Creating Comics!

Creative Process

This is from a comic I did called BodyWorld. The comics I’d done

prior to BodyWorld, such as The Mother’s Mouth and Bottomless

Belly Button, were very involved with page properties—things like

facing pages, or page turns—formal properties of printed books.

It started to feel like all of these formal properties were weighing

me down. I just wanted to tell a story in a stream of little boxes.

So I started BodyWorld as a webcomic, where there is no book

or pages.

All of the drawings are done in a grid of panels that continue

as a long scroll down a website. It helped me focus entirely on

the story, which is about a rogue botanist named Paulie Panther

who travels to an experimental city to research a plant. This plant,

when smoked, grants the smoker telepathic powers. He becomes

involved with other residents of this town when they smoke the

plant and he “reads” their bodyminds.

Unlike how telepathy is displayed in most fiction, BodyWorld

is about bodymind telepathy, so your body would read what it’s

like to be inside another person’s body—not just reading their

thoughts in the form of words. It’s like physical thought balloons.

Since I made it for the Internet, the story branched out to become

about what the Internet is to me: a society composed of all of

these individual cultures’ minds, like a superorganism, and the

conflict that occurs during that transition from a single organism

to a superorganism. But mostly it’s a sex/relationship comedy,

sort of like Molière.

Tools: Mixed media, Bristol board, crow quill pens,

gouache paint, Photoshop, photocopies, acetate

Dash Shaw illustrates Bottomless Belly Button, the short

story collection The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century

A.D. (both from Fantagraphics Books), and BodyWorld,

originally serialized online and later published in book

form from Pantheon Books.

A prolific cartoonist and animator, he also regularly

contributes to Mome, the Fantagraphics quarterly

anthology, and is the director of The Unclothed Man

series of animated shorts on IFC.com. He lives in

Brooklyn, New York.

Dash Shaw

128

Creating Comics

Dash Shaw

129

Dash Shaw