Materiality in Print and Online in Dash Shaw's Bodyworld (2010)

Dash Shaw’s 2010 book Bodyworld, his follow-up to 2008’s Bottomless Belly Button, presents its readers with several material alterations to the conventional reading process. A hardback book comprising 384 pages, the work is read vertically, with its spine at the “top” according to a conventional reading structure, creating a very tall and narrow shape. Inside the covers are two fold-out cardboard flaps presenting maps to be consulted as the reading progresses, and which situate graphic references on the pages themselves within the context of a larger spatial framework that has been gridded out and remains visible to the reader throughout the reading. In multiple senses, then, Bodyworld is a narrative that takes place within and through grids – not only the panel grids that incorporate the work’s images, but also the gridded topography of the map sides. Moreover, Bodyworld was originally published as a webcomic before becoming what Shaw describes as a ‘dead tree comic’, and the constraints of the digital grid are retained in the vertical orientation of the images and the reader’s interaction with them, both of which suggest notions of scrolling through content vertically on a website perhaps more than they do conventional ideas of leafing through pages. Yet as the content of the work, and the physical performance of the act of reading make clear, this is not simply a matter of printing a digital comic – careful attention has been paid to the form of both the book and the experience in print. Philosophically, Bodyworld’s narrative concerns itself with the overlaying of experiences upon each other as characters come to be able to read each other’s ‘bodyminds’ thanks to a novel drug experience, a concept that is represented verbally, visually and materially within the book itself. In this chapter, I argue that the complex intermingling of these elements within Bodyworld make it a valuable intersection of key ideas around printed and digital comics, that can help us to better understand both forms.