"Curses"

Kevin Huizenga's excellent debut follows Everyman Glenn Ganges as he navigates marriage, newborn babies -- and feathered ogres.

By Douglas Wolk

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Nov. 8, 2006 | In "Lost and Found," one of the central stories of Kevin Huizenga's marvelous debut book "Curses" (Drawn & Quarterly), his character Glenn Ganges flips through the mail, imagining the missing-child and last-seen-with images on "have you seen me?" postcards as panels in "an accidental graphic novel whose story is mostly hidden, though sprawling landscapes are implied and tragic scenes are hinted at." In Huizenga's comics, everything has an intrinsically interesting story of its own -- even junk-mail ads and suburban sprawl and annoying bird noises, things that most people do their best not to perceive at all, become crucial parts of a grand and gradual narrative.

Huizenga's been a cult hero in the art-comics world since the late '90s, initially for his self-published "Supermonster" minicomics, and more recently for a series called "Or Else" and a separate "Ganges" project. (He also wrote and drew the Center for Cartoon Studies' promotional booklet, a splendidly bizarre little comic book in its own right.) The nine stories in "Curses" mostly appeared separately in various anthologies over the past few years; all but one of them feature Glenn Ganges, Huizenga's default protagonist, a quiet, literate sort living in the Midwest, usually with a woman named Wendy who's his girlfriend in some stories, his wife in others.

Glenn's not really an autobiographical stand-in, although his perceptiveness and loopy imagination are obviously a lot like his creator's. Sometimes he seems more like Carl Barks' version of Donald Duck: an infinitely durable Everyman in a long-sleeved T-shirt whose life circumstances are whatever they have to be for any given story. Still, one major aim of Huizenga's comics is to explain the complicated systems that shape people's lives and emotions -- at least as far as it's possible to understand them. The individual stories here vary enormously in tone and technique and aren't directly connected by plot threads, but they can be read as the components of a single, elliptical narrative about children longed for, found and lost again, and how people in the world of the living can understand the torments of hell.

Huizenga cares a lot about titles -- he's published a minicomic, "Untitled," which consists of the various titles and logo designs he considered for "Or Else." (He's also very interested in creative processes; his other minicomics detail the way he designed a character who appears on three pages of "Curses," and excerpt the doodles and notes he makes during sermons in church.) The word "curses" is the sort of thing a villain might say in the kinds of simple cartoons that inform Huizenga's drawing style (Hergi's "Tintin," E.C. Segar's "Popeye"), but living under a curse is also the closest a person can come to damnation: a punishment that needs supernatural intervention before it can end.

The title of "Curses" also refers, more directly, to its best story, "28th St.," a tour de force of cartooning adapted very loosely from Italo Calvino's own adaptation of an Italian folk tale, "The Feathered Ogre." The setup is that Glenn and Wendy are trying to have a baby, and it's not working ("You have the most halfass sperms I have ever seen," a doctor informs Glenn). Eventually, he discovers that he's under a curse, and the only way to lift it is to pluck a feather from an ogre who lives under 28th Street -- a hellish stretch of stop lights and strip malls in Grand Rapids, Mich., where Huizenga once lived.

Like most of "Curses," "28th St." is drawn in a spare, whimsical, almost old-fashioned cartooning style, built around symbolic abstractions. Glenn has dots for eyes and a line for a mouth; all the cars in the story are the simplest possible "sedan" or "SUV" glyph; a character's surprise is shown by his feet flying through the air with a puff of speed lines coming out of them. The future baby Glenn imagines is drawn to look a bit like Swee'Pea from "Popeye."

What Huizenga's really up to, though, is so conceptually tricky that a "realistic" style would make it impossible to render; his artwork's surface simplicity makes the reader fill in the blanks of the transformations Huizenga suggests with a handful of nonchalantly confident lines. On the first page of "28th St.," a tangle of roads with houses alongside them prefigures the next panel's tree branches with birds perched on them. The rest of the story is one long, gliding fluctuation between suffocating reality and hallucinatory fantasy. Glenn, trying to find the feathered ogre, meets a gas station attendant who informs him that he's come to the right place: "This is an enchanted gas station. We have enchanted gasoline ... How it works is you got to squirt some in your eyes. Then you have visions." Over the next few pages, the deadened landscape of Home Depots and Jo-Ann Fabrics mutates into abstracted shapes and animal forms; then a rainstorm washes all the scene's new geometries and clots of language away until 28th Street regains its old form. Glenn is directed toward the ogre by one of the "lost boys," the Sudanese refugees in Michigan mentioned in "Lost and Found," who's cursed with insomnia. At the end, the defeated ogre becomes a flock of cursing birds.

Next page: Huizenga cares as much about the mundane as he does about mystical glories