Knowledge, intuition, chance: A Blurry view of Dash Shaw’s changing comics

In Dash Shaw’s new book Blurry, the artist shortens the question he’s been asking his whole career. "How do we live with each other?" becomes "How do we live?", and the scope of Shaw’s work broadens with the cut. Most of Shaw’s comics depict clashing subjectivities, characters struggling to manage differences in perspective. Blurry has its share of interpersonal conflict, but much of the book follows characters changing their orientations to the world. These are less dramas between people, more dramas of choice and approach. The result keeps continuity with Shaw’s other works but lays out new concerns.

More so than many of his contemporaries, Dash Shaw has varied his visual approach from book to book, shifting from the spare line work of Bottomless Belly Button to the blunt lines and colorful near-chaos of New School to the comics normcore of Cosplayers. The Shaw of Blurry has completed his experiments to date, and favors function over flare as he applies the results. The book finds him in a mode akin to the naturalism of a Showing Up Kelly Reichardt, with a loose line, subdued ink washes, and a grounded set of story beats. A switch from food service to retail, the end of an affair, the choice of a pen name, and more unfold across a large ensemble.

From the book’s beginning until its midpoint, Shaw transitions from one character to another, with each segment taking place earlier in time. Then, Blurry reverses course, returning to characters in the order in which readers last saw them. The comic moves like the following, with its present at either pole and its deepest past in the middle:

Across story segments, a handful of motifs are constants. Fog drifts through the book as if unmoored from time and location. This fog is often literal: it causes a car crash that changes the course of character Christie’s life; the character Maala is captivated by a fogbow (“when a fog creates a rainbow”) while on vacation. It’s also frequently figurative: another character describes the fog of her ex’s mood swings; yet another mentions a fog of tension in a room. Uncertainty pervades both types of scenes.

If that fog metaphor feels almost obvious within stories of decision and doubt, it interacts with Blurry’s other motifs in compelling ways. As the character Mel describes a bout of strained vision, readers see concentric circles that resemble the fogbow they find later. Karetzky, a drawing teacher, shares a technique of circling his page before making any lines. This moment falls late enough in the book that readers are primed to spot the fogbow again, on Karetzky’s drawing board, as the man finds a path in the void.

In other words, Shaw gives an image as simple and discrete as a circle the same aura as the book’s fogs. This allows him to depict characters’ uncertainty through circles too (and frees him from having to repeatedly draw actual fog). Wheels spin throughout the book; a coin flips across pages; and if that coin flip is already a familiar shorthand for indecision, here it joins a new metaphorical apparatus. As the relationship between fogs and circles emerges, embedding Blurry’s themes broadly throughout its drawn imagery, even the book’s structure comes to resemble a set of concentric circles, cropped by the limitations of narrative and object:

In addition to the book’s main motifs, details from one segment often rhyme with details from another. Character Kay’s work as a life-drawing model is the focus of multiple scenes, but later, Karetzky and Maala become nudes before the viewer as they conduct an affair. Maala and another character, Fiona, share a habit of reading multiple books at once. While a segment’s POV figure is usually clear, a character may reappear in another’s segment, giving Blurry a marbled quality. For example, though Karetzky and Christie never meet, a student hands the teacher a copy of Christie’s memoir. One figure, Carol, is unique in only appearing throughout other characters’ segments; Shaw scatters her indecision about an ice-cream flavor across Blurry. (The book gets a bit cute here in micro-sizing its concerns, but the move saves readers from an uninterrupted ice-cream choice scene.)

Just as ripples of a character’s story move into other segments, elements of Shaw’s previous works also ripple throughout Blurry. This is clear from an early interaction between two of the book’s principals, Ken and Mel. Former middle-school classmates, Ken and Mel encounter each other as adults and recall their adolescent days differently. It’s a commonplace example of divergent personal realities, the most dominant theme of Shaw’s comics.

In its size, dimensions, ensemble, single-tone interior, and omission of overt genre elements, Blurry most resembles Shaw’s breakthrough book Bottomless Belly Button. Subtler similarities include the occasional hyper-specific extradiagetic label (“Returning unread books to library,” next to a character putting an object into her purse), which dotted Bottomless too. A reader can also find an oceanscape glimpsed through an airplane window near the start of Bottomless and near the end of Blurry. It’s a small but resonant piece of visual rhyming, one that (along with the broadening of Shaw’s thematic concerns) even gives the sense of an ending to this phase of his career.

Elsewhere in Shaw’s bibliography, the title story of the Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D. collection presents a heightened, speculative version of figure modeling, with some of the same discomfort Kay endures in Blurry. In New School, a language barrier fuels the alienation of two brothers abroad, until they begin to exploit it. In Blurry, hostility along a language barrier defines a low moment for Maala during a trip to Rio de Janeiro.

Blurry makes some of Shaw’s works into post-hoc predictors of where he has gone with this latest book. Cosplayers mainly explores the (relatively gentle) friction between daily life and the put-on, acted-out fictions of fan cultures. But by its final segment, “A Cosplayers Christmas,” the story teases questions of how much to commit to a fantasy and how far to integrate imaginative play into the rest of life. Discipline, the graphic novel that precedes Blurry, is once again a story of divisions, not just between Union and Confederate forces during the U.S. Civil War but also between members of an Indiana Quaker community. Charles, a restless 17-year-old, can only see moral soundness in fighting to end slavery; others in his village only see moral soundness in abstaining from war. These comics have signs of a shift, realized in Blurry, from a focus on incompatible perspectives to a focus on approaches to life.

While every segment in Blurry features a decision, the book’s concerns appear most dramatically at its midpoint. Character Dan finds a thick fog while driving and keeps going despite poor visibility. Guiding him are “knowledge of how far the streets were before each turn” and “an intuition that came from my arms, my body.” To complement Dan’s narration, Shaw draws a label in one panel, adding a third factor: “Knowledge Plus Intuition Plus Chance.” Fiona, the audience for Dan’s anecdote, reflects later on this combination of knowledge and intuition, wondering if it would serve her too.

At first, Dan’s scene may read like Shaw finalizing his thesis, given its place of privilege at the center of Blurry. But across the larger book, Shaw stages characters’ choices with ambivalence. Dan reaches home and lives to tell his story, but an unrelated car wreck elsewhere suggests how much chance — the variable he and Fiona overlook — determined his fate. When Karetzky, the drawing teacher, passes advice to Kay, his model, readers must determine whether Karetzky’s insights are less valid because of his abrasiveness or valid despite the teacher’s faults. And Mel, helping Ken select an outfit for a wedding, assures him, “There’s no real wrong choice, is there? Listen to yourself.” This mindset underlines the role of intuition but undermines the role of choice. The bleakest read of all this — not a given, but available — is that Shaw’s characters labor over decisions, oblivious to chance as the most meaningful factor.

The relative newness of this emphasis in Shaw’s work is clearest through comparison. BodyWorld arranges a sci-fi thought experiment in which the borders between consciousnesses become porous; as its characters inhale an alien plant, their thoughts turn contagious. The story stars Paulie Panther, a character of no real convictions, and focuses more on these borders than on how subjectivity informs decisions. With New School, some similarities to Blurry make the differences more notable. The former story positions language as a barrier, specifically between visitors to its island setting and the island locals. Language can be an obstacle in Blurry too, but the story doesn’t treat it simply as barrier or bridge. Nonsense language in particular becomes a kind of channel for characters’ intuitions.

Fiona, a student at a crossroads, journals as a way to decide on a major. In the attempt, she writes garballoof where her choice of major would be, and in a similar exercise later, writes another nonsense term, bwightazoo. Exploring bwightazoo with her therapist, the connection between its sound and her feelings, she grows more confident in making a change. Later, an uptight Ken has to speak at his brother’s wedding despite their lack of closeness. The scene — effectively the book’s climax — shows an increasingly emotional Ken stringing together nonsense terms, culminating in a loud BWIGHTAZOOOO, to his brother’s satisfaction.

As Ken speaks, he moves from a repressed mode to an intuitive mode, and readers can exercise their own intuitions throughout these pages. The emotional impact of Ken’s toast is clear. Less clear is whether Ken literally delivers gibberish or if the text readers see is a proxy for Ken’s in-scene words. It’s an only-in-comics technique, the way the text can be both at once. It also gives readers freedom of choice and maintains the book’s characteristic ambivalence.

One interpretation is that Shaw keeps Ken’s verbatim speech between the character and other wedding guests while using nonsense to signify his embrace of intuition (that the visible text of Ken’s speech is visual shorthand). Earlier moments give readers some evidence for divergences between what’s on-page and what’s in-scene. When Christie writes her memoir, a process she describes as words pouring out of her hand, readers see a series of scribbles — precedent for text in a panel not mirroring what a character views or hears. And the nonsense term bwightazoo appears in between Fiona’s scene and Ken’s, spoken by Maala during her Rio de Janeiro trip. Maala does not encounter Fiona or Ken directly, so the presence of bwightazoo in one of her segments suggests two possibilities:

1. The phrase signifies a whole body of gibberish.
2. Blurry steps lightly toward magical realism, with a nonsense term moving across time and place, manifesting at moments of high conflictedness.

The first option is more likely, the second far weirder, but this range of possibilities enhances the experience of reading Blurry.

The ambiguity around nonsense language keeps the book’s closing scenes from feeling too didactic. It also suggests how readers might navigate ambiguity in other areas of the comic. The boundaries of Shaw’s presence as author are difficult to map. Occasionally, formal gestures draw attention to the hand of a cartoonist behind the book’s pages. The kind of label mentioned earlier, “Returning unread books to library,” is a small detail and yet removed enough from orthodoxies of the form to make its authorship conspicuous. Additionally, much of Blurry takes place in Shaw’s home base of Richmond, Virginia, and features multiple authors and artists in its ensemble. With these characters come multiple plot-level issues of authorship, decision points specific to the life of an artist.

These aren’t formal invitations to contemplate Shaw at this stage of his career, and the ambiguity in Blurry is potent enough to discourage too many 1:1 connections. At the same time, the combination of creative choice as a subject, formal gestures that mark the presence of an author, and a return to images from earlier works (the airplane view from Bottomless Belly Button) makes Blurry as much an occasion for reviewing Shaw’s trajectory as he might ever host.

The sequence in Blurry most likely to stoke speculation about similarity between author and character follows prose writer Christie as she contemplates the project after her successful memoir. She shifts between a genre story and an experimental novel, alarmed by how her enthusiasm for either project waxes and wanes in the course of a day. Here, it’s easy to think of Shaw at his most experimental (New School, 3 New Stories), his most accessible (Cosplayers, Clue: Candlestick), and the distance between those poles. Blurry lands closer to Cospayers/Candlestick, and its ensemble structure fits loosely with the shapes of various prose best-sellers. This, and similarities to Bottomless Belly Button — take it from someone who wrote a book on Shaw, still the work most people mention — open Blurry up to a certain strain of skepticism. Is he playing the hits? Conceding to mainstream respectability? 

New School, incidentally, may be the most interesting point along Shaw’s trajectory. Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections has been a comp for Bottomless Belly Button from its LA Times review onward, a minor critical cliche this piece will exploit one last time. With New School, it’s as if Shaw, rather than following Bottomless with his version of Franzen’s piece on William Gaddis, created his version of a Gaddis novel, a frenzied, thorny work, and an outside contender for the finest American graphic novel ever published.

Blurry does not meet that bar, and it is unlikely to satisfy a reader seeking only Shaw at his most adventurous. Nevertheless, it’s a thoughtful work full of well-delineated characters and intriguingly articulated questions. Shaw’s other recent comics build a case that Blurry is an uncompromised work too, not an intentional pitch down the middle. His linework and figure drawing in Blurry echo those of contemporaneous pieces like Ant Dodger, one in a series of self-published, short-run projects in which Shaw’s work accompanies that of a poet. Taken together, the wide-release- and fringe work show Shaw in a surprisingly consistent mode.

How most of Shaw’s readers will receive Blurry is a different question, and a frustratingly difficult one to answer. The book arrives in a different era than Bottomless Belly Button. The release of Bottomless coincided with the comics blogosphere at its most active. Since then, the medium has seen not just the decline of those spaces but also the decline of what followed, with Facebook and Twitter, once scattershot but useful measures of a work’s impact, overrun with all varieties of virtual weeds. Over the last 15 years, a reader looking for a book’s communal reception has never found less to work with.

How this materially affects working cartoonists is outside the scope of this piece; it is, of course, bad news. For a reader wondering how to assess this art and this artist at this moment in time, a credible answer could be: on one’s own terms. That stance — there's no response more relevant than one’s internal reaction — even complements Blurry’s privileging of personal intuition. Still, because Shaw’s comics so often depict the convergence of perspectives, engaging with a plurality of reactions feels like, if not strictly the point, an intuitive extension of reading the work. And Blurry supports this idea too.

For as much as Blurry emphasizes what happens when characters follow their intuitions, it also offers the possibility that intuition develops through contact with others. The book’s transitions from one narrative to the next create an implication: the choices a character makes, even while heeding an inner voice, are influenced by other people’s choices. The impact of Mel on Ken, or Karetzky on Kay, or Dan on Fiona, is difficult to measure, and the relationships of characters without linked segments even more so. But a reader finishes Blurry believing characters’ outcomes would be different if not for their crossing paths. And so the step of seeking that plurality of reactions becomes appealing, even essential, in turn. A reader has the work itself, and their initial internal reaction, in all its primacy and integrity. But if you like the book, or if you don’t, tell somebody. We — a we that, just as Ken’s nonsense is two things at once, can be singular and large — are all we’ve got.

Greg Hunter is the author of New Realities: The Comics of Dash Shaw (Uncivilized Books, 2023)

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