NV: I’ve noticed that you’re also using many graphic signs and words to translate odours, sounds, tastes or textures (steam, dust in air, ocean sounds, loud music…). Is it to compensate the lack of those “effects” in comic art?

DS: It’s a cataloging of natural phenomena, which repeats throughout Bottomless. It’s used for a lot of different things, to create relationships between things, or to act as a specific sound effect, like how Japanese comics have more specific onomatopoeias. It’s about creating an environment mostly. I don’t think I’m compensating. I like it that comics don’t have sounds and smells. Sometimes a word is nice, seeing the words “garage door opening” is different than hearing a garage door opening or seeing it happen. In my webcomic BodyWorld I emphasize rain hitting different things, with words saying “rain hitting pavement” or “rain hitting embers” and that creates a sound and ties together the three rain scenes throughout the book. Words are different than pictures. They can be brought in to do a lot of different things.

I also appreciate his comments about D&D and how it related to his comics work. I was just thinking about that this morning in relation to my own interest in comics and narrative. I started reading comics thought D&D by way of one of DC’s line of comics done in specific D&D worlds.

I played Dungeons and Dragons hard-core. I was the Dungeon Master, playing about every-other day after school and a long game on Sunday for about 5 or 6 years. I quit playing early Junior Year (of High School) and basically transferred all of my energy into comics. I learned everything, creating an enviroment, characters, stories, from playing D&D. My games were very character-driven and social. I know that a lot of cartoonists have played D&D, and there must be some kind of relationship there, but many of the others focus on monsters or weird creatures. I guess I never got into that part of it. I don’t remember drawing monsters a lot. I mostly made maps and characters and stories. It’s strange to me that D&D has a misanthropic reputation, because it is a very social game. It’s people sitting around talking. That’s all it is. I think it’s an important game that children should be taught and encouraged to play.

[...]

“I played a lot of [Dungeons and Dragons] in middle school and high school, and I was the dungeon master, who runs the game,” he explains. “My friends were the player characters. The PCs, [in] the lingo. So they would move through these places, and I had to have maps for everything.”

The villages they’d visit, the dungeons they’d explore, the enemies they’d battle — all this would stem from Shaw. He says he wants the experience of reading a book to be similar to D & D; transporting the reader to and immersing them in another world.

“I spent a lot of time making these stories,” he says. “That was my life, until I got a girlfriend.

Dash Shaw from “The Comic Corrections by Mark Medley, National Post (25 June 2008).

I listed Brian Chippendale’s Ninja as one of my favorite comics of 2006. It was my first reading of a long work by Chippendale, my experience up to that point a few brief pages in an anthology here or there. Long ago I had Maggots on pre-order in its never released Highwater Books edition. Last year, the book was finally released by Picturebox. In a way, I’m glad it never came out from Highwater, as, at the time, I don’t think I would have had the same reaction to it. I’ve had it sitting on my “to blog” shelf for months now. The recent posts by Charles and Craig at Thought Balloonists (see this list of posts) got me to pull the book out and reread it.

Maggots is a tough book. In some ways, it feels more diaristic than most published comics, as if it were created with little (or no) thought for the reader. Chippendale clearly made the work with a sense of energy and exuberance (else, I can’t imagine the creation of all those tiny images and tight lines) and a general lack of what would be considered traditional narrative content.

I was recently reading Susan Sontag’s “Godard” (from Styles of Radical Will) and something she says about the films of Feuillade struck me as relevant to the case of Maggots:

“…the director has carried the melodramatic narrative to absurd extremes, so that the action takes on a hallucinatory quality. Of course, this degree of abstraction of realistic material into the logic of fantasy requires a generous use of ellipsis. If time patterns and space patterns and the abstract rhythms of action are to predominate, the action itself must be “obscure.” In one sense, such films clearly have stories–of the most direct, action-packed kind. But in another sense, that of the continuity and consistency and ultimate intelligibility of incidents, the story has no importance at all.” (161)

With a bit of tweaking for “comics” instead of film and “autobiography” instead of melodrama, this speaks to Maggots. The book has markers of autobiography, and a general sense of the everyday, though it is an everyday for a certain type of alternative lifestyle: the twin problems of not wanting to work but needing money, food, sex, listening to music, reading, shopping, art making, hanging out with friends, communal living. These elements are abstracted and transformed. A trip to Japan becomes a journey into a strange world with characters speaking in unintelligible words. The return flight becomes a kind of rocket ship voyage.

Part of the “logic of fantasy” and “obscure” action in Maggots is what I read as a kind of Dungeons & Dragons “dungeon crawl” milieu of dark corridors, trapdoors, secret passages, spatial confusion, random encounters, and mostly meaningless fighting. We might apply the term “mash-up”–as used for the combination of various web services into something new–to the book. This combination of diary with fantasy, a particular kind of fantasy, is an unusual and novel area (one that takes on a different, and more intelligible, cast in Ninja).

The protagonist of the book is called Hot Potato. Beyond him the only character I can clearly recall is his girlfriend/ex-girlfriend, Rabbit. Their relationship, apparently a long distance one, provides one of the few recurring lines of events, though it is mostly a series of actions separated by large ellipses.

In the end all the narrative elements do not create a consistent or coherent “story.” The diaristic aspect of the book is increased by this lack of a coherent through line. As if Chippendale were transforming and recording life events one after the other, excising any context to reality. I get the feeling this is a very personal book. So what does the reader gain from it?

The primary interest is Chippendale’s visual flair: his dense pages, the dynamic mark marking, the unconventional panel ordering, and the Muybridge-esque attention to breaking down actions into a multitude of slightly altered images.

As has been discussed extensively elsewhere, Chippendale organizes his panels in a snaking motion, back and forth down one page and up the next. The instructions on the inside bookjacket flap warn against an easy complacency, “stay alert.” The reading experience is often confusing, where the “correct” order of reading is nigh impossible to decipher (if there even is a “correct” ordering). This adds to a sense of displacement (increasing that “dungeon crawl” aspect) and frustrates any easy reading, yet, the close, snaking nature of the panels combined with the crude style of the images increases the reader’s tendency to read quickly. Zipping through the pages, certain sequences look like a flipbook disassembled, such is the moment-to-moment actions of Chippendale’s breakdowns. The sense of movement in the tight tiny panels is increased by the way Chippendale parallels the direction of the dense background hatching to that of the actions.

This book lopes along at a steady pace, slowed by a few short (often hard to read) word balloons, and the rare, but all the more affective for it, large panels. The sudden expansive panels (often full page images or two page spreads) are a breath of fresh air amongst the tight dark panels (like passing from a series of labyrinthine passages into a giant garden), offering a feeling of freedom and escape.

The speed of the book is also retarded by occasional pages of non-action. One such sequence that goes on for almost three pages (more than 65 panels) shows Hot Potato (I think it’s him?) sitting in a chair reading silently. This repetitious non-action in contrast with the frenetic movement of much of the book is a welcome respite, nicely creating an identification between reader and character as he rests.

For the reader unfamiliar with Chippendale’s work I would not recommend Maggots. Ninja is a much more successful and mature work (despite the juvenilia which starts it), offering more conventional narrative pleasures, but also a greater sense of thamatic depth to the succession of events and a style that is more dynamic in its patterning, actions, and space. Maggots, while pointing towards a different sense of comics action and reading, ends up feeling more like a published sketchbook, a different experience.

The majority of my friends and our activities were D&D (or some other role-playing game) based throughout my pre-teen and teen years. I met one of my best friends because we both played the game, and while we haven’t played the game in years, we’re still friends. I’m not sure what we would have done in high school if we weren’t playing D&D.

You could say my comics reading goes back to D&D as the first comic I (or rather one of my parents for me) bought was Dragonlance #2 from DC Comics, based on a D&D product. I quickly moved on to X-Men and then to indies, but that, probably really bad, fantasy comic was what first directed my attention at comics.

I’d hazard that my interest in rules (constraint) in relation to narrative goes back to D&D. What is D&D but rule-based collaborative narration? Structures and rules have stuck with me. Even my first (sad) attempts at writing were fantasy stories based on my D&D characters (thankfully I moved away from that before I got out of elementary school).

I haven’t played D&D in a few years, keeping a group together and all the time for preparation was just more than I wanted to deal with, but I still have a few books and polyhedron dice in the closet. I’ve moved on to other activities, but I owe a lot to that game and, thus, to Gygax. I don’t know what he was like as a person, but I hope he knew what an effect he had on so many people (dorky/geeky as we are).

Today he put up an interesting reply to a reader who questions why he doesn’t write fiction instead of gaming, since role-playing games (like D&D) are so narrative. I quote part of his reply:

…Writing a poem gets me closer to the originary experience of reading fantasy novels—the discovery of a dream-landscape where I felt I belonged—than reading such novels does now. Also, there’s the sheer fussiness of D&D and its epigones—hit dice, THACO, alignments—and those constraints are perhaps akin to those we impose on ourselves in poems, the better to free the imagination. And the whole game happens in language—it’s distinctly un-visual, except in the sense that radio is a visual medium—so maybe it’s natural that my attention would be more captivated by the language’s powers of transport rather than any particular story. Also, the collectivity of gaming, which means that no one, not even the DM, has total control over what’s going to happen, imitates the processes of the unconscious and surrender of intent that I find intrinsic to the best poetry.

Go check out the rest.

It’s also interesting to note his bit about the “constraints” of game play (the rules) and it’s relation to poetic constraints and freeing the imagination. That’s pretty much one of the main ideas behind literary constraint, the opening up of new vistas of imagination.