The alternative cartoonist discusses his massive new book, 'Bottomless Belly Button' and his ongoing web comic, 'BodyWorld.'
By David Paggi
Posted 6/06/2008
Dash Shaw is definitely one of fastest rising stars in today's indie/alternative scene. At only 25 years old, Shaw has already amassed an impressive body of work including a number of anthology contributions in books like MOME and Meathaus , and full-length graphic novels like Mother's Mouth and Love Eats Brains. Shaw's latest offering, The Bottomless Belly Button, a mammoth 720 page tome from Fantagraphics, is an impressive examination of familial relationships and exercise in Shaw's innovative sense of design and cartooning. Shaw is also currently publishing a weekly web comic entitled BodyWorld, which breaks barriers with its experimental sense of layout, color and storytelling.
In regards to Bottomless Belly Button, what would you say interested you about family drama as a genre? Do you think it fits in that genre?
I think it is in that genre. I'm glad that you share my view of it as a genre, because it seems like it's one of those weird things where people don't think of it as a genre. It's more like a drama or it's in real life stories. But family stories are a genre and BodyWorld kind of has sci-fi elements, it's kind of in the sci-fi genre but they're both inside the genre's, but it's not like they're genre exercises. I guess what drew it to me, for Bottomless Belly Button was, in those stories you're surrounded by a group of characters that are kind of crisscrossing around each other. There's a lot of immediate, dramatic situations inside of a family. I was thinking of family comic strips and television shows where the characters are all doing their different things and then the stories are woven together somehow. So I'm listening in on this family, and watching them and seeing them do their things. And that's what I like to do, is create this little world and see what all the characters do to each other. That's what BodyWorld and Bottomless Belly Button are.
Do you have any favorite work in family genre from other mediums?
Well, I really like The Simpsons, and Dennis, the oldest son [in Bottomless Belly Button] is basically Homer Simpson with hair. The reason I like The Simpsons is that they're cartoony, and very stylized and they all have faults that are very cartoony but you still really like them, or I like them at least. Family Guy I feel like I'm watching a bunch of disgusting people. I'm laughing at them. Simpsons, I'm watching a bunch of people that I probably wouldn't like, and I disagree with but my heart goes out to them [Laughs]. Maybe that sounds extreme, but…And of course I think about families that I know in real life is what kicked off me thinking about it. Which at that time, I guess I started working on it when I was a senior at SVA, and I was spending a lot of time with my friends family and I would go to my girlfriend's family's house a lot and I had never really gotten to know another family so well, maybe other people have that experience earlier but for me that was my first time out spending a lot, like two months or something staying with another family, because my friend was working on a project and had to stay at his house, so I would spend a lot of time, and then became friends with his brother. Families are so different than each other, like my family is very quiet and undramatic, and the consistent family trait in the Shaw family is mellow, like extreme mellow. Like friends have gone to my house and they come back and they're like, they don't get it. “Are there ever any arguments in your family. I don't get how you can have a family like that?" And then I go to spend time with other people's families, and I think it's irritating the level of arguments or raised voices. I can't deal with that. It feels irritating to me, or I can't live in that environment. But to then, that's how they communicate and care for each other, by being worried about each other and expressing that loud. The family in my book is like a combination of these different elements that are at odds with each other, where family members have different ideas of what a family is like inside of it. So there's a lot of undramatic conflict. There's a lot of conflict in the comic, but I wouldn't say that it's a super dysfunctional family. Compared to The Simpsons, or a lot of family stories the characters in The Bottomless Belly Button don't really fight each other that much. I can't think of any really big arguments. And a lot of the characters spend time outside of the family doing their things and then they come together for dinner. Those are the scenes that they're together. And it feels like that's how most families operate, in my mind. That everyone is doing their own thing and then they come together for these miniature events and then they split off, and it's a cycle of doing that.
You were working on Bottomless Belly Button for a little over two years and it is a huge book. Did anything in the story change from conception to completion?
Things did change from where I though it would take me. I thought that Claire and Jill's story would move farther along in the third part. But when that happened it felt like it would be forced, and so there isn't a relationship change. In fact most of the stories don't really have a reveal. Most of them stay the same. A lot of it's just drawing scenes and seeing where they go. Having a goal in mind, but sometimes that goal doesn't feel right.
Would you work from a script or would you work directly to the page?
I had an outline and I would draw scenes, and I had ideas for sequences and once I drew scenes I could put them in different places. Because the drawings in Bottomless Belly Button are bellow my natural drawing ability, and so drawing them was very easy. So because the drawing was easier my focus was on what the drawings were of and what the scenes are and what the characters are doing. So I could draw a scene and then do a lot of editing with it. I could decide to redraw it in a different place, or only use part of it or take the whole thing out. It was very easy for me to make those decisions because I could draw it so easily. BodyWorld, the drawings are a lot more complete and illustrative and in color so when I have a page I know that's the page I want. I'm not going to edit it. I guess I could if I really wanted to, but I don't draw it thinking, "Oh that's alright if I don't end up using this page." But The Bottomless Belly Button, I did a lot of drawings that didn't appear in the book.
Do you think a family drama is a big departure for you?
No, because all my comics are about relationships, even when they were more experimental looking and even when they had horror things in them and even now that they have telepathy in them. They're all relationship based. That is what I am interested in and that's what all my comics are about. I feel at home in doing anything that's about more than one person.
Moving onto BodyWorld, why did you decide to make this a web comic?
To answer that, this might sound like a long answer, but I will get around to it. [Laughs] As a warning. When I did a book called The Mother's Mouth in Gary Panter's Senior Portfolio Class. That was a lot about facing pages and page turns and properties of the book and using that in a story, same as a short story I did called Echo and Narcissus, a mini comic. From that, I liked the characters in the story but because of how I did it, it didn't have a lot of character based scenes or characters talking to each other. So when I made the step to The Bottomless Belly Button I kind of divided it into these sequences that were more like pure comics, not character based, with character based scenes that were just panels. I had these ideas for scenes of facing pages and page turns and image, image, image and then a scene of characters talking outside and I would draw that panel for panel and not think about the page at all because my focus was on the characters and what they were doing. I didn't want have my scene and try and force it into some weird idea of what a beautiful comic is. I liked how these kind of character based scenes were going, that I was doing panel by panel without thinking about the page, so I thought I wanted to get rid of the page entirely and not even think about page composition or anything like that. I just wanted to think about the story and what the character was doing right then. So then I came up with a never-ending grid format—that's Body Walk, the constant 12 panel pages. Then I thought since it doesn't have a page, it doesn't have to be a book. I can just put this on the Internet and it doesn't matter what page is facing what page at all. The only thing that matters is what the characters are doing. I really like web comics and I like that they are free, of course, and that lots of 12 year old kids have web comics, they're create stories and just putting them up there. It feels really immediate and nice to me and I want to be apart of that. There's a lot of things I like about web comics. I really like the cartoonist who did Bolt City, who spent so much time on these pages that he would put up on the Internet for free. That is really moving to me. I know that most cartoonists don't make any money but for some reason the idea of spending twelve hours a day, or more, painting and putting together this thing where the end result is just posting it and not asking anybody for anything is just awesome! It's exciting, right?
What was the idea behind the map of the town for BodyWorld, and having that other kind of aspect?
Like in Bottomless Belly Button, I like having a limited location and keeping all my scenes inside these spaces where you know what they are. I don't like having to keep establishing where the character is. I like having the character in the background and you know where they are because you've read the pages before. So the map creates a limited contained space where we're aware of where the character is at that time in relation to the other places that he or she's been. On top of that, the distance between the places and the town becomes important later in the story. I don't want to say why because it will spoil things.
Is that something you came up with when you knew you were going to do this as a web comic?
No, you could do that at the beginning of the book. I wanted to have the grid placement as kind of like an establishing shot that shows where the character is in relation to the map. This way, you can stay aware of the relationship between the different locations and the town so that later when something happens that spreads out from a point in the town you can see what is happening to all the different areas as it's spreading out.
Would you describe some of your work as science fiction? Perhaps a little less in BodyWorld, but some of your work in MOME comes across as avant-garde science fiction?
I'll tell you what happened. I really liked Dick Calkins' Buck Rogers comic strips. I started ordering collections of the Sunday's and I have big collection of the Daily Strips. I was working as a figure drawing model in Richmond, Virginia, this was a couple years ago, and so I did a story about a figure drawing model in the future that was drawn in this Buck Rogers, Sunday page style. That was a four-page story that I did a long time ago, but it's just being published now in the Meathaus S.O.S. anthology. And then I had an idea for a story about someone who would have to perform tasks in reverse in order to move forward, because he's going on a reverse timeline. That kind of has to be science fiction because I would imagine the only way that would happen is if he was of an alien origin, so the ideas kind of lead to science fiction. I drew that one in the style of the daily Dick Calkins strips. Both of those were before BodyWorld. Bottomless Belly Button is about character relationships but there isn't any thought balloons in it, and so a lot of the scenes come from us known what a character is thinking based on things that we know about that character. I wanted to do thought balloons, because I don't think people think in sentences, and I think using the normal thought balloon is useful in a lot of circumstances—so I'm not dissing it—but I wanted to do something that would involve no only knowing what a character is thinking on the surface level where we think in words, but also what the character is feeling and associations with places or objects that this character has. So super thought balloons, ya know? Then I thought telepathy would do that. If you do a comic about telepathy what you're really doing a comic about is how people think and what it's like to be inside another person, and that's what I wanted to do. That felt like the logical next step from the Bottomless Belly Button. So if you're doing a comic about telepathy that involves a character gaining telepathic powers, and I don't think people can be telepathic to the degree I wanted to go in my story without some kind of outside force giving us this ability. And I think this outside force could only be alien in origin. I don't think I could think really hard or practice different things and gain telepathy. I think I could study people and understand things about people and get very low-level telepathy on that scale, in real life. But to get really, really high levels of telepathy, that I'm talking about in my comic, it would have to be some special gift, that in my story is a plant that's alien in origin. So then I wandered back into the science fiction realm because of what I wanted to do. But I have to say I don't feel like I'm a sci-fi cartoonist, and I don't feel like I'm a family stories cartoonist. I don't feel attached to any of these genres I'm in. I don't know if that's good or bad [Laughs].
Yeah, I felt like just calling it science fiction is limiting. Like the new story in MOME #12. It's in the future and has some strange elements, but it's not just sci-fi.
Right, it's because I don't think of it as sci-fi, ya know. I like science fiction a lot, but I like a lot of different things. I love Westerns and I love images that are associated with all kinds of different genres. But probably the only genre that I keep coming back to is romance. There's a lot of romance elements in pretty much all my comics, and I love romance movies and romantic comedies a lot too.
What about the coloring in process for Body World? What's that like? I love the way it kind of drops the hard lines.
A lot of the things comics that I was doing, I did a comic called Love Eats Brains and sections of The Mother's Mouth and a lot of my short stories, I would have colored sections of that were gouache paint on acetate. So I would take my ink drawing down to Kinko's and then photocopy it onto an acetate sheet and then paint the back of it like an animation cell. But whenever those were published they were always in black and white because coloring costs more and I figured they were fine in black and white. But the originals were all in color. I started doing that more and more and I started developing different things that were combinations of working on acetate sheets, which was done for a long time—Batman: Year One was colored on acetate sheets, and I love the way that book was colored—and then kind of a screen print look, which is, I draw things with a rapidograph pen and then on the computer I just color the ink line in the same tone as what's around it so that there are no lines. I use the acetate or gouache paintings as guides for how I color the page, so I use the eyedropper tool from colors that I mix so it completely blends together. I feel like my color sensibility comes out of my hand. When I'm sitting in front of a computer and I have a million color options, I don't know what to do. But if I am playing around on a page I can just scan that in a use the eyedropper tool and pick up colors that I made in real life, and use them on my page. And that will be the case for a lot of the pages in BodyWorld. There will be five or six pages at a time where there's only computer coloring, but those colors come from the gouache paint, and then I can go back to a scene that's gouache paint. Gouache paint, when it's on a side of an acetate sheet and you scan it with the flat side on the scanner bed, the color looks completely flat. It looks as flat as the computer color. So I can combine that with flat computer colors.
Also, it's exciting for me to work in color. I love line work, and I've been looking at black and white drawings, and other artists' drawings forever. I always liked the black and white comics. When I'm doing drawings, I feel like I have all these other people's drawing inside of me that I'm trying to fight to find my drawing. A lot of my drawings are weirdo combinations of these millions of different artists that I like. I like Chris Ware, but I don't think I color like him. I like Batman: Year One, but I don't think my colors are like that book, because I've never thought about color. I don't think I took any color classes in college, so whenever I color it's completely intuitive for that scene. And because of that I think that they are more exciting and original than my line drawings, my black and white work. That's exciting for me.
What about that recent scene in Chapter Four of BodyWorld, with the overlapping images [the telepathy scene]? How did you achieve that effect?
It's just two drawings that I put on the multiply layer so they look like two acetate sheets on top of each other. I got that idea because I have to make sure, when you compile a book, I drop the pages on top of each other to make sure things line up with the previous page, so I ended up looking at a lot of my pages all multiplied on top of each other in Photoshop. I noticed how things from different pages related to each other when they were on top of each other and I like that. At the same time I was trying to think of way to do the telepathy scenes where I could communicate two things at once, which, if you were having telepathy it would be a lot of new information, multiple things going on in your body or mind. So that worked out really well…or thinking about that worked out well. Then I did a poster for Exorcist II: The Heretic [for the Supertrash film festival]. That movie has scenes where there are really cheesy ghost effects of someone else in the movie. It's basically like the multiply level effect for cinema. So then I used that in my poster and tried different things, because you can do multiply which is the two drawings on top of each other, or you can do two layers and change the opacity of the white or specific color on the second layer.
So what else is going on with you now? Are you just going to be working on BodyWorld and MOME stuff or do you have anything else coming up?
Yeah, BodyWorld takes a lot of time [Laughs]. Then I do stories for MOME and I did a Cold Heat Special with Frank Santoro so that will be at conventions. I think a silkscreen cover version will be at MoCCA. I'm thinking about other things that I might want to do, but I really enjoy working on BodyWorld right now, and I'm pretty much going to stick with that.
For more on Dash Shaw, or to read his current web comic BodyWorld, visit: www.dashshaw.com
