It is a distinct possibility that, given enough time and restless ambition, any artist, no matter their chosen form, will reach a point where they want to focus on the nothing, which is to say, to reduce their depiction of life to its bare essentials and see what emerges. Again I return to Samuel Beckett and Yamada Murasaki: artists whose intra-artistic environments, though not clinical in their feel, are so tremendously focused and controlled that they nonetheless resemble laboratory experiments. 

This has arguably always been true of Dash Shaw (among our most restless of cartoonists) as evidenced by his latest outing, Blurry, released by New York Review Comics this August. At 480 pages, it is second in length only to his breakout graphic novel Bottomless Belly Button, and yet, sprawling though it may be on its face, Blurry sees Shaw at the peak of his containment: visually, it continues the monochrome, uniformly-weighted pen-work of his previous release, Discipline (with ink-washes for added texture), only, here, he also does away with the free-flowing, fluid page structures, instead setting his pages in a tidy two-by-two grid of equally-sized panels that remains fixed until the final movement, wherein Shaw collapses each tier into one wide panel. 

Our welcome into the world of Blurry sees the would-be protagonist, Ken, driving home from work; pondering the oppressive daily repetition of the drive. He concludes that he can probably make it with his eyes closed – which he does, briefly, only to find himself snapped back into the real world by the honking reproaches of another driver in the opposite lane. It’s no coincidence that Shaw decides to open on this note of abandon: Ken is just the first in a chain of characters to be defined by profound, debilitating neurotic preoccupation, hence the book’s structure as a succession of eight narratives, eight lives at a turning point, nested within one another (with a ninth, that of Ken’s wife Carol, taking place concurrently): the function of digression, Shaw recognizes, is to infinitely dilate the dimension of narrative time to the point of a loss of any coherent frame of reference. We can reasonably assume, for quantification’s sake, that the ‘outermost’ event of the book – Ken’s visit to H&M to buy clothes for his brother’s wedding – doesn’t take more than, at the very most, forty minutes; any longer than that and we would be going not only against common shopping sense but against on-page events as well. But through digression (which in Ken’s case is sevenfold, his story being the one that frames all others), Shaw widens the gap between the two parts of each story, creating the negative space of suspension from which doubt emerges. “If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fated and inevitable points,” the Italian author Carlo Levi wrote in his preface to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, “digressions will lengthen it; and if these digressions become so complex, so tangled and tortuous, so rapid as to hide their own tracks, who knows — perhaps death may not find us, perhaps time will lose its way, and perhaps we ourselves can remain concealed in our shifting hiding places.” In Blurry, however, digression is not in service of an escape from death; it is a living death, a violation of inner peace.

Although the art in several of Shaw’s previous books operates within a similarly limited palette, the choice of a fixed grid and ink-and-wash linework here feels counterintuitive; reading the scene wherein a different character, Professor Karetzky’s lover Maala, has a breakdown in Rio de Janeiro (after her boyfriend first cheats on her then breaks up with her, framing his breakup in ‘I’m not good enough for you’ verbiage), one remembers, by contrast, the maximalist experiments of New School or 3 New Stories. Whereas these works saw Shaw reaching for tonal-emotional heightening through a geometry of color that refused to correspond with the linework, the understated, austere look of Blurry maintains a basal tone level at all times, purporting to an objective display of the events as they happen rather than their impact. 

Granted, it’s an approach that Shaw himself seems, on occasion, to brush up against; there are moments where, evidently insecure with the articulateness of his own cartooning, he will state outright the effect he is trying for. On page 49, for instance, as Mel lies in bed and tries to sleep, we get a view of the loosely-captured ceiling, with a caption at the center of the panel reading “blobby darkness at night w/ no glasses”; a few pages later the cartoonist adds an arrow to indicate that a “hmmmm…” is intended as “a long groaning hum noise.” It’s a surprising admission of a momentary lapse of confidence from an author whose confidence appears, in all other regards, total. All in all, however, the lack of ornament creates an interesting push-and-pull effect that brings to mind the words of filmmaker Chantal Akerman, in a 2004 interview conducted by Miriam Rosen: “When most people go to the movies, the ultimate compliment — for them — is to say, ‘We didn’t notice the time pass!’ With me, you see the time pass. And feel it pass. You also sense that this is the time that leads toward death. There’s some of that, I think. And that’s why there’s so much resistance. I took two hours of someone’s life.” In this regard, Blurry seems in close dialogue with cartoonists like Daniel Clowes or Chris Ware – it is a world carved out of pure anxiety, populated by people who first imagine their lives in agonizing detail, like an inversion of Borges’ “Funes the Memorious”, only to find themselves frustrated by a lack of neatness in the options presented to them by the world outside their own minds. 

In a 2008 interview for The Comics Journal, conducted by Fieldmouse Press’ own Rob Clough, Shaw professed an interest in what he termed the ‘third space,’ or the connection created in the act of juxtaposition between two opposing or unrelated images. In Blurry, this interest is back in full force, in the form of negative space, which serves as theme, recurring visual motif, and organizing principle all rolled up into one. Each of the book’s key characters faces a decision that is, on its face, binary: Ken needs to choose a dress shirt ahead of his brother’s wedding, his old schoolmate Mel a style of glasses; Christie, whom Maala meets in Rio de Janeiro, debates whether to write literary autobio or young-adult thrillers, while Fiona, whom Christie meets through a common acquaintance (a writer who first tries to ‘help’ Christie with her book, then hits on her, only to be rejected), needs to decide whether to keep her current university major, Philosophy, or to switch to Child Psychology.

The visual significance of negative space, to Shaw, is that it serves as a creator of cohesion; it is a void from which meaning emerges. “Treat [the negative space] as form,” advises Professor Karetzky in his drawing class. “Does it have a logic?” Shaw, however, does not skip straight to the logic; he pointedly suspends this process of semiosis to show first how it can go wrong. Neurosis, after all, can be viewed as an inversion of negative space: it is a void-space from which illogic emerges; it begins anchored in reality and then slowly loosens its grip as doubt sets in.

The result is a preoccupation with the dichotomy of self versus other, and the resulting ‘third space’ of external perception – and the anxiety that emerges when we don’t know where we stand with the people we care about. As he tries on shirts, Ken finds himself pondering whether his wife’s description of him—“calm,” “level-headed,” “you look before you leap”—isn’t in fact code for incorrigibly boring; Mel is thrust into doubt about her own autonomous existence after her employee Kay doesn’t seem to like the new glasses she has chosen and becomes obsessed with Kay as a result, finding herself trying to sleep with him. In Shaw’s world, problems, when they become interpersonal, will always ‘breach containment,’ and will always take on metonymic meanings far exceeding the reasonable. 

Nowhere is this fear of external perception more evident than in the narrative of Kay, during his time working as a model in the middle-aged Professor Karetzky’s life drawing class. Purposefully placing himself in a position of total unilateral exposure, both literally and metaphorically nude, the job slowly erodes at Kay’s certainty-of-self: he wonders whether (and in what way) the students talk about him; he fails to recognize himself in their drawings; he feels “penetrated,” like “an object, scrutinized” — yet, at the same time, he is, himself, afraid that he might “remind the students that [he is] an actual human being.” When he does eventually buckle, couching his critique of the students’ art in the observation that “they’re all more about the position and lighting than a likeness,” he feels embarrassed, as if he’d overstepped by insisting on the particulars of his own identity. The bitter irony comes when he falls into the same trapping: “I really look like this to you?” asks his boyfriend, Travis, in a later scene, after Kay tries to draw him, and, although this isn’t in itself the reason for the end of their relationship, the reaction is delivered as enough of a gut-punch that it may as well be.

Professor Karetzky, for his part, struggles not only with the simultaneous decline of his marriage and extramarital affair but also with the erosion of his professional authority. One of his students refuses to listen to a lecture on Picasso, stating that he is “on [her] list” (of artists she refuses to engage with, implicitly for moral-political reasons); another student draws in a way that does not correspond with the professor’s conception of life-drawing as active observation. One cannot help but view this intergenerational divide at least partially as Shaw’s ambivalent musings on his own growth and place: at 41, Shaw has been publishing comics for more than half of his life and is now at a point where his is no longer the generation of up-and-comers but increasingly the generation of professors at institutes like SVA or CXC. Both instances of professor–student contention end with, evidently, no clear ‘winner’; the professor views the students as stupid kids who “need people like [him] to keep them in line,” whereas the students view the professor as an old-guard ego-tripper who teaches simply because his own art wasn’t good enough to build a career on. If the story of Mr. Karetzky is any indication of the cartoonist’s view of the art world at the present point in time, it is a pessimistic outlook indeed: the distance between teacher and student is too far to bridge, leaving the former dismissive and the latter unmoored, or at least unguided, in their engagement with art at large. 

Blurry, one might note, takes the shape of a perfect parabola. The middle portion, telling the story of Dan, a gay film producer torn between his career and his family, is the book’s key structural anomaly – being the last of the nested narratives, Dan’s is the only story not divided into two parts, instead presented as one contiguous chunk bereft of any digression. Special attention ought to be paid to the sequence in which Dan, on his return home from a work trip, finds himself stuck in a fog; against all logic and safety, he first continues to drive then makes the rest of the journey on foot, relying on “knowledge plus intuition plus chance” – and succeeds in finding his way home to his husband and daughter. It’s a wonderful moment, which sees Shaw eliminate all detail outside of the car (then outside of Dan himself) and erase the panel borders while retaining the underlying rhythm of the grid, allowing his cartooning to take on an almost dancelike quality that beautifully breaks away from the materiality and solidity of the rest of the book.

If it sounds too neat and tidy, that’s because it is: although the fog sequence ostensibly shepherds the book from the movement of resistance (to use Akerman’s word) to its complementary resolution, this resolution is rarely as tidy as Dan makes it out to be. This surrender to the fog of chance, to the unexpected and uncontrollable, works for some in Blurry but not for others: Maala’s inability to commit self-harm in Rio de Janeiro is what leads her to ultimately meet her now-husband, but Professor Karetzky’s surrender to habit is the very source of his misery; Christie’s initially-failed YA book becomes a successful series, which prompts her to submit to the whims of commerce and only write pseudonymous young-adult fiction, but Fiona’s initial attempt to go with her instinct and change her major turns out to be a non-starter as she drops out of school and goes back two years later to study a third and unrelated discipline.

“I can’t even imagine being another person,” thinks Christie after the initial failure of her pseudonymous YA novel, and this does appear to be one of the book’s thesis statements; although they all end up at the same cognitive cul de sacs, Shaw makes a point of propping up characters that are alien enough to one another that their advice or experience, though recognizable, is not entirely applicable. It’s a smart choice, not least because it, by design, prevents the cartoonist from treating his characters as ‘lesson-learning machines’: their circumstances and manners of response are so particular, running so counter to one another, that no advice can be universal. (It is worth noting, in this context, the subtle changes in visual style in the various characters: the softer, rounder features of Professor Karetzky are reminiscent of Sammy Harkham’s characters, whereas Dan has a lanky angularity evidently owing a certain debt to Abner Dean; even the artistic language inhabited by each of the characters is, at least to some extent, incongruous – how could they presume to exist in the same circumstances?)

For the final scene, at Ken’s brother’s wedding, Shaw brings back several of the previous characters: the wife-to-be is Fiona, the aspiring author whom Christie met at a signing; the guests include Christie, as well as Dan, whose daughter Fiona used to nanny and thanks to whom Fiona and Ray met. It feels curious at first, an everybody-comes-together-at-the-end beat that undercuts the spontaneity and tangentiality of both the connections and the structure of the book. Shaw himself seems aware of this, though: Ken’s speech cleverly undercuts the risk of schmaltz by putting a certain distance between reader and narrative – the speech is written in total gibberish (calling back to both Fiona’s failed attempt to follow her own intuition and Maala’s dialogue with Brazilian strangers, asking them to “tell me who I am”), but the guests are authentically moved.

For Shaw, who back in 2008 said that “every book is a stepping stone to another book,” Blurry feels perfectly natural: like Doctors, it balances heightened drama with a flat, detached formal sensibility and a ‘chopped up’ structural approach; like his intention with Bottomless Belly Button, it weaves together disparate first-person narratives into a sometimes-contradictory tapestry of the world. More than anything, though, it calls to mind the critic R. Fiore, who in 2011, in reference to Harvey Pekar (with whom he feuded some twenty years prior in the letters column of The Comics Journal), wrote that “[t]he answer to the mechanistic plotting and bootless fantasy of commercial comics is not to present mundane experience shorn of any suggestion of drama but to create genuine stories that arise out of character.”

Readily demonstrated by his latest release, this observation could easily serve as a declaration-of-intent for Shaw’s overall oeuvre. Not only a book where drama is an incline that exists predominantly within one’s mind, Blurry is a work whose core questions only become evident after they are answered (whether or not these answers are satisfactory – Shaw is more interested in point-of-view than in outright assertion), and whose characters and their individual existences are only validated by their connection to those around them. “It’s all related, and I must hold the relationships in my hand, as I make quick connections throughout,” Professor Karetzky says in his drawing class, and one can easily imagine that it is Shaw speaking through him: it is only through the negative space of the other that these connections make sense. We are all, Shaw says, driving through the fog – but, if we’re lucky enough, there will be someone, or something, waiting to meet us as we go.