Book Review

BodyWorld

by Dash Shaw
Pantheon, 384 pp., $27.95

The obvious blurb about Dash Shaw in general and about his new book BodyWorld in particular is that "American sequential art has found its own David Lynch." But that's too easy, isn't it? Still, the mind draws comparisons much the way Shaw draws his narratives: not with the near-clinical precision of Adrian Tomine or the smooth neo-DeCarlo lines of Jaime Hernandez or the gorgeous urban draftsmanship of Chris Ware, say, but with starkly simple caricatures and sketchy figures and painted backgrounds of a vast color palette and explanatory diagrams and digital overlays and whatever the hell else it takes to most effectively express his ideas.

The mind draws comparisons. Look, says the mind, how BodyWorld showcases the Lynchian tropes of innocent young romance and the subversion of that romance by intense chaotic forces. Behold, says the mind, as the disintegration of personalities (literally, in this case, thanks to alien biotechnology) appears to warp the very medium used to depict it. Make note, even, of how the author dwells lovingly on quotidian, mundane details in the midst of paradigm-shattering intergalactic mindfuckery.

In BodyWorld, we've got a small-town high school where the top athlete's in love with a rebellious girl but also entangled with the imminent prom queen. We've got a putative professor of pharmacological botany (but a bona fide, vigorous abuser of every drug on the planet) sent from New York City to investigate the mysterious new species of plant that's been discovered in the woods behind that high school. We've got a substance that enables the imbibers to project their memories and personalities into the sensoria of other nearby imbibers – like a panoramic version of the telepathic bad-acid-trip scene in Robert Silverberg's 1972 prose novel Dying Inside. We've got random violence and multiple freak-outs and disastrously overlapping relationships and sexual antics and alien takeover plots in a dystopic future. We've – wow. We've got – wow.

Altogether, BodyWorld is a twisted masterpiece of storytelling built from stunning visuals and panel-manipulation, rendered with much care by the young artist whose first full-length graphic novel, Bottomless Belly Button (from Fantagraphics), was a black-and-white foreshadowing of what he's capable of in full color and unbridled weirdness – much like, to return to our original premise, Lynch's Eraserhead was a monochrome foreshadowing of what that auteur would later create in Mulholland Dr. Which is to say: Wow.