcing him to perpetually disgrace himself as his dreams torment him with incredible, impossible visions.

At least he thinks it’s the island making him mean and spiteful or shamefully stare at the unconsciously libertine, scandalously disporting womenâ€¦

This book is drenched in the turbulent, reactive, confusing and conflicted feelings of childhood and physically evokes that sense. At 340 pages, all delineated in thick black marker-like lines with hulking faux mis-registered plates of flat colour seemingly whacked willy-nilly on the 279 x216mm pages, this feels like a mega-version of one of those cheap colouring books bought for kids on a seaside holiday in the 1960s.

In fact the sheer size of the tome hammers that point home, no matter how grown up your hands now are.

Strident but subtle, simplistic yet psychologically intellectual and viscerally, compellingly bombastically beautiful in a raw, rough unhewn manner, this a graphic tale that every dedicated fan of the medium simply must see, and every reader of challenging fiction must read.

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