Bottomless Belly Button

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Bottomless Belly Button

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Overview

This is a reprint of the graphic novel that launched Dash Shaw as a major young cartooning talent: Official Selection, 2009 Festival International de la Bande Dessinée de Angouleme; named one of Publishers Weekly's 2008 "Best Books of the Year: Comics."Bottomless Belly Button is a graphic novel comedy-drama that follows the dysfunctional adventures of the Loony Family. When the parents announce their divorce, the family comes together at their beach house for a week. Dennis, the eldest son, is having marriage troubles of his own, and searches for clues, trap doors, and secret tunnels. Claire, the middle child, is a single mother with a troubled 16-year-old daughter, Jill. The youngest child, Peter, is a hack filmmaker suffering from paralyzing insecurities who establishes an unorthodox romance with a mysterious day care counselor at the beach.

Customer Reviews

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781560979159
Publisher:	Fantagraphics Books
Publication date:	06/08/2008
Pages:	720
Sales rank:	432,495
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.50(h) x 2.10(d)

About the Author

Dash Shaw lives in Richmond, VA. He was a 2010 Sundance Labs fellow and a 2014–2015 Cullman Center fellow at the New York Public Library. A cartoonist, animator, and illustrator, he was born in Los Angeles and attended the School of Visual Arts.

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Editorial Reviews

Using Peanuts-like comic strips in addition to pie charts, letters, and floor plans, Shaw draws an honest, meditative 720-page portrait of a multigenerational middle-class family...”

GQ

Shaw's online and bound comics inhabit surreal spaces both cerebral and emotional, leaping from zombie love stories to futuristic set pieces without resorting to predictability...It's probably safe to say he has arrived.

Wired

This book came from out of nowhere to great critical acclaim, and it pushed young Mr. Shaw in the spotlight as one of the most exciting new cartoonists in the field. ... This haunting story of a dysfunctional family twists and turns and stuck with me long after I read it.

Suvudu

A clear candidate for book of the year.

Sequart

One of my favorite books of the year.

USA Today

Bottomless Belly Button is a wonderful book that I strongly recommend for every comic fan... Dash Shaw is a name to remember.”

Laurent De Maertelaer - freaky.be

Dash Shaw brilliantly weaves the multiple story lines together to create a funny/tragic tale of a family at the brink of falling apart. I like Dash's intelligently-restrained creativity with the comic medium... I was mesmerized through the entire book.

Boing Boing

In the insular comics community, Shaw has made a name for himself (and a good one it is) by willfully eschewing the mainstream to follow his own decidedly original and peculiar muse.

Punk Planet

[Dash Shaw] seems to have managed to cross [the] strict border between painstakingly planned genius and slapdash brilliance... It's enough to make a grown-up reviewer swoon.

The Stranger

An utterly brilliant young cartoonist who has, in a few short years, advanced from the academic experiments of his earlier work... into a formalist genius whose skills encompass both a natural gift for color and a feel for subtle, indirect characterization. Bottomless Belly Button is a daring, daunting work.”

Ed Howard - Only the Cinema

Shaw draws the story of this family reunion with rare attention to detail, the lives of every family member young and old are explored with his nuanced pen. From the elegant cover to the closing panel, this is a powerful emotional story, and one I will recommend as an example of the heights graphic novels can attain.

Largehearted Boy

Easily the best graphic novel of the year so far... a triumph of the form that is going to echo in my mind for quite some time. Bottomless Belly Button is a book that made me laugh, think, smile, and finally, over a ten-page sequence at the end, weep like I’ve not in a very, very long time... Dash Shaw may be an artist and storyteller of the highest caliber, but his work here is refreshingly free of facade or ironic distance. Recommended very, very highly. In fact, this may be the Great American Graphic Novel I’d been waiting so long for.”

Kevin Church - BeaucoupKevin.com

Dash Shaw's mammoth new graphic novel is a sweeping tapestry of a family in crisis. It's sad, it's thoughtful, it's dirty and funny and hesitant and right in your face... Bottomless Belly Button even further establishes his credentials as a cartoonist you should be paying attention to. You find a lot of him inside his new book, but you'll find even more of yourself.”

Alan David Doane - Comic Book Galaxy

Formally inventive and emotionally acute, Bottomless Belly Button indeed proves to be… as fascinating and affecting a depiction of family ties as Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections or Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums.”

Ed Park - Los Angeles Times

Shaw's dysfunctional-family epic is so funny and engrossing we'd expect Oprah to pick it, but for all the graphic frog sex.

New York Magazine

Engrossing... very compelling.

The New York Times

[A] family drama filled with neurosis, romance, mystery, comedy, fond memories, bad parenting, teen angst and sexual awakening. The book is big but not overwhelming, and sad with out being tragic. This is a graphic novel of the tallest order, from one of the most unique voices in the medium today.

Steve Ponzo - Multiversity Comics

Bottomless Belly Button reaches so high and executes so much of what it does so well that it shames you into reconsidering every other book you may have praised recently. ...A work this humongous, this idiosyncratic and this almost totally devoid of pretension... is sort of a miracle. If there are better books this year, it will be a very good year.”

Tom Spurgeon - The Comics Reporter

Cartoonist Dash Shaw displays the kind of ambition that comics could use more of in his graphic novel Bottomless Belly Button... Design-wise, Bottomless Belly Button is frequently stunning, as Shaw conveys shared memories and states of mind in a few poignant, impressionistic panels.”

The Onion A.V. Club

A genuine masterpiece.

Entertainment Weekly

Kaleidoscopic... Shaw has a deft touch... Like the very best illustrated fiction, Shaw's work moves between pathos and humor, between the fantastic and the familiar.

The Christian Science Monitor

Reads almost like a John Updike novel... [Dash Shaw] really utilizes the medium to its fullest capacity.

Benn Ray on WYPR Baltimore public radio

Bottomless Belly Button is a wonderful book that I strongly recommend for every comic fan... Dash Shaw is a name to remember.

freaky.be - Laurent De Maertelaer

An utterly brilliant young cartoonist who has, in a few short years, advanced from the academic experiments of his earlier work... into a formalist genius whose skills encompass both a natural gift for color and a feel for subtle, indirect characterization. Bottomless Belly Button is a daring, daunting work.

Only the Cinema - Ed Howard

Easily the best graphic novel of the year so far... a triumph of the form that is going to echo in my mind for quite some time. Bottomless Belly Button is a book that made me laugh, think, smile, and finally, over a ten-page sequence at the end, weep like I’ve not in a very, very long time... Dash Shaw may be an artist and storyteller of the highest caliber, but his work here is refreshingly free of facade or ironic distance. Recommended very, very highly. In fact, this may be the Great American Graphic Novel I’d been waiting so long for.

BeaucoupKevin.com - Kevin Church

Dash Shaw's mammoth new graphic novel is a sweeping tapestry of a family in crisis. It's sad, it's thoughtful, it's dirty and funny and hesitant and right in your face... Bottomless Belly Button even further establishes his credentials as a cartoonist you should be paying attention to. You find a lot of him inside his new book, but you'll find even more of yourself.

Comic Book Galaxy - Alan David Doane

Formally inventive and emotionally acute, Bottomless Belly Button indeed proves to be… as fascinating and affecting a depiction of family ties as Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections or Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums.

Los Angeles Times - Ed Park

[A] family drama filled with neurosis, romance, mystery, comedy, fond memories, bad parenting, teen angst and sexual awakening. The book is big but not overwhelming, and sad with out being tragic. This is a graphic novel of the tallest order, from one of the most unique voices in the medium today.

Multiversity Comics - Steve Ponzo

Bottomless Belly Button reaches so high and executes so much of what it does so well that it shames you into reconsidering every other book you may have praised recently. ...A work this humongous, this idiosyncratic and this almost totally devoid of pretension... is sort of a miracle. If there are better books this year, it will be a very good year.

The Comics Reporter - Tom Spurgeon

Reads almost like a John Updike novel... [Dash Shaw] really utilizes the medium to its fullest capacity.

WYPR Baltimore public radio - Benn Ray

…engrossing…Most of Mr. Shaw's creative decisions…simply leave the reader marveling at his work.
—The New York Times

George Gene Gustines

All of Shaw's formal experimentation…works in the service of the story's emotional impact: It's a sprawling mess, but a fascinating, affecting sprawling mess, whose raw invention and sentimental core justify each other.
—The Washington Post

Douglas Wolk

Shaw's stunningly conceived and executed comic opus captures one moment of change in a family. Maggie and David Loony have called their three adult children to their childhood home to announce that, after 40 years of marriage, they're getting a divorce. Dennis, the eldest, desperately searches for an answer to why. He believes that if he just finds the right old letters, he'll understand what's happening to his parents, only to find that his answers say a lot more about his own marriage and infant son. Claire, the middle child, has been through her own divorce and is now struggling to raise a teen daughter by herself. The youngest, Peter, who has always felt like a changeling in his family and is drawn with a frog's head, is going through a delayed coming-of-age. Shaw's style deftly combines cartoon drawings with slavish attention to detail. The result feels reminiscent of a photo album, one person's quest to remember everything from the floor plans of the vacation home to the texture of the sand on the lake beach. Masterfully using the comics medium to juggle all the different characters, weaving their stories together seamlessly, Shaw allows the Loonys' emotions to play out naturally without forced resolutions, leaving a wistful hopefulness that feels just as conflicted and confusing as every family is. (June)
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Publishers Weekly

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