Dash Shaw: "Fuck the three-act structure"

BarcelonaThe graphic novels of Dash Shaw (Los Angeles, 1983) can intimidate readers at first glance. In the case ofBottomless navel (Apa Apa, 2010), the family chronicle that launched the career of this essential author of the latest generation of American independent comics, with its hefty 720 pages, some packed with vignettes. The page count drops to a more reasonable 480. Everything overwhelms (Apa Apa / Blackie Books), his latest work, where the challenge is to confront an unusual structure in the form of a Russian doll that intertwines lives and adds layers and layers to the narrative without the complexity ever hindering the reading.

The story begins with a call from an unknown number on Ken's cell phone: it's his brother, who announces that he is getting married. While Ken is trying on clothes for the wedding and runs into a high school friend, Mel, the comic leaves Ken to delve into Mel's memories of the tortured attraction she felt for a colleague, Kay. And a few pages later, a new flashback It takes us back to the time when Kay was modeling in a life-drawing class. From Kay, we jump to the class teacher, from Professor Karetzky to his lover, from Maala to Christine, and so on. Everything overwhelms unfolds a thousand pages of plots and characters that seem to expand to infinity until, halfway through the book, Shaw begins to close the flashbacks Now, all the loose threads are painstakingly re-stitched. The Russian nesting dolls neatly return to their proper place in an exercise of formal virtuosity that, rather than overwhelming in size, excites with its depth.

And what drives him to complicate his life and experiment with such complex narrative structures? Shaw's response is forceful: "I hate the three-act structure more and more; its predictability irritates me. Cinema has popularized it, but it's also in many books, and it's suffocating and boring. Screw the three-act structure. And I'm not the only one who thinks this: people want to be surprised." In his search for surprising ways to narrate, Shaw was inspired by the classic short film by Charles and Ray Eames Powers of ten, in which the camera moves millions of miles away from an everyday scene and then zooms in to observe the microscopic world. "In my head, Everything overwhelms "It's like a zoom back and forth, a single movement," he says. "And that's why, in reality, it's not difficult to read." The absence of chapters and the stable structure of four panels per page create an illusion of continuity that Shaw compares to "one long uninterrupted sentence." "Every part is a satisfying experience that makes up for the effort of the first."

Reinventing yourself with each work

One of Shaw's most characteristic traits as an author is the changes in style between comics. There seems to be no continuity between the slightly cartoonish style ofBottomless navel, digital experiments of Body world and the realistic coldness of Everything overwhelms, as if they were works by different artists. "The first thing I think about is the story and then the best way to draw it," he explains. "In this case, I thought a lot about what people call jokes." New Yorker, but they did not appear only in New Yorker, but also in magazines of all kinds."

Shaw claims this tradition of graphic humor for its satirical but realistic look at American life, unthinkable in superhero comics or newspaper strips. "His protagonists are ordinary people and the settings are kitchens, bedrooms, the former office. I especially like the work of Garrett Price, an author who drew in a beautiful and at the same time restrained way. He wasn't especially funny, and that makes him even more interesting." This expressive atony seems to spread to the drawing and narration of Everything overwhelms, which projects a certain emotional distance from the action and the characters: "I like the way it feels because one of the book's goals was for nothing to be too dramatic or funny and for the tone to be rather flat, like a Brian Eno ambient record. A tonal indecision like that of the characters, always wavering between different options."

Although comics are his first love and main dedication, Shaw is an avid film buff who has directed a couple of animated features. low fi: the hybrid of high school comedy and disaster movie My entire highschool sinking into the sea (2016) and satire Cryptozoo (2020), in which activists rescue mythological animals to exhibit them in a zoo. Both films reflect Shaw's fondness for fantastical delusions and a passion for surrealism, which, on his recent visit to Barcelona, led him to escape for a day to the Dalí Museum in Figueres. However, the contrast between the zany tone of Shaw's films and the analytical formalism of his graphic novels is striking. He attributes this to the Japanese animation classic. Akira"When I was young, it was my favorite film, and it's a spectacular and bombastic work, the whole world exploding for an hour," he says. "But the comic it's based on, which is the author's own, was a much more intimate, character-driven experience for me. And this division of cinema as an external experience and comics as my DNA" has remained ingrained.