Dash Shaw is a creator who happily straddles that line. On the one hand, he's an indie cartoonist who flirts with the avant garde in the pages of Fantagraphics' MoMe anthology, and his major graphic novel release was the 720-page slice-of-life Bottomless Bellybutton. On the other, he's an anime-inspired artist and animator who often does sci-fi stories.
Shaw's latest, The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D., is hitting shops this week, but I picked up a copy from the Fantagraphics booth at APE last fall. I wasn't sure what to expect; I really liked Bottomless, but I feared this book would just be leftover drawings from Shaw's recent animations for the Independent FIlm Channel (which you can watch online here). While the book does contain pages of storyboards (which Shaw points out is a common practice in Japan), it also features some really great comic work.
The titular Unclothed Man comic takes up the first chunk of the book. It's kind of a surreal Flash Gordon, starring a space adventurer who has to pass himself off as a robot and become a model for a life drawing class, in a future where drawing actual humans is banned. The animated version has the same story and even a lot of the same drawings, but it abstracts the images to the point where it's difficult to really understand the narrative. The comic version is still dreamy and bizarre, but it's a lot more linear and it's easier to grasp when you can digest the imagery at your own pace. I wouldn't say it's better exactly, but I think I liked the animation a lot more having read the comic first.
After that, we get a lot of Shaw's shorter comics, originally published in various issues of MOME. I was particularly impressed with a story called "Cartooning Symbolia" which at first just seems like a kind of pretentious experiment (each panel demonstrates a different classic cartooning device, like sweat drops or anger lines), but ends up being an emotionally affecting story about how obsessively making art has distorted the narrator's ability to experience the real world.
Though the "Unclothed Man" comic is more post-modern space opera than actual science fiction, in some of the short stories Shaw really engages with sci-fi traditions while still reveling in formal cleverness. A highlight is "Look Forward First Son of Terra Two," a love story set during a war between parallel Earths which move in opposite directions in time. Shaw distinguishes the timelines with contrasting color schemes, making the story relatively easy to follow in spite of its weirdness.
I can imagine a certain kind of sci-fi aficionado being put off by Shaw's strange storytelling style, but I actually think it suits the genre very well. At its best, science fiction challenges our conceptions of society and ourselves. At its most exciting, it allows us to escape into another world. Shaw's work does both, and I can't wait to see what he comes up with next.
If you're interested, but aren't sure you'd want to spring for a book, I'd suggest you watch the animations and check out Shaw's webcomic Body World, which will be published as a book by Fantagraphics in 2010.
If you can't find Unclothed Man at your local comic shop or bookstore, you can pick it up from Fantagraphics.