Out of Body Experience: Dash Shaw’s ‘Body World’

For those who followed BodyWorld as it appeared on Dash Shaw’s website from 2007 to 2009, it will come as no surprise that the book version, to be released by Pantheon iin April, is out of this world. To those who haven’t read Shaw’s work since Bottomless Bellybutton, it just might blow your mind. The 26-year-old Shaw received high praise for 2008’s Bottomless; it was nominated for a Harvey Award, New York Magazine named it the graphic novel of the year, and it appeared on countless top-ten lists—including winning the 2008 PWCW Critics Poll.

With BodyWorld, Shaw gives us something completely different. Where Bottomless was a quiet family drama—albeit a weird, hilarious, and graphically brilliant one—BodyWorld is a raging torrent of ideas, characters, and plot. Paulie Panther is our main dude, a drugged-out genius prone to truth-telling in his own brand of hipster jive-talk. Accused of being a bad influence on the youth of Boney Borough, the planned community where he’s washed up sometime in the future, Paulie might reply “you know what's a bad influence? fucking textbooks written by thought police,” and then he’ll add, “Oh!Sorry, I didn't mean to liberate your mindor anything. My bad!”

Shaw brings this gonzo humor to his tale of what happens in Boney Borough when a new plant is discovered in the woods. Smoked as a joint, the plant allows people to experience one another’s physical and mental states telepathically. This mind-melding is portrayed in lushly painted pages and it shows memories, ideas, and physical experience overlapping and mingling in beautiful boundlessness. Shaw recently talked to PWCW about BodyWorld, the animations he’s been working on with Sundance and IFC, and how his cartooning is changing directions.

PWCW: There’s such a different energy to this book than to Bottomless Belly Button. What accounts for that, do you think?

DS: Well, technically, Bottomless had a strong kind of horizontal movement where everything moved left to right. BodyWorld was originally serialized on the internet as a long scroll-down on the computer screen so I designed it to be read that way. When it was reformatted for the book, it was made to be read from top to bottom. That scroll-down is important for the story, especially at the end when it becomes one long image.

PWCW: The subject matter is pretty different, too.

DS: Right, Bottomlessis more about creating an environment, showing characters in a place. It has a lot of situations where two characters’ stories are bumping up against each other but without thought balloons and with no interior monologue. BodyWorld is moving into super thought balloons. Most comics show people thinking in word form but people don’t think that way. People think in words and images at the same time. BodyWorld is about telepathy.

PWCW: What made you want to do a science fiction story about telepathy after the more “realistic” story of Bottomless?

DS: That was the main interest of the book for me. In the telepathy sequences I really tried to accurately get down how I think it would work; it’s not random trippy images. I wanted to show how people are in their bodies. I tried to depict how I think telepathy would work and to show it from the perspective of these characters. I don't think someone could train themselves to be telepathic. I think you could be more sensitive or have a super-understanding of other people but I wanted to take it past that. I don't think a human being could do that without having a superpower so I thought that kind of superpower would come from aliens. It’s the most realistic way that telepathy would happen.

PWCW: The character of Paulie is so wild, and he has some of the smartest, funniest dialogue I think I’ve ever read. Where did he come from?

DS: I had the idea that someone would be going around smoking all these different plants because that’s how they’d find the new plant. And I just thought about what kind of person would have this completely ridiculous job, and that was Paulie. He really created himself.

PWCW: He looks very striking, too, and different from the other characters.

DS: I thought of his character design as being a little like the caricature in those old Dick Tracy villains. I have a big nose and I kind of think I'm attracted to characters who have these strong unusual features because I see that in my own face.

PWCW: You’ve been working on animation projects lately—your series of shorts, The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D.,

are up on IFC’s website and now you’re doing a feature with Sundance Labs. Has doing animation changed your approach to cartooning at all?

DS: Animation is a really beautiful process because you’re sitting there at your desk figuring out how someone walks or moves through space and breaking it down. You’re thinking about your body and increasing your sensitivity to how things move. Bottomless was about that kind of slowness. Now I’m putting that kind of thing into animation, and my comics are getting leaner, tighter, and more detailed.

PWCW: And what’s the animation feature you’re working on?

DS: It’s called Slobs and Nags, and it’s really in the very beginning stages right now. It was just announced because it was chosen as one of the projects for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. That’ll throw me into animation very heavily. Frank Santoro will also be drawing. Unclothed Man had a very small crew, and on this one there will be voice actors so I'll have to actually interact with actors. I don't have a director personality where I'm excited about corralling a bunch of people to do things, so even one or two more people feels like, ‘Oh no, this is really big deal!’, so I’m a little nervous but I’m also very excited about it.