But it's the next story in the book that's actually called "The Curse" -- its premise is that Glenn, Wendy and their newborn daughter can't sleep because they're being tormented by the screeching of starlings. That becomes a springboard for Huizenga to go off on a fascinating tangent about how the birds were introduced into North America and the reference to them in Shakespeare's "Henry IV." One page of the story is nothing but starlings flying in formation, and it evokes their motion with the faintest suggestion: Huizenga draws them as a flurry of dashes, crosses and V's. The image on the book's front cover is a flock of single-pen-stroke birds, high above the street lamps and pylons of a suburban highway.
The rest of "Curses" flows out of or into those stories' concerns. Their "lost boys" and lost children and desperately longed-for babies are echoed by "Case 0003128-24," the one Ganges-less story here, a heartbreaking piece of found text from adoption papers accompanied by Huizenga's pastiche of classical Asian landscape drawing -- no people, no straight lines or man-made structures, just floating organic shapes. The insomnia of the Sudanese immigrant and the starling-besieged family reappears in "Not Sleeping Together," evidently set before Glenn and Wendy lived together: a meditation on Indian-summer nights whose "holy, warm and humid air mass" makes it impossible for even the dead to rest in their graves. Visions and sleeplessness underscore "Green Tea (Glenn Ganges Remix)," an adaptation of a Victorian ghost story by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu about a man driven to insanity and suicide by images of a demonic monkey dragging him into "the enormous machinery of hell." In Huizenga's version, Glenn relates a supernatural vision he had in college, then relates Le Fanu's narrative as something he'd come across in a pile of old papers.
The underworld/torment motif is fleshed out in "Jeepers Jacobs," the bulk of which concerns a conservative theologian, at his desk, writing a tract about the doctrine of hell being "eternal conscious torment." That's a lot more interesting than it sounds, partly because Huizenga depicts Jacobs' ideology and thought process as sympathetically as he can, and also because he uses the natural dryness of its premise (golf! theology! driving!) as leverage for the dramatic impact of the only full-page image in "Curses": a drawing of the smoke billowing up from the fires of hell, filling the page all the way out to its borders.
Most of the book's themes come together in its final, perfect five-page story. In 32 images and fewer than 200 words, "Jeezoh" plays with the way religious ideas evolve into more informal folk mythology, and calls into question how much of what's come before it has "really happened" to Glenn and Wendy, and how much our desires as readers (or as people living in the world) lead us to try to put together contradictory images into "an accidental graphic novel." It's emotionally crushing; what's surprising about it is that it's also cathartic and even funny, a suggestion of a kind of redemption improvised out of desperation.
"Curses" is full of peculiar, oblique approaches to storytelling -- Huizenga favors depth of reflection over narrative drive -- but calling the Ganges stories experimental cartooning doesn't do justice to how effortlessly droll and charming they can be. In one brief piece, "The Hot New Thing," Glenn and Wendy hear about ... something ... from their friends ("We were talking about the HNT at work! It sounds incredible! Let's go check it out this weekend!"), then go stand in line for it, as Huizenga occasionally cuts away to newsmagazine covers ("The Hot New Thing: Is It Safe?"; "HNT2: A Behind the Scenes Look"). Finally, we see Glenn and Wendy going to bed after experiencing the Thing: It blew his mind, she didn't think it was all that special, and he lies awake after she's fallen asleep, silently fuming a little.
That's probably the best joke in the story: the dead-on evocation of the disappointment of a loved one's seeing only mediocrity where you've seen profound brilliance. The deeper comedy of the scene, though, is that Huizenga is both Wendy and Glenn, crediting and debunking the hype at the same time. He cares about the sensations and meanings of grindingly mundane things as much as he cares about the mystical glories his Ganges stories always seem to evoke around their edges. When Huizenga distills the sacred and the everyday into the symbolic clarity of his line work, they come out looking like the same thing viewed from different angles.
About the writer
Douglas Wolk writes a monthly column on comics and graphic novels for Salon. His book "Reading Comics" will be published by Da Capo next year.
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