A comiXologist Recommends

New School

By Dash Shaw, @dashshaw

@fantagraphics

Dash Shaw’s New School has proven to be an excellent success in comic experimentation.  It reads aesthetically as a rich and organic piece of architecture. The narrative develops literally while its shifting moods manipulate the background noise in the back of our heads. Unlike most books that fall short of this goal, despite their best efforts, Shaw has created an exceptional coming-of-age story that grasps the real world’s impact on two brothers after they leave their parents

This book has a fairly simple narrative: Luke and Danny are brothers.  Luke leaves home to teach English.  Luke stays away longer than Mom & Dad thinks is necessary, so they send younger Danny along to retrieve his older brother.  Danny meets up with Luke on the island known only as “X,” where Luke is teaching English to construction workers and locals who work at the nostalgia-themed amusement park “Clock Town.”

Danny finds Luke a changed man, and as times passes on “X” Danny too begins to understand these changes.  Danny himself begins to grow into his own man and learns a good deal of life, the passage of time, and the contributions we can give back to it.

The strength of this book comes from its nuance. It deserves 3 or 4 more readings from me.  I’m not sure where to start in any level of analysis.  The approach it takes to the theme of time comes from every direction. The brothers’ parents for in the beginning of the book for example, speak with an antiquated syntax and vocabulary that makes them read as old world provincials.  This detail by itself gave the brothers believably old-fashioned parents, made the step out into the real world feel like an awkward leap once Danny was on the island, and showed growth in both boys once apart from their parents.  It sort of hits the feeling of learning that your family is weird right on the head.

“New School” has little things that can be dug into with analysis throughout, and if I had the time I’d give a full thesis on the subject.

I’m going to close out on this: This book understands brothers.  There is a believable relationship of old wounds and sibling resentment depicted, but as if we were just hanging out with Luke & Danny.  We see them for a short time and weren’t entirely aware of what had come before.  We know there’s a history, and we do get some of that, but we certainly don’t need to know all of it to understand why they suffer the other one.

Matthew Burbridge is a Digital Editor at ComiXology and he thinks you’re pretty.