Blurry (Dash Shaw, 2024).
If you know Dash Shaw’s films but haven’t read his books, you might be unsure what to expect when picking up his newest graphic novel, Blurry. My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea (2016) is a high-school melodrama that dovetails with a disaster plot: soon after a student discovers that the school building is not up to code, an earthquake sends the building into the sea. The characters, rendered with thick lines, are often tinted and filled in by expressive bursts of color. The animation style in Cryptozoo (2021) is more detailed, the colors more lush; the story seems more straightforward at first—the stewards of the titular enclosure attempt to capture another mythical beast for their menagerie and protect it from the humans who want to exploit it—but it raises questions which are meant to encourage deeper thinking from the audience.
Ever since his first graphic novel, Bottomless Belly Button, was published in 2008, Shaw has changed up his style for each book: from the thick line drawings and bold color blocks of New School (2013)—a book about the divide between two brothers, which grows after one of them is sent to teach English overseas at an avant-garde theme park—to Cosplayers (2014), a much more conventionally drawn and colored book about the the way people see the art they love from different vantage points. Not content to simply tell a new story in a familiar style, Shaw pushes himself to craft a new visual approach that suits the story at hand, and Blurry is no exception.
For the uninitiated, Blurry is a great introduction to the graphic novel form. The book is thick, but it moves quickly. The layouts are simple: most pages consist of four equal-sized panels. The characters are drawn in loose lines with an ink wash. The first pages of the book feature an ordinary guy, Ken, who visits the mall to buy a new shirt for his brother’s wedding. At the store, he’s torn between two options. The salesperson, Mel, turns out to be a former classmate, but he doesn’t recognize her at first—perhaps because of her glasses, she suggests, and then she relates how she came to wear them. At this point, Mel takes over as the narrator. She recounts shopping for her first pair of frames, which prompts her to reflect on the relationships she was in at the time. Shaw structures the book in this way: one character runs into another and tells them a story, thus inviting the reader into a new person’s life. The structure of the book will be familiar to many readers, echoing novels like A Visit From the Goon Squad or films like Magnolia (1999): ensemble narratives whose sense of ambling from one character to another belies their very tight structure.
Blurry (Dash Shaw, 2024).
In Mel’s memories, we meet an art-school graduate turned life-drawing model who’s debating a career change. The next narrator is the professor who teaches the class, who is having an affair with another teacher. When she tells him that it’s over, she recounts a vacation she took to Rio years before, and we relive it alongside her. On this trip, she meets—and we hear from—a young writer trying to decide how she can follow up her popular memoir. And on and on.
These stories slide from one to the next; suddenly, a conversation between two characters triggers a scene change, centering a new perspective that at first seemed peripheral. Each story is largely self-contained, and each centers around a consequential choice that a character has to make. This isn’t a book about alternative universes, possibilities that branch out into various outcomes. No, instead it’s about people making what may seem like small decisions—what often are small choices. These are people for whom life and chance hang together.
Mel may simply be purchasing a pair of eyeglass frames, but this means more to her than just figuring out which frames she likes and what fits her face. This choice is about her independence and her place in her long-term relationship, about being seen, and about taking control of her own life as opposed to yielding to someone else’s plans.
Blurry (Dash Shaw, 2024).
Blurry deals with ideas and concerns to which Shaw has been drawn throughout his career. As he fills his books with people responding to divergent motivations, Shaw explores how small yet profound conflicts can inform the course of our lives. In Discipline (2021), a young Quaker turns away from his community and its pacifist values to fight for the Union in the Civil War. He and his sister write each other letters as he finds himself an outsider among the other soldiers, who come from different religious and regional backgrounds; they sneer at his more archaic form of English, which favors “thee” and “thou” for the second person. In Cryptozoo, Lauren sees the park as a sanctuary for the cryptids, but Phoebe challenges her to interrogate this assumption. This shift away from black-and-white thinking is more unsettling than any of the film’s creatures.
In interviews, Shaw has talked about his interest in collage, in finding ways to play with the aesthetic elements of his stories. That sense of play is evident throughout Blurry, in which the lives of characters intersect in ways that the characters themselves are sometimes unaware of, as when one character’s book, Fogbound, is read or referenced by others, from whom she is otherwise separated by several layers of nested story.
Blurry (Dash Shaw, 2024).
Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote, “A man can be himself so long as he is alone,” and based on Blurry, Shaw would likely disagree. The characters choose their paths based largely on their intuitions, but they’re also affected by chance interactions with others. Fiona, after hearing her boss’s story about being lost in a fog, decides to follow her intuition and change her major. Later, she acknowledges that she didn’t even finish her degree, but the decision initiated a series of events that helped her find her place. Kay, the life-drawing model, bumps into the professor who teaches his class at a restaurant. As he listens to the older man talk about his sad life—how everything on the menu is shit, how he only comes there out of habit—Kay realizes that he needs to quit his job, break up with his partner, and change his life.
Shaw’s drawings are straightforward for the same reason the page designs are so straightforward: he wants the reader to note the nuances of the story and characters. His works avoid sentimentality and melodrama in favor of a sharp focus on ordinary interactions between people, their struggle to understand and be understood by others. He adjusts his style at points to emphasize those exchanges, drawing his minor characters with less detail if the focus belongs to the other person in the scene. But the structure of the book means that no one is truly secondary, and there is always an opportunity to fill in the blanks of those figures’ lives.