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Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw
Shaw, Dash. Bottomless Belly Button. Fantagraphics, 2008. 9781560979159. $29.99, 720p.
If I summarized the plot of Dash Shaw’s brick of a comic, Bottomless Belly Button (henceforth, BBB), it wouldn’t sound like much. Three grown-up children return to their family home for a week to learn that their aged parents are getting divorced, psychology ensues, then they all leave. As a basic plot, it’s not anything you haven’t read before. When I wrote about Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings a few weeks ago I criticized his psychological realist work for its lack of invention or daring. Shaw, on the other hand, seems to be as much interested in the form of his story as the content, and he does not disappoint here in taking a rather conventional story and creating an inventive, entertaining, and layered work that demands rereading due to an often
(Continue Reading...)
Telephone Text
An interesting film still that not only shows three separate shots at once, but also shows a rather comics-like use of text making a visual path across the image from one character to another.
(Image from David Bordwell’s post “Lucky ‘13″.)
Tags: film, image-text-interaction
(Continue Reading...)Rohmer’s Characters
According to Crisp, the loss of the retrospective narration, and therefore the loss of identification with the first person, is unfortunate. He contends that in the Moral Tales the retrospective narration gave the audience the pleasures of searching for ambiguity and contradiction in the ‘uneasy coexistence of these subjective reflections and of the “objective” image [...]
(Continue Reading...)More constraint presentation follow-up
Issac asked for clickable links, so I’ve added links to all the works I cited (or used) in my presentation to the post that has the audio version. I’ll also add, that Mike Wenthe made my day in his post where he refers to me as “cartoonist, critic, and comics theorist”.
Issac also commented:
It’d be interesting [...]
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