As a graduate of Mahattan’s School for the Visual Art who has been actively creating his own comics since middle school, it seems like a stretch, at best, to consider Dash Shaw an outsider artist, in spite of his penchant for non-traditional forms of graphic storytelling. Still, the Shaw argues that, in many cases, some of the most exciting things happening in the world of sequential art are being created by artists who are largely unfamiliar with the form.

It’s fitting, then, that Shaw himself has tried his hand at a number of other artistic mediums, which have, in turn, influenced his comics. In this third and final part of out interview conducted at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland, we discuss Shaw foray animation, the influence of outsider artists, and why his music career—or lack thereof—never really  took off.

[Part One] [Part Two]
You’ve done some lyric writing in the past—in some ways the creation of music—the juxtaposition of lyrics and music is similar to creating comics.

Well that something I tried with my friend. That was just something I tried—I was trying to do some kind of a social activity, but I gave up.

So you didn’t have a similarly positive response to your music?

That was just a fun project thing that we tried. I’ve tried a lot of different kinds of collaborations, but they always—they don’t work. That was for The Mother’s Mouth, and the Spanish edition of Mother’s Mouth, I took out like 20 pages of the book and redrew a lot of things, so the Spanish edition is a lot better [laughs]. And it’s also a smaller format. It made all of the drawings look better, at six-inches. The Spanish edition is good. The English edition, I don’t know, that book doesn’t look go to me, especially after the Spanish edition.

In terms of things like size and pacing, do you take into account where the work is going to end up, in terms of print versus online?

Yeah, because I think about the form. The Webcomic is long. I think if you look at Bottomless, it’s really obvious that I’m thinking about spreads, and then if you look at the things in Goddess Head, I wouldn’t change the drawing inside of a single page. The spreads in Bottomless, it’s really clear—I’d never have the largest panel on the right side of the spread—it’s always on the left. It’s annoyingly formal. Some people are like that. I tried to turn myself into one of those people who are just thinking about the little boxes, with Body World. I decided I was just going to do all of the little 12-panel grids, just telling the story in the box, the little TV screen, moving down like a lot of other cartoonists, but even now, when it’s published from Pantheon, you’ll see that I still didn’t change things. I still can’t get myself to totally get rid of the page in my mind.

It seems to be tough for people to make that transition, from print to the Web. For us, there were computers around, when we were growing up. Did you start doing Webcomics fairly early on in your comics career?

I always kind of had a Website, but I didn’t have a computer for a long time. As soon as I got a computer, a started doing a Webcomic.

For a lot of people who’ve been doing print comics their whole life, it’s pretty hard to wrap their minds around this new format.

Right. I’ve been preaching the Web to all of my cartoonists friends. I’ve got Frank on the subway going, “yeah, I can do a Webcomic!” I think Webcomics are really exciting. It feels like the dawn of the newspaper comics, because there’s all of these comics people out there who don’t even read comics, who are doing comics, so they’re coming up with all of these weird ways to combine words and pictures. You click on it, and it’s kind of like an animation.

There are things coming out where it’s like, “is this even a comic?” You take away the page and you take away the things, it’s not really comic—it has a relationship to comics, but it’s a new thing. I think, instead of thinking, ‘that’s not a comic, that sucks,’ it should be like, ‘that’s not a comic, it could be some new thing that’s really exciting.’ A lot of the comics I like, I’m not even sure if they’re comics. When I was at Duke University with Gary Panter, he was talking about Jimbo in Pergatory. He said, “this is being sold as a graphic novel, but it’s about 40 pages of 11 x 17, and each page has a background that goes across it. Is this even a comic? I don’t know.” It’s some kind of a different thing that’s exciting, and Webcomics are like that.  Maybe it’s starting to be like really slow flipbook animation.

For lack of a better term, it’s a bit like the “outsider art” phenomenon.

Yeah, it has some outsider art in it, but the format is creating some different things that are new.

You went to SVA.

Yeah.

Was it difficult to cast this stuff aside, having coming from relatively formal training, rather than the outside.

All the teachers I had, no one was really trying to force me to do anything. They were really encouraging of what I was doing. They offered comics and were really interested in helping me. No one was telling me that I had to do something a certain way.

Having studied what was out there, was there any point in which you felt inhibited by the confines of a traditional strip? You said that part of you wanted to do the standard 12 panels on a page.

But that was just for me. I felt like I was being too formal. That was a personal thing. It wasn’t for an audience. I don’t want to be the formalist guy, and I don’t collect comics that are like that. It’s just that, at that point in my life, my brain had just kind of started to turn into that. And now I feel like I’m kind of stuck in the grid. And now I feel like I have to get out of the grid, because it’s kind of crappy that every single page, I just roll out the panels. I need to blow that up. It’s just a never-ending little journey of doing different thigns and thinking that I need to change directions. I know that Bottomless is definitely the thing that most people have seen, but I’ve been doing comics for a long time. I did them in middle school, high school, college, and only now are they starting to get published. With Mome, now when I have a story, it actually gets published.  For the longest time, I had a story and no one would read it. It would just sit there. People are seeing my work now, but in my mind, it’s kind of this larger exploration.

Is that earlier work something you’d be interested in anthologizing?

Probably not. They’re bad. I’m not saying they’re good. They’re shitty. But I did illustration for a long time, and I wanted to be a brush guy, for a long time. Some people who no me know these different phases and interests that I have.

Do you see this exploration taking you outside of comics, in the near future? If so, in what sort of mediums? You mentioned that some of these comics are a bit like slowed down animations.

I was saying that those different Webcomics are like that. I love animation. I’d love to do more of it. The problem is that I need money to do it, and with comics, if someone doesn’t give me the money, I just do it, anyway. With animation, if someone doesn’t give me the money, I just don’t do it, because the way I animated is drawing every frame, so I need to pay someone to put it together.

That trailer that you did for Bottomless Belly Button you drew the whole thing?

It was 720 computer sheets—8.5 x 11 computer paper.

Are there any other mediums you’d like to experiment with?

I do paintings on acetate sheets. That kind of came out of the color experiments I would do. So it’s kind of comics, animation, and acetate paintings. They all feel like they’re related. I think animation has a relationship to comics. I’m surprised that more people in comics don’t do animation, with Windsor McKay and the history involved. Part of doing that trailer was that I was surprised that no one had done that before.

–Brian Heater

“It’s a weird book,” says Dash Shaw, frankly, describing Bottomless Belly Button. The artist is delighted—if slightly baffled—about the book’s success. Soon after being release in June on Fantagraphics, the book was declared the graphic novel of the year but a number of fans and critics, with another six months still left until 2009.

Shaw’s own assessment is fairly apt, of course. Beyond its girth, Bottomless Belly Button seems a peculiar contender for the year’s best comic—it’s graphically simple—drawn with what the artist refers to as a “dumb line,” slow moving, and catalogs its own imagery with an almost obsessive compulsive drive. It is, perhaps, exactly these elements that make the book such a surprise hit.

Whatever the case may be, Shaw is very humble about the praise that has been heaped upon him in the last few months, working with his head down on the followup, BodyWorld, which is currently being serialized on the Web, and will soon be collected as a book by Pantheon.

In this second of our three-part interview, we discuss bookmarks, the compulsion to draw large breasted women, and what was in 13-year-old Dash’s middle school notebooks.

[Part One]

Do the characterizations of your characters arise from the way you draw them in your sketchbooks?

Yeah. I try to make it like the characters drew themselves. Why would they draw themselves that way? But I had to train myself to draw that way. This is kind of strange—I had to teach myself to draw that way, and with BodyWorld, I wanted the girls to be sexy, like Dan Decarlo girls, but I don’t naturally draw that way, so I had to learn to draw a big-breasted girl. But now it feels pretty natural.

It’s funny—I assume from what you said that you grew up reading superhero books—X-men and Batman—

Right, Rob Liefeld.

Exactly, and that seems to be the first thing that you’d start to draw, these giant-breasted women from the comics.

No, I was drawing manga stuff. You look at my middle school books, and it’s all Dirty Pair [laughs]. I’m serious. What’s funny is I read a lot of interviews with other artists and they say things like, “I wanted to draw Spider-man.” For me, I wanted to draw The Guyver. It was just a different time, and Japanese comics were the most exciting thing, when I was around.

What’s funny about this situation, too, is that artist had to draw, for the longest time, in a consistent style, so that they could get higher to draw different stories, or draw on different books. “X-men could use Joe Madureira’s style. It’s hot right now. It will give X-men his surface look.” But in alternative comics, there’s no money in that. No one will hire me to do this one thing. I don’t need to draw consistently. I can draw differently for every single thing, if I want to. I think that’s really exciting. That’s a huge new thing that should be looked at.

We were talking about Kevin Huizenga, earlier. Everywhere I looked at the show, I saw something by him. I was all immediately recognizable. Is there something to be said for having a consistent style?

Oh yeah! I think people should do whatever they want to do. People have styles that have a wide range. I think the way Kevin draws is perfect for the kinds of things he’s interested in. I’m just saying that this is the kind of thing that I’m interest, and I think that it’s what I should do, if that’s what I’m psyched about. But there’s people who have a really consistent look, but inside that, it has a wide range and can do whatever they want it to do, and those people are amazing. There are people who draw in a really consistent way, and it seems like they have one story, and the other things are drawing on that one story.

Like I love Paul Pope, but to me, Escapo is the best Paul Pope story, and there isn’t going to be another one like it. Everything else is kind of like him doing the same thing. It’s cool to see him do Batman, or whatever. Kevin Huizenga is a writer. He’s good with words. He’s one of the few people, I think, who can actually write a book and it would be good. My impression is that he’s unusual in that that’s what’s his focus.

Do you get attached to characters? Bottomless Belly Button is a long book. Is there a specific reason why it’s as many pages as it is? Is it clear when the story is over, for you?

The reason it’s long is because that’s the style of the book. People say it could have been shorter. No shit it could have been shorter! It has someone undressing over 50 panels, or this small thing happening over pages and pages. It’s a style that kind of comes from Japanese comics, but I went even slower, to just look at a naturally phenomenon. And they’re kind of cataloged, with other types of sand and other types of water. That is kind of the story. Atmosphere is the story. That’s why it’s long. It’s not long because I had 700 pages of something to say. I didn’t put page numbers on it, because I wanted it to feel like a long sequence of spreads. I didn’t want it to feel like, “I’m 50 pages into this book.” When I’m reading a book, I look down at the page number and say, “I’m going to stop at 75 today.” It’s just a straight sequence. It’s a weird book, you know? It’s cool that it’s getting good press, but it’s kind of strange that it kind of snuck in there [laughs].

In terms of where to stick a bookmark when it’s time to move on, there’s a note at the beginning of the book that says, very specifically that you should read it in pieces.

Right, because there’s no chapters and no pages numbers, and so I thought if I was reading something and I was 100 pages in and there was no chapter, I would just put the bookmark in there and stop. But if I said that there were three sections and that there was going to be breaks, that you would go to that section and stop there. I don’t know who follows that [laughs]. But it reads very fast. What’s funny is that people say that it’s a long book but they probably read it in under three hours. That’s a fucking short book.

Is that good or bad, when you set out to have this methodical, slow pacing on something—

But it reads quickly.

Is that an issue?

No, I think that’s what I want. It’s fast, it’s slow. It’s long, it’s short. It’s large-scale, but it’s extremely small-scale. I’m looking for these kind of juxtapositions. I’ve said this a lot of times—comics to me are about taking two different things and then creating some third thing that’s really great.

Words and art.

Yeah, or a picture next to a picture and then that creates some other thing. And then a picture next to a word. This style of storytelling with this thing creates a third thing. It’s always like creating this new thing that’s really where the meat is. You can’t really describe it, because it’s created of all of these different things that are at conflict with each other.

[Concluded in Part Three.]

–Brian Heater

It didn’t take long for reviewers to begin lavishing praise upon Bottomless Belly Button. Before Dash Shaw’s 700-odd page tome was released, back in June, critics and artists alike were already heralding it as the graphic novel of the year, the subsequent six months be damned.

Even at that length, the book is deceptively simple, thanks in a large degree to what Shaw refers to as a “dumb line,” as he quietly discusses his art in an bench-lined alcove downstairs from the chat of Bethesda’s Small Press Expo.

It’s a surprisingly frank assessment of his own work, but like book it describes, the comment is far more complex than it initially lets on. Shaw is an artist who prides himself on putting a good deal of thought into even the dumbest of lines, constructing an image and subsequent book that can read and enjoyed in no time flat, but require repeat visitations to be fully understood, which, of course, assumes—perhaps falsely—that they can ever be understood fully.

Halfway through October, the book still seems a likely candidate for a good many year end lists, and Shaw, for his part, while still happy to discuss the intricacies of the book, has long since moved on to his next masterwork.

Have you been doing a lot of interviews over the past few months?

Over the past few months, yeah, but this is the first that I’ve done at this show.

Was there a big push when [Bottomless Belly Button] came out?

Eric Reynolds at Fantagraphics really pushed it. For the past couple of months—June, July, August—there have been a lot. Because once you do one thing with one magazine, other magazines want to review it and other people want to pay attention to it.

When you were working on the book, did it feel like a turning point, in terms of recognition? Having Fantagraphics on your side must have helped a lot.

But I didn’t know that Fantagraphics was going to do it. I had more than half of it done, and then I showed it to Fanta. They said that they were interested, but they wanted to see the rest of it. I finished the rest of it, and then, maybe half a year later, they said, “yes.” In that time I edited a bit and redrew a lot of stuff, but the only things I did after I knew that Fantagraphics was going to publish it was stuff like the cover. Knowing that Fantagraphics was going to publish it and that it was going to be in bookstores did inform my decision about the cover. I wanted it to be the comic in the bookstore that looks more like a minicomic, and not have the author bio and the picture and the coverflaps, and all of these things that it seems like people who do minicomics get in the bookstore market and immediately do. They want their stuff to look like every other book. So I wanted to be the person who gets into the bookstore market and has something that looks like what I was doing before.

You approached Gary [Groth] with something like 300 pages. Isn’t there a point when it’s hard to go back and edit, to make major changes to the work?

Well, I did make a lot of changes, and you can tell. If I pointed it out to you, you could tell.

But you don’t really want to point them out?

If you had it here, I would point it out to you.

Were there any major character changes, or was it all aesthetic choices?

Well, a lot of it was trying to keep the drawings consistent and changing story things around. The way I drew it, the quality of the drawings was such that, if I had an idea for a scene, I could just do it and decide whether or not the scene goes into the book. Body World and some of these other comics I do, if I draw it, I know that it’s going to be in the book, because executing a Body World page takes so much time and work and effort. A Bottomless Belly Button page is easier. It’s more like how you would write a paragraph of text. So I drew things so that I could move them around. And the brown ink kind of helps everything look more consistent. But the drawings are pretty inconsistent. I had to redraw all of the Jills for the first 200 pages of something, because she morphed.

Were you keeping it simple because you knew it was going to be such a massive book?

Well, I wanted to do something where I could really edit it. For that book, I wanted to do something where I could do a scene and have it come together in the editing and the redrawing. Body World is more like executing one solid piece slowly forward. What I do after Body World, I want to have it so that I pencil the whole book and then I ink the whole book—I spend a year just doing these big layouts. For these different projects, I want to try these different things, because there’s usually these things that make sense for the material. I like trying something. I don’t think any of these methods is better than another one—it’s just more appropriate for what I was doing. I just think of myself as experimenting.

But it’s not the sort of thing where, if you find something that works you’ll keep doing it forever, is it? How important is it that things look different from book to book?

Well, it’s more like, when I do something, I just don’t want to do that again. I just there’s something more exciting—I’m chasing these different styles and aesthetics. I don’t know if people can tell that Body World is done by the same person as Bottomless. Maybe they can, and to me there are a lot of similarities, but the surface aesthetic is different, but the things underneath are me, and obviously what people recognize of someone’s work is that one top thing. Like Paul Pope, he’s brushy manga, but I don’t have that one top thing. I think that’s good. I don’t want to have that top thing. I think the thing that are like are people like Bruce Connor who do a lot of different things. I think comics should have people who aren’t applying their illustrated style to different stories, but maybe are trying to tell the same story with different illustrated looks.

How would you describe the style of Bottomless Belly Button, versus the other works you’ve done?

I would say it’s kind of dumb looking. I was in [David] Mazzucchelli’s class, and I was really obsessed with Batman: Year One. And I still love Batman: Year One. I was looking at this drawing of Catwoman, where the lines were shading her face, but they didn’t wrap around the curvature of her head. They weren’t hatch marks. They were just straight, horizontal lines. He said, “this is a dumb line. The style of Batman: Year One is that the line doesn’t know what it’s describing.” I would just look at this Catwoman drawing, and I was mesmerized by this idea of a dumb line. So the style of that book is using a lot of the same angles and a lot of the same repeating setups. A single drawing is not beautiful, but it fits into some kind of a beautiful sequence.

Is there a reason why you chose that style for that text?

Well, they came at the same time. I don’t think, ‘this is a good way to draw this story.’ I pictured a beach, and stippling for sand is very dumb. There’s no space in it. It’s just flat dots and the water is flat, wavy lines. And the people are kind of these Simpsonsy people, and they’re all drawn different. I didn’t have a story and thought that I should draw it this way, it’s more that I just kind of pictured flipping through this book that looked like this.

–Brian Heater