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Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Or Else #2
In the first few pages of this comic, a reprint of his mini-comic Supermonster #14, Kevin Huizenga makes it clear to the readers that he has an uncanny ability to recreate the passage of time on a comics page so well that we cannot help but relate to the world of his characters Glenn Ganges and Wendy Caramel-Ganges. The first story is a few minutes out of Wendy’s day at work where Huizenga takes one panel from the two page story to shows every piece of information that is happening around Wendy’s office in the space of one minute. He’s showing us that the Ganges’ world is like ours, there are a million things going on at once and they’re all connected in some type of tapestry.
Huizenga then decides to look into the tapestry that is the Ganges’ personal lives as they are on the brink of parenthood and the different ways their lives could evolve. The Ganges are putting groceries away when Glenn starts dreaming about the baby he and his pregnant wife are going to have. Glenn sees his life as a father enjoying the small, mundane things with his child. Their life is nothing special by all appearances but there’s something sweet to be found in the sparse visual of Glenn teaching his offspring how to ride a bike. Glenn tells Wendy that he was fantasizing about being someone whose brain is damaged so he is constantly finding out his wife is pregnant for the first time. Wendy then sees her life as a mother, with the doctor handing her the newly born child. She sees danger as a household object lying around the house could hurt their child. When Wendy tells her husband this and they decide that they should move the real object from off the high shelf right now. Their anxieties about parenthood are furthered when the fantasies are gone and Wendy tells of a dysfunctional relative and her future. Right now they are in the prologue of being parents but they can already begin to imagine, as they do not yet know, what is in store for them.
In “The Sunset” time is no longer just a force of nature passing folks like the Ganges through their world. Here Huizenga rips it open in a brilliant use of his skills. Glenn is beginning to tell his wife an anecdote of what happened to him at the library. When Glenn is just beginning to speak of what transpired Huizenga dives into every single thing that is happening in that library, every person who is looking at books to the forestry just outside. This goes on and on until what makes up the comic itself is explored as drawings become looser, panels become smaller and all figures on the page become more abstract. Soon the reader literally folds out the comic to find a four page spread that I found to be the graphic equivalent to the climax of a grand crescendo in a composition. The distinct majesty in what Huizenga has accomplished here is now put to its best use. It’s as if the cartooning has gotten away from him and now is exploring itself. Soon everything coalesces back to normal and Glenn finishes the story of how the sunrises made him see sparks, all the while the readers are still reeling from what they just saw.
If in “The Sunset” Huizenga let the comic get away with itself it is in “The Moon Rose” that he grips a tight hold on it and delivers a very different but still awesome use of the comic book form. Glenn arrives home to see neighbors standing outside looking at the blood red moon before them. They say it is signifying the Second Coming. Glenn instead informs them in detail the scientific reason for the moon to appear larger and in such a color on this particular night. Huizenga turns Or Else #2 in an educational science piece as diagrams and optical illusions make sure that Glenn’s audience and the readers know of this scientific phenomena. “The Sunset” was about the wonder of how so much is happening in the world at once and this story is about the wonder of trying to unravel it and have it all make some kind of sense. Of course, Glenn realizes at the end that if Jesus does come back it will leave poor old Glenn embarrassed. Huizenga knows if you’re going to fill a story with talk a lot of complicated facts and figures you should leave the audience with a joke.
This main part of the 96-page comic is tackling, amongst other things, the idea of perception and how what one person can perceive differently than the person standing right next to him or her. The opus in “The Sunset” is so expressive that only Huizenga could draw it that way and probably could only draw that way that one time he decided to do it. The science stuff that comes later on is a series of cold hard facts that would never change no matter whose comic this was. Similarly, Glenn and Wendy have different worries and predictions for their child and start to see their future with different amounts of caution. Glenn interacting with his neighbors can even be seen as a comment on the way religion has an easy answer for everything while science has a better one. Huizenga does not forget the smaller examples of this, either. One panel shows the neighbors as Wendy imagines them (white) as opposed to how they really are (black). It’s a world made of millions of different things and people are putting them all together in a million different ways.
The final few pages of the book is a sweet and melancholy story of basketball and family that has the definite feel of authenticity to it, although I do not know if it is autobiographical. Huizenga ends his fantastic piece of work with the kind of emotions that glues us all together through the complex world he just recently pondered.
I’ve read Or Else #2 three times since I bought it two or so weeks ago and I look forward to reading it many more times. It holds up to being looked through over and over again. The work reprinted here is only a year old but yet I already want to christen it some of the best comics made, at least in a long while. At the very least it is a wonderful example of the potential of comics.
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