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Summary
Summary
From the astonishing imagination of Dash Shaw, visionary author of Bottomless Belly Button , comes a darkly fantastical graphic novel about a small town, a lowlife botanist, and a mysterious plant with strange powers.
It's 2060, and a devastating civil war has left the country in shambles. Professor Paulie Panther-botanist, writer, and hopeless romantic-arrives in the experimental forest town of Boney Borough to research a strange plant growing behind the high school. As he conducts his research, he befriends some of the local residents: Miss Jem, the alluring science teacher; Billy Borg, Boney Borough's star athlete; and Pearl Peach, the rebellious schoolgirl. Paulie soon discovers that the plant, when smoked, imparts telepathic powers. But when he shares this remarkable drug with his new friends, he finds that they're not interested in mind-expansion. In fact, it appears that Paulie's brash individualism might not be at all welcome in a town that prefers conformity to eccentricity.
Nominated for a 2009 Eisner Award and with a bold, innovative design, BodyWorld is a mind-blowing blend of science-fiction, classic high school drama, and futuristic what-if. It is at once funny and fearless-and sure to be the graphic novel event of the year.
Author Notes
DASH SHAW grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and studied at the School of Visual Arts. A prolific cartoonist and animator, he is the author of the 2008 graphic novel Bottomless Belly Button . He lives in Brooklyn.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A fantastic follow-up to Shaw's widely praised first full-length graphic novel, 2008's Bottomless Bellybutton, Body World treads very different territory. Boney Borough is a pastoral planned community in a dystopic future, where everyone knows each other's names and young romance blossoms at the high school "die-ball" games. But like all idyllic suburban communities, Boney Borough has a drug problem, and a newcomer, tweaked-out drug "researcher" Paulie Panther, takes advantage of it. Panther discovers a new kind of plant in the woods outside town, that, when smoked, allows people to telepathically experience one another's bodies and minds. Introduced to the local youth, the drug wreaks havoc with Boney Borough in some very unusual ways. First published as a serial comic on the author's Web site, the print version has added scenes, with gorgeous full-color pages to be read from top to bottom, as if you were scrolling through the story from beginning to end. This is key for the climactic scene, which unfurls in one extended panel. Shaw's willingness to experiment with his drawing style pays off particularly in pages portraying the effects of the drug with abstract blurring and melding of images. Another brilliant work that is sure to attract loads of attention and praise this year. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Shaw changes genre and tone from the not unplayful but serious realism of The Mother's Mouth (2006) and Bottomless Belly Button (2008), folding sf and high-school romance into a grunge-noir continuum sprung from the ancient trope of the stranger coming to town. The burg in question is rigorously plotted (in a perfect square) Boney Borough, and the newcomer is Professor sic Paulie Panther, an experiential drug researcher (i.e., for all practical purposes, a professional addict). He comes to inspect a mysterious two-lobed plant growing on the local high-school campus and, as things unfold, to get involved (well, almost) with curvaceous teacher Jem Jewel and later with new grad Pearl Peach, whose athletic swain, Billy-Bob Borg, is already dismayed at her dumping him. If all those alliterative names don't immediately give it away, the first few pages clarify that this is a black comedy on the lines of 1980s cult film Repo Man, which it most directly resembles in its space-alien conspiracy (the plant's a Trojan horse) that never physically breaches the plot's surface (the aliens never appear). Deploying color seemingly pasted-in à la hip 1950s advertising and UPA cartoons (especially impressive in scenes distorted by the plant's mind-and-body-melding effects) to his trademark art-brut-meets-computer-animation drawing style (his protagonist's name is probably a tip of the hat to stylistic forebear Gary Panter), Shaw shows himself as adept at dire comedy as he is with midlife and family crises.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Characters in Dash Shaw's graphic novel don't just read one another's minds; they share them. "THIS book is for 'ideal readers' only!!!" declares the copyright page of Dash Shaw's new graphic novel, "BodyWorld." He's kidding, of course (the same page goes on to request, "Please read in bed naked"), but it's a clever way to point out that this isn't a particularly straightforward piece of work, "BodyWorld" is a psychedelic, romantic, science-fictional high school melodrama, the sixth book by a 27-year-old cartoonist who made his name in 2008 with the ambitious "Bottomless Belly Button." A hard-core experimentalist, Shaw enthusiastically tosses one dizzying visual technique after another at his readers, because his story constantly heads into territories where simple narrative artwork isn't enough. The first sign that "BodyWorld" doesn't play by the rules is that the book's spine is at its top. The overall motion of Shaw's story becomes a downward scroll rather than a rightward stroll. The climax of that slow 380-page dive is a remarkable sequence toward the end - seven pages devoted to a single gigantic panel that pulls the reader's perspective downward across the architectural landscape of a future megalopolis, after which the movement of the story bounces back up into the stars. This is a disorienting, distracting funhouse of a book: there are long hallucinatory passages, near-abstract images, drawings overlaid on one another until they're nearly incomprehensible. That said, Shaw is as eager to entertain as he is to mess with the parameters of his medium, and he goes out of his way to guide readers through the obstacle course he's laid out. On the inside covers of "BodyWorld," there are fold-out flaps with gridded maps of Boney Borough (the post-future-civil-war planned community where most of the action happens), as well as reference images of the major characters. There's always some kind of high-spirited slapstick or engaging gross-out or emotionally fraught interaction to keep things entertaining. And whenever Shaw gets a funny idea, he runs with it. One blackly daffy subplot involves "dieball," a game that's not quite as fatal as its name suggests - it's a kind of cross between football, curling, Dungeons & Dragons (the ball is a gigantic 10-sided die) and glue-huffing (players cover themselves with addictive, brain-damaging "Diegunk"). Originally serialized online, and revised for its print incarnation, "BodyWorld" centers on the downfall of a crazed botany professor named Paulie Panther. An impotent, drug-gobbling creep who thinks of himself as a sensitive, romantic soul, Panther comes to Boney Borough to investigate a newly discovered and potentially psychoactive plant growing in the woods near the town's high school. As it turns out, the plant does indeed have some unusual properties: inhale its smoke, and you can experience the sensory perceptions and thoughts of anyone else near you. Smoke it with other people, and you'll not only feel what they're feeling, but feel them feeling your feelings of what they're feeling, and so on. If that sounds creepy, it is, and Panther's successive plant-fueled, erotically charged entanglements with the high school science teacher Jem Jewel, the 18-year-old naïf Pearl Peach and the star dieball player Billy-Bob Borg lead "BodyWorld" into increasingly dark, unsteady-underfoot territory. (Yes, every character in the book has an alliterative name. Why not?) Shaw's cast members all have the broad, improbable features of old-school comic-strip heroes and villains - with his broken nose, 80-degree-angle chin and zigzagging sideburns, Paulie Panther could be a visual remix of Chester Gould's design for Dick Tracy. As the characters' physical perceptions melt into one another, Shaw pulls out the stops to show us what that blurring of identity could mean. He mixes and matches their features, superimposes drawings of characters on one another, adds raw splotches of color to his coolly composed lines and flat tones. Shaw isn't yet much of a draftsman, but he's a hell of an artist, constructing vivid, uncanny compositions with a spectacular sense of color and space. (When he can't quite communicate with images what's supposed to be going on, he sometimes just writes it in. One panel, for instance, includes the note "feeling sheet on back.") His sense of pacing is odd but very effective - a shift to nine panels from 12 per page midway through the book kicks its tone into a higher gear. And he seems to have fully absorbed the visual vocabularies of whole schools of cartooning that barely took notice of one another: old Japanese adventure comics, the art brut Fort Thunder scene, animation storyboards. A sequence in which a human-alien hybrid offloads a chunk of exposition is a bravura pastiche of off-brand '60s horror comics (right down to the off-register color effects), if something of a cheat as far as plotting goes. To read "BodyWorld" for its plot, though, is to be sidetracked by one of its lesser pleasures. (It's also more fun if you read it a few times, to catch the early images and lines of dialogue that seem like idle decoration until you've seen what comes later.) Shaw devotes great chunks of the book to evoking both intense and less-intense bodily experiences - feeling textures, sensing heat, climbing, sweating and itching. His characters cough and tickle and stretch and clench their guts and strip leaves off fallen twigs. There's so much sensory input involved in being a person, he suggests, that sharing someone else's senses could be unbearable. WHAT the mysterious plant of Boney Borough does, in fact, is communicate the incommunicable: not just the part of someone else's perceptions that language and visual art can suggest, but other people's entire experience of being in the realm of the senses. That's nearly impossible to get across on the page, but near impossibility isn't going to stop Shaw from taking advantage of comics' symbol-making potency to try. More often than not, "BodyWorld" doesn't quite get there: Shaw's alliterative characters are too two-dimensional to rise from the page. But there's so much gusto and invention in his attempt that it's more rewarding than any number of more modest successes. A mysterious plant lets characters experience the sensory perceptions and thoughts of anyone nearby. Douglas Wolk is the author of "Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean." He writes frequently about comics for The Times.
Kirkus Review
A graphic novel that seems not only to expand the possibilities of the form but explode them. Looking for the linear narrative of conventional storytelling in the latest from critically acclaimed artist Shaw (Bottomless Belly Button, 2008, etc.) is like trying to drive on LSD. In fact, the riot of color seems hallucinogenic, befitting this futuristic scenario of a mysteriously seedy botany professor on the prowl for a plant with unusual properties. His quest leads him to Boney Borough, 50 years from now, in particular its high school and a forest where typical notions of reality achieve dreamlike suspension. Living in a motel that is little more than a flophouse (out of some noir film), Professor Paulie Panther befriends Miss Jem Jewell, the school's femme fatale of a teacher, who grows suspicious of the stranger after a very unusual bathroom encounter between the two. He then turns his attention to two students, star athlete Billy Borg and the attractive Pearl Peach, each of whom falls under his seductive spell. If such a summary seems straightforward enough, it betrays the spirit of a narrative that hop-scotches across decades and finds characters exchanging brain waves, even genders, through the properties of the plant that the professor smokes and shares. Anyone trying to make even symbolic sense of this might be frustrated; just hop aboard and enjoy the ride. Fittingly, the book must be read verticallytop to bottomrather than the usual horizontal, side-by-side progression from beginning to end. Not for kids or repressively mature adults, but a real kick for those in between. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Finely written and equally well drawn by Shaw, this is one of those genreless works that defies explanation, challenges imagination, and leaves the reader satisfied if not entirely overjoyed. Set in the year 2060 in the wake of a civil war that has left America with highly visible social and economic scars, the narrative finds Professor Paul Panther-homage to Hunter S. Thompson if there ever was one-in the small town of Boney Borough, fulfilling his professional duties to experiment with a strange new hallucinogenic and document his experiences with it. During his stay in the quaint, upbeat town, he establishes relationships with (for good or ill) the town's quirky characters and manages to shake up the status quo, with often humorous results. Things take a dark turn, however, when the townsfolk become exposed to the drug and experience its mind-warping effects, all as part of a sinister, far-reaching plot by an unexpected outside force. Verdict Lovers of offbeat comics and purveyors of drug culture will find lots to love in this story, which drips with personality and unfurls at a comfortable pace.-M. Brandon Robbins, Wayne Cty. P.L., Goldsboro, NC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
