Dash Shaw on stories and worlds
“My dad’s thing is that he likes a good story well told. That’s his phrase,” says Shaw. “If he walks out of a movie, he’ll slap his knee and be like [adopting deep voice] ‘That was a good story well told.’ I don’t believe that. I don’t go for good stories well told. I want beauty. I’m an art dork. I like avant-garde films.”
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“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).