Bottomless Belly Button
Dash Shaw, Gary Groth (Editor), Jacob CoveyBooks.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
A major new graphic novel from a major new talent.
Bottomless Belly Button is a comedy-drama that follows the dysfunctional adventures of the Loony Family.
After 40-some years of marriage, Maggie and David Loony shock their children with their announcement of a planned divorce. But the reason for splitting isn't itself shocking: they’re "just not in love any more." The announcement sparks a week long Loony family reunion at Maggie and David's creepy (and possibly haunted) beach house.
The eldest child, Dennis, struggles with his parents' decision while facing difficulties of his own in his recent marriage. Believing that his parents are hiding the true reasons behind their estrangement, Dennis embarks on a quest to discover the truth and searches through clues, trap doors, and secret tunnels in attempt to find an answer. Claire, the middle child, is a single mother whose 16-year-old daughter, Jill, is apathetic to the divorce but confounded by Claire and troubled by her own "mannish" appearance. 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.
In a six-day period rich with atmospheric sequences, these characters stumble blindly around one another, often ignoring their surroundings and consumed by their own daily conflicts. Visually, Shaw employs a leisurely storytelling pace that allows room for exploring the interconnecting relationships among the characters and plays to his strength as a cartoonist — small gestural details and nuanced expressions that bring the characters to vivid and intimate life. If the controversial R.D. Laing wrote an episode of The Simpsons, it might read something like Bottomless Belly Button.
Official Selection, 2009 Festival International de la Bande Dessinée de Angoulême; named one of Publishers Weekly's 2008 "Best Books of the Year: Comics;" named one of Booklist's "Top 10 Graphic Novels" of the Year."
Synopsis
A major new graphic novel from a major new talent.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Many a young cartoonist in recent years has gotten bogged down by minutiae: depicting in excruciating detail the back-and-forth of a breakup or the mechanics of nose picking. In its early pages, with pie charts of family relationships and a taxonomy of different varieties of sand, the 720-page graphic novel Bottomless Belly Button threatens to fall into that trap and entirely vanish into creator Dash Shaw's navel.Remarkably, the 25-year-old Shaw instead builds a complicated multigenerational drama and makes a name for himself as a major new cartoonist. The story centers on the Loony family: after four decades of marriage, the parents have decided to get divorced. Their three adult children visit them in an unnamed beach town and cope with the disintegrating family in various ways: by angrily searching for the underlying cause of the divorce, by getting drunk, by flirting with a cute camp counselor on the beach. Shaw's sketchy art can be as awkward as the members of the Looney family, but that only makes it more moving when there's a moment of fleeting grace: a beach chair floating away, for example, lofted by too many helium balloons. And his narrative is filled with small moments that linger with you, as when one character teaches a young child how to make a wish before blowing out birthday candles: "You can't make anyone die or force someone to fall in love with you," he says. "Those are the rules." --Gavin Edwards
Editorials
GQ
“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...”Wired
“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.”Suvudu
“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.”Sequart
“A clear candidate for book of the year.”USA Today
“One of my favorite books of the year.”Laurent De Maertelaer - freaky.be
“Bottomless Belly Button is a wonderful book that I strongly recommend for every comic fan... Dash Shaw is a name to remember.”Boing Boing
“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.”Punk Planet
“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.”The Stranger
“[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.”Ed Howard - Only the Cinema
“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.”Largehearted Boy
“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.”Kevin Church - BeaucoupKevin.com
“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.”Alan David Doane - Comic Book Galaxy
“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.”Ed Park - Los Angeles Times
“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.”New York Magazine
“Shaw's dysfunctional-family epic is so funny and engrossing we'd expect Oprah to pick it, but for all the graphic frog sex.”The New York Times
“Engrossing... very compelling.”Steve Ponzo - Multiversity Comics
“[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.”Tom Spurgeon - The Comics Reporter
“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 Onion A.V. Club
“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.”Entertainment Weekly
“A genuine masterpiece.”The Christian Science Monitor
“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.”Benn Ray on WYPR Baltimore public radio
“Reads almost like a John Updike novel... [Dash Shaw] really utilizes the medium to its fullest capacity.”freaky.be
“Bottomless Belly Button is a wonderful book that I strongly recommend for every comic fan... Dash Shaw is a name to remember.”Only the Cinema
“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.”BeaucoupKevin.com
“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.”Comic Book Galaxy
“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.”Los Angeles Times
“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.”Multiversity Comics
“[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.”The Comics Reporter
“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.”WYPR Baltimore public radio
“Reads almost like a John Updike novel... [Dash Shaw] really utilizes the medium to its fullest capacity.”George Gene Gustines
…engrossing…Most of Mr. Shaw's creative decisions…simply leave the reader marveling at his work.—The New York Times
Douglas Wolk
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
Publishers Weekly
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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