Dash Shaw's latest is BodyWorld, a graphic novel set in the not-so-distant future in an isolated town called Boney Borough. There's some crazy weed smoking, some translucent bodies, some prodding and pushing over a game called die-ball.
Dash lives in New York City and is making an appearance at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art on Tuesday, May 25. More info on Dash and the event can be found at Dash's website.
Impose: So what usually comes first… the art or the story?
Dash Shaw: Everything starts
with sketches and writing, so they can happen simultaneously. Since
I don’t work inside of a production system, where a writer passes a
script to a penciler and then the pencils are passed to an inker and
then a colorist, I can work on everything and have it all more
integrated. I don’t have to separate the steps in my mind.
I can color something and then go back and ink something.
It’s more intuitive and less of a step-by-step process, which
can feel like a day job and get boring to work on. The
last thing I want is to give myself a long illustration assignment.
It should be playful.
BodyWorld was serialized first right? What, if
any, are some of the differences in creating a serial rather than a
completed story?
You
gain a momentum doing something serialized, seeing it from start to
finish. You can follow the story, almost, like a reader
would. Of course you make mistakes but then you have an
opportunity to look at it all at once, as a whole story, and make
changes. There are a lot of differences between the
serialized version of BodyWorld and the book version. The
book was re-colored and lots of new pages were added, especially in the
tenth chapter. I remember when I finished the tenth
chapter, as it was serialized, I was unhappy with it, but I just kept
going. I’m glad I got to go back and change it.
Why did the idea of being able to transfer between
bodies, to feel and think what the other person is thinking appeal to you
as a central device in the story?
I
think it’s something that everyone is interested in. People
want to know what it’s like to be another person. I feel
like it’s the main thing you have to grapple with every day: dealing
with other people and not being them, being yourself. I
would like to know what it’s like. When I’m drawing, I’m
transferring myself to the character and imagining what it’s like to be
the character. So it’s a form of doing that.
Why was Boney Borough so isolated?
It’s
an experimental forest town. The rest of America is very
advanced, which you see at the end of the book, but there are still
communities that are separate from that. Mostly it’s about
small towns, like Richmond, Virginia, where I drew the book after
graduating college, versus New York City where I went to college.
People are free to leave, and they do in the book. A
monorail connects it to NYC.
For the uninitiated, how do you personally describe your
art and your style? What elements of your art are kind of frustrating
for you?
Huh.
I’ve never had to describe my comics. I’ve had to
describe my animations before and I’ve settled on “eighties Robotech
plus Bruce Conner” and I think that actually describes it pretty well,
inside of the dumb, cute “this plus this” format. The
comics are harder, because I’ve been drawing them for a long time and
they morph from project to project. I guess BodyWorld is a
dry comedy. I laughed a lot while drawing it. I
think a drawing is good if it makes you laugh. So the
drawings are comedic and the story is comedic. The drawing
and storytelling is sort of like traditional animation. Character
movements are broken down, so the characters can
“perform,” and there are painted backgrounds.
Lately
I’ve been frustrated with having drawings move back in space as opposed
to being flat and two-dimensional, side-scroll-y. I’ve
had to throw out a lot of pages and redraw things so that it’s in a
3-dimensional space. On BodyWorld I remember being
frustrated with balancing different color elements. The
pages were getting over-produced; too many different things compiled
together. BodyWorld has a lot of shit going on that was
time-consuming. Like, there’s a scene in Paulie’s bathroom
where I’d draw the shower curtain on a separate layer so that it would
be semi-transparent. I thought of it as a “special
effect,” like Star Wars. But I don’t have the patience for
that anymore.
Now I just do a drawing layer and a painted layer and
that’s that.
