Dash Shaw’s work has appeared in anthologies and independent newspapers across the country. His books include Garden Head (Meathaus Press), Love Eats Brains (OddGod Press), Live with Passion (Sequent Media), a collection of his short stories titled Goddess Head (Hidden Agenda Press), and the upcoming The Mother’s Mouth.
What would you say about your one-page comic, “Introducing,” to a reader who’s never seen your work before?
“Introducing” is a basic story: a couple meet, have an intense relationship, and then someone comes between them. I just stripped away all of the specifics and left only the emotional. The simple rhyming gives it a fast rhythm, so it ends abruptly and is kind of flighty.
Why strip out the specifics?
Specifics don’t speak to a universal audience. Everyone can relate to emotions because (I hope) everyone feels things. Some people will relate to a specific character or situation, and others won’t. If they met in a bar, and you met someone you loved in a bar, then maybe you would become more involved in the story. But another person might hate bars or have had a bad experience meeting someone in a bar. It’s all associative.
Distilling a story to the emotional, I think, highlights the most interesting and moving elements of a story and cuts out all of the fluff. It’s more like music. People don’t ask for a story in music—they just want an emotional experience. That’s not to say that my comics don’t have stories. They do. It’s just that the stories are secondary to the emotional quality of the sequences and the psychology of the drawings.
What do you mean by “the psychology of the drawings”?
Different lines have different psychological effects. Later in his career, Charles Schulz’s hand started to quiver, and it gave Peanuts this nice fragility that suited the story. Lines are already abstractions; they don’t exist in real life. So the drawings have to work abstractly on top of explaining what’s going on.
In “Introducing,” the characters are first drawn in a static, almost instructional illustration style to juxtapose with the drawings inside their relationship, which are cursive and loose. In “Echo and Narcissus,” I wanted to do a dance sequence where Echo’s movements would mirror Narcissus, and the lines are these brushy strokes that cut into each other.
You occasionally reference Richmond in your comics.
Yeah. I’ve traveled around a lot and lived in New York for a few years, but Richmond’s where I’ve spent most of my life. Richmond is beautiful, but it’s become like a mixtape that an old friend has given me—it has all of those associations. I’m sure everyone feels that way about their hometown. I mean, Richmond’s so small that every place now carries a personal history.
I did a comic that took place at a Civil War reenactment site in Richmond because I feel like I’m trapped in the past when I’m here. I can’t spend the rest of my life drawing at Fourth Street Café and swimming at Belle Isle.
