To Current Biography

Dash Shaw, Graphic Novelist

“I want my comics to be an emotional experience,” Dash Shaw told Tim Leong for Comic Foundry (April 27, 2005, on-line). “The main character in my comics is ‘You’ and the story is ‘You’re reading this comic.’” He continued, “Some people will relate to a character and others won’t. I have no control over it. I could draw a character who looks like someone you hate, but to another person it could look like their sister or mother. It’s all associative. But the emotions, the psychology of the drawings and sequences, is universal.”

Shaw, whose comics have been praised for their eclectic style, innovative design, and emotional depth, has emerged from a growing breed of artists who maintain autonomy over their work. (By contrast, major comic-book publishing companies, such as Marvel and DC, employ an organized system of writers, who produce story lines and dialogue; pencillers, who are responsible for initial versions of the artwork; and inkers, who refine and complete the comics.) Shaw told Current Biography, “I want my comics to be beautiful. I want it to feel like you’re transported to another place.”

Shaw is the author of the critically acclaimed graphic novels Love Eats Brains (2004), published by Odd God Press; The Mother’s Mouth (2006), published by Alternative Comics; and, most recently, The Bottomless Belly Button (2008), which was published by Fantagraphics Books. (Graphic novels, now widely recognized as a legitimate and respected format in literary circles, are novel-length tales in comics form.) In addition, he has produced a compilation of graphic-art short stories called Goddess Head (2005), and his work has appeared in numerous anthologies, newspapers, and magazines.

Dash Austin Shaw was born on April 6, 1983 in Los Angeles, California, to Monica Shaw, a child psychologist, and Daniel Shaw, a direct-mail copywriter. His parents moved to Richmond, Virginia, two years later, thinking that it would provide a better environment in which to raise a family. (Shaw has one younger brother, Nick.)

Daniel Shaw was a devoted comic-book aficionado. “My dad had a box of underground comics that I’d look through. He also had [the legendary artist] Will Eisner’s The Spirit magazines,” Shaw told Current Biography. When he was four years old, Shaw began creating his own comics by drawing the art for captions his father had written. Shaw told Sunyoung Lee for Publishers Weekly (December 5, 2006, on-line), “Luckily my dad . . . raised me with the idea that comics are a legitimate art form—not that I have a concern for being a ‘legitimate artist.’ But he encouraged me to make comics and continues to encourage me. It wasn’t like I discovered Maus [a Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel about the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman] and it opened doors for me.” Some of Shaw's early favorites included The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the crime-fighting stars of a wildly popular Saturday-morning TV cartoon, and the Japanese comics known as manga. He went on to be influenced by such luminaries as Chester Gould (best known as the creator of the Dick Tracy comic strip), the legendary Japanese manga artist Osamu Tezuka (the talent behind Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion), the contemporary American cartoonist Chris Ware, and the influential illustrator and painter Gary Panter, among others.

Shaw attended high school in Richmond, going to morning classes at Godwin High School and spending the rest of the day at the Henrico High School Center for the Arts magnet program. He told Current Biography, “The Center for the Arts was a great program that allowed for hour-long arts classes every day and a budget for visiting teachers in different fields [and] mediums. An airbrush artist could come in for one class, and a digital artist for the next.” When he was a freshman, Shaw started producing his own Xeroxed mini-comics, which included such titles as “Six Days,” “Skylark,” and “Shippori.” Making roughly 50 or so copies of each, he distributed them to local comic-book stores. In addition, Shaw began providing illustrations for “InSync,” a now-defunct youth supplement to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. At the Times-Dispatch he began experimenting with using such computer programs as Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop to manipulate images and fonts, and he tried out other methods, including watercolor painting. Describing that period to Leong as a kind of “illustration boot camp,” he explained, “I was always attracted to artists who would juxtapose different kinds of drawings.”

Shaw spent his junior year in Tatsumigaoka, Japan, as part of an exchange program. “There are so many kinds of comics in Japan,” he told Lee. “You can pick up a weekly and find a comic that looks like Astro Boy in the front and something that looks like Panter’s Cola Madness in the back. I’m skeptical of American artists who say they adopt manga into their work—which manga? Manga isn’t a genre. It’s a whole world of different artists and storytelling styles.” Shaw explained to Current Biography, “The pace of manga has influenced a lot of my work. My comics don’t look like manga on the surface, but they’re manga underneath. This is something that a lot of other cartoonists notice about my work, people who think about structure and these things, but something that people outside of comics usually don’t pick up on.”

Upon graduating from high school, in 2001, Shaw moved to New York City and enrolled at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). As a freshman, he began self-publishing comics series. Thanks to a friend who worked the graveyard shift at the office-services chain Kinko’s, the costs of the projects were kept at a minimum. Shaw’s emotional stories and innovative design quickly started receiving attention from the comics cognoscenti, and at 19 he was named one of the top 10 artists to watch for at the Small Press Expo, an annual showcase for independent comic books.

Throughout college Shaw placed graphic-art short stories and illustrations in a variety of publications, including the SVA magazine Visual Opinion, the Belgian magazine Front, the now-defunct Philadelphia Independent, and anthologies from the artists' collective Meathaus. Many of the pieces were subsequently reprinted in Shaw's 2005 collection, Goddess Head, which was published by Hidden Agenda Press. In a review for Afterimage (May 1, 2006), Ariel Lin wrote, “Reading . . . Goddess Head is not a comfortable experience—[Shaw] seems to want you to feel uneasy. Unlike the common approach to comics, focusing on a conflict, structured with a beginning and an end, Shaw refuses to give you a straightforward, linear answer. . . . His drawings and texts turn blank pages into mirrors. Look into the mirrors and you can project an alter ego into his conflicting, contradictory, and sometimes compassionate short fantasies, and try to make sense of it for yourself.”

Before Goddess Head, Shaw had published Love Eats Brains, which first appeared in comic-book form in September 2002. After publishing three issues, he decided to complete the series with the help of an assistant artist, who sabotaged the project by stealing the original prints. Shaw then opted to use the name and some of the themes of the series for a graphic novel, which was published in 2004 with the subtitle A Zombie Romance. The novel—which concerns a love triangle involving a photographer, his pregnant girlfriend, and a dead librarian—helped catapult Shaw to a degree of fame in the world of independent comics. In a review posted on the comics-oriented Little Terrors Web site, Sam Costello wrote, “Love Eats Brains is much more than a zombie story. In fact, it’s not exactly a horror comic. Certainly there are zombies and murder. There’s even necrophilia. But Love Eats Brains is, at its core, [a] comic about love that uses horror to illuminate deep human emotions. . . . Amid the murder and the zombies, there are touching human moments.” In one portion of the novel, for example, two men who have been killed in a head-on car crash are reunited in a cemetery after their deaths and, instead of harboring ill will, become friends. Commenting on the passage, Costello explained, “This is a kind of acceptance and peace most horror work wouldn’t ever think of, let alone include.”

In 2005 Shaw graduated from the SVA, and the following year he published his senior thesis project, The Mother’s Mouth. He had been supervised by one of his heroes, Gary Panter, an SVA instructor. Shaw told Current Biography, “What [Panter] taught me, in person, was how an artist should behave. He isn’t stuck-up and he isn’t annoyingly self-deprecating. He’s casual, confident . . . perfect. It’s important to have a teacher to act as a behavioral model.” The Mother’s Mouth tells the story of a young woman, Virginia, who travels to pre–Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, Louisiana, to look after her sick mother. There, she meets an aspiring musician named Dick, who bears some resemblance to her deceased childhood boyfriend, Richard. Shaw drew inspiration for the story from personal experience. He recalled to Lee, “The summer between junior and senior year [of college], I stayed at my parents’ home in Richmond, Virginia, and started dating my high school girlfriend again, whom I hadn’t spoken with for a few years. We would do the same things we did senior year of high school. If you have the opportunity to relive any time that you feel sentimental toward, and you seize that opportunity, you’ll find that it’s a creepy, unpleasant experience.” The Mother’s Mouth won praise for its exploration of sexuality and identity and its innovative design. In a review for Booklist, as posted on Amazon.com, Ray Olson wrote, “Shaw draws a bold but fragile line that allows his characters no beauty but forces consideration of their moral quality. Virginia and Dick emerge as decent, lonely thirtysomethings who deserve a good relationship. There is much more stylistically to Shaw’s presentation, however: flashbacks to Richard, rendered in gray; interpolated photos of Virginia’s mother and Richard’s fatal therapy; drawn ‘establishing shots’ of settings; comic-strip-like scenes; typeset explanatory passages and notes; and more. Shaw adroitly uses this technical variety to give the simple story emotional, cultural, and psychological weight.” In 2007 the novel was nominated for a Will Eisner Comic Industry Award.

In the fall of 2006, while attending the Small Press Expo, in Bethesda, Maryland, Shaw approached Gary Groth, the head of Fantagraphics Books and the editor of the Comics Journal, and gave him the first 300 pages of The Bottomless Belly Button. “While the comics business allows amateurs to submit their work directly to decision-makers in a manner unheard of in other media—no expo exists at which budding novelists hand manuscripts to Knopf’s Sonny Mehta (Groth’s closest analogue, if Mehta also edited a meaner version of The New York Review of Books)—it still took a striking confidence on Shaw’s part to submit his book to Groth,” Dan Kois wrote for New York (June 15, 2008, on-line). “The next day, back in his office in Seattle, Groth e-mailed Shaw to express his ‘intense interest.' By May 2007, when Shaw sent Groth the last chapters of Bottomless Belly Button, a deal was struck, and now that enormous book—720 pages of knotty family drama, emotional teen angst, lyrical passages about nature, good jokes, bad parenting, architectural schematics, rudimentary codes, and explicit sex—has become the graphic novel of the year, combining youthful exuberance, sage storytelling, and visual experimentation.”

The Bottomless Belly Button chronicles a week in the lives of Maggie and David Loony, who have called their three adult children home for a reunion at the family’s old beach house, to announce that they are divorcing after 40 years of marriage. Dennis, the oldest of the children, responds by searching the house for love letters or other concrete evidence as to the nature of his parents' relationship. Claire, the middle child, who has been through a divorce herself, is more preoccupied with her own life and the difficulties of raising her teenage daughter. Peter, the youngest and the black sheep of the family, suffers from the others' lack of attention. Shaw told Matthew Shaer for the Christian Science Monitor (June 27, 2008), “I wanted to do a story that was about characters. With family stories, you don’t have a lot to establish, in terms of background. These are people forced into a situation—forced into one space.”

Shaw drew the three siblings as though each had come from a different graphic novel: Dennis is drawn in a childlike, cartoonish fashion; Claire is illustrated more realistically and is depicted with long gloves to symbolize her habit of keeping her loved ones at arm’s length; and Peter, who tells his girlfriend that his family treats him “like I'm a big, dumb frog,” is shown with the head of a frog for most of the book.

The Bottomless Belly Button received almost universally glowing notices. In a review for the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Patriot News (June 27, 2008), Chris Mautner called the book “an adventurous, admirable work, one that will further cement Shaw’s growing reputation as a formidable author.” In an assessment for Booklist (June 1, 2008), Ray Olson wrote, “Shaw [has created] situations and characters identical with those of mainstream realistic novels and movies and handles them with the sensitivity and humor of the best humanist novelists and filmmakers.” George Gene Gustines wrote for the New York Times (August 1, 2008), “Most of Shaw’s creative decisions simply leave the reader marveling at his work.”

Shaw, who lives in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, is currently working on a science fiction–inspired on-line comic called Bodyworld, which he serializes on his Web site (www.dashshaw.com). “I really like web comics and I like that they are free,” he told David Paggi for the Wizard Universe Web site (July 6, 2008). “That is really moving to me. I know that most cartoonists don't make any money but for some reason the idea of spending twelve hours a day, or more, painting and putting together this thing where the end result is just posting it and not asking anybody for anything is just awesome!” Shaw does not, however, disparage commercially produced comics. He told Kois, “If Marvel called and asked if I wanted to do [the popular superhero series] Ghost Rider, I would be like, ‘Hell, yeah.'”