D&Q: Tom Gauld's Baking With Kafka

Baking With Kafka is another collection of Gauld's strips for The Guardian, and it's Gauld doing riffs and gags. I prefer his long-form work as it's drier and more restrained in its humor, but that's not to say that his pure gag work ins't entertaining as well. This collection of strips isn't so much a collection of strips about literary concerns in the vein of a Kate Beaton, but rather a series of meta-literary strips. That is, they are strips about writing, about the tedious business of publishing, about the cynical nature of advertising, about the way books become product, but most of all about books qua books. It pokes gentle fun at fantasy quests, literary cliches, romance tropes as well as the workshops aimed at writers desperate to get published.

All of this is done in Gauld's usual dry and deadpan manner, with a healthy dose of the silly and absurd heaped on top. Indeed, a lot of the jokes in the book are funny because Gauld pummels the reader with context, delivers the joke, and then goes back to context. Take "Niccolo Machiavelli's Plans For The Summer". In terms of drawing, this couldn't have taken more than an hour, because all it is is a calendar. The joke is conceptual, as the first Monday's plan is "Plot", the first Tuesday is "Scheme", the first Wednesday is "Connive", etc, all based on our conception of Machiavelli from his famous book The Prince. That's amusing, but after piling on for seven straight days, we get the more amusing "Dentist" on a Monday, and then ten days marked off for "Holidays!", and back to "Deceive", "Collude", etc, interrupted only once more with "Mum's birthday". It's a joke that would not have worked without a really good thesaurus and a strong conceptual grounding, because without the repetition of the expected bits, the other part of the joke wouldn't have landed.

Slightly less successful is "Magical Items For Fantasy Writers", where each magic item is described as doing something like "Dispels misgivings, gloom, bad advice and writer's block". Here, the joke is simply repeated from panel to panel, rather than building from panel to panel. The best strips incorporate visuals as a key element of their humor, and this is where Gauld's minimalism shines. Using simple silhouettes, he's able to evoke nearly any kind of situation. "Forgotten Chapters of Jane Austen's Emma" is a good example. The captions ("The Witch's Prophecy", "Bonaparte Attacks Hartfield", "Emma's Warrior Training" and "Wild West Adventure") are all funny on their own. But it's the drawings of silhouetted blimps bombing a British manor, of Emma learning to fight using an umbrella and Emma on horseback dodging arrows that help the joke to really land.

My favorite of Gauld's literary strips are those which feature books as anthropomorphic characters. There's one where a stodgy old literary novel refuses to let his daughter marry a fantasy novel named "Kingdom of Iron" ("He is epic and exciting and I love him!"). Instead, he's arranged for her to marry "pickwick.com", a "humorous modern update of a classic". The latter book is presented as wearing sunglasses and saying "Yo!". This is another conceptual strip, but the small visual flourishes are crucial in helping the joke to land, like the older book carrying a cane. Gauld also uses color not so much to emphasize his jokes, but simply as a way to fill negative space and force the reader's eye back to his figures.

Gauld is such a strong conceptual humorist that he barely needs illustrations for many of his strips, but this is sometimes unfortunate because his drawing is clear & efficient and creates clever juxtapositions to his text in his longer narratives. Indeed, some of Gauld's best work occurs in long, extended silent scenes where all the gags are visual. That's because this allows him to establish his themes in a more restrained and less obvious manner, without losing any of the humor. It's the difference between a long-form, personal work and a regular cartoon with a deadline. With the latter, Gauld has a lot of variations on particular themes that he alternates, most of which circle around the idea that books and characters are wonderful but publishing and all that goes with it is very silly indeed.

D&Q: Tom Gauld's Mooncop and Lisa Hanawalt's Hot Dog Taste Test

Mooncop, by Tom Gauld. Gauld's long-form comics tend to be variations on an individual being manipulated by forces beyond his control, often resulting in a kind of tragic obsolescence. That's the case in the silent The Gigantic Robot (the robot eventually just erodes away) and Goliath (a nice guy who's manipulated by bureaucracy and circumstance into becoming the victim of legend), and it's true in a less dramatic way in Mooncop as well. In many ways, Mooncop is even sadder than the other two books, because they're both about wars and conquest, where history is written by the winner and then later forgotten. In this book, we're presented with a glimpse of what was once a noble attempt at something glorious that's fallen into disrepair and disinterest. The titular character patrols the moon, earning perfect marks on his quarterly crime-solving reports because there's no crime to report. In the beautiful domed buildings on the starkly gorgeous surface of the moon (which Gauld emphasizes with heavy hatching and cross-hatching and a light blue-grey wash), the cop starts off the story by reluctantly dealing with the fact that he barely serves any purpose and starts to sink deeper into despair when he realizes that everyone is starting to leave.

Gauld mixes the melancholy quality of the cop's life on the moon with some hilarious technology-related gags that ultimately only serve to make him feel even worse. This is a future where technology rules over everything, only it's constantly breaking down or is lacking the right adapter. There's a bit where the cop is denied a transfer back to earth but is assigned a therapy robot. The robot promptly falls on its face when it tries to move, since it wasn't designed for rough terrain. When it finally manages to charge itself, it explodes. The moon bureaucracy takes away his frequently-malfunctioning coffee and donuts machine and inexplicably puts in a cafe, a funny reflection of how out of touch leadership and technology is with reality in the book. The cop and the young woman hired for the cafe trade quips and then share some poignant moments when they realize they're the last two people on the moon. The cop and the other characters are drawn in Gauld's typical simplified style, which aids in him maintaining the deadpan atmosphere of the book. That deadpan style blends perfectly with the sense of not just frustration, but resignation, that the characters share. Not only did the cop (who confesses that all he wanted to do as a kid was be a cop and live on the moon) come to understand that he joined this moon utopia too late and that the party was over, he came to understand that it was never that great to begin with. The moon was dotted with convenience stores and drive-throughs, just like any dull suburb on earth. He had to be reminded from time to time that the moon and its views were beautiful, but even those moments of aesthetic bliss were simply not enough to counter the banality and bureaucracy of everyday life.

Hot Dog Taste Test, by Lisa Hanawalt. Hanawalt's minicomics series, I Want You, was a thunderbolt of over-the-top grossness and absurdity. In a strange way, it also felt deeply personal precisely because of the specificity of its eccentricities. Her first book, a collection of assorted short stories and other ephemera titled My Dirty Dumb Eyes, was not quite the Full Hanawalt experience that I had hoped for. It was still really out there and funny, to be sure, but it felt a little safer and a little more measured & restrained. That's understandable, given that many of those pieces were assignments, rather than directly personal work. I was worried that her new book, Hot Dog Taste Test, might be similarly muted in content. Instead, despite the fact that most of it is a collection of work published in a food magazine, I found much of it to be not only Hanawalt's sensibilities fully unleashed, but also to be remarkably personal and even poignant at times.

The fact that the book centers around food is precisely what makes it so personal. Hanawalt loves food, loves talking about it and isn't afraid to remind the reader that we are absurd animals. Hanawalt has a knack for using mundane images to make fun of pretentious ones, like substituting hot dogs for actual dogs at a dog show-style event. She also constantly subverts the kind of food-related advice people seek from the internet or magazines with absurd add-ons. In a hand-written list of baking tips, it starts off with "whisk drys" and "parchment paper will save you" (two sensible things) and ends with "yogurt makes promises it can't keep." She reduces shopping to furniture ("stuff to fart on") and clothing ("stuff to fart in"). This, and wine advice like an arrow pointing to a shiraz that says "makes your tits itchy") establishes the baseline for her humor in this book: coarse, silly, vaguely familiar and very brightly colored.

That use of color is in prominent display in her "Holiday Food Diary", which abandons anything resembling reality to delve into eating "a box of meat", fresh egg nog with eggs squeezed straight from the bird, and an apocalyptic and orgiastic two page spread of "The Holiday Feast". Hanawalt alternates a fairly straight-ahead profile of celebrity chef Wylie Dufresne with a long series of cartoons about toilets and toileting issues. Yes, she literally indulges in potty humor in a series of hilarious strips that work because she treats them with an eager sense of curiosity about our toileting habits as humans. That's followed by her drawings of human-type breasts and genitalia on birds, including a statue of one in an art museum. By the time she finishes up her strip on "menstrual huts" (including the "menstrual barcycle"--one of those pedi-cab bars), Hanawalt has undoubtedly cleared the room of those who simply wanted to read some funny comics about being a foodie--and more power to her.

Most of the rest of the book is dedicated to longer pieces, like one talking about leaving New York City for good and indulging in all the "Sugar, Spice, and Fat" she can get her hands on. There's an interlude featuring one of her anthropomorphic characters that were a staple of her earlier work and are now mostly seen on her TV show that she designs, BoJack Horseman. Tuca the Toucan is hilarious, reminding me a little of the old R.Crumb character Mode O'Day as she has an intensely awkward encounter with a guy at the deli counter. The strip where she's desperately trying to get a Cathy ("Aack!") swimsuit on is a bit of hilarious metahumor. "Planting" features an anthropomorphic bird couple moving into a new house in another brightly-colored story (watercolors, I believe) that introduces plants as a fun hobby and then reveals that the wife starts becoming obsessed with them to the point of starting to sleep curled up in pots.

"Otters!" works as both a guide to something interesting (a sanctuary where you get to swim around with baby otters) and something that could not have been more in Hanawalt's wheelhouse. "I can't get over how good it feels to have otters all over me", she says, in a paragraph next to a self-portrait of her with a shirt that reads "Every Day I'm Not Covered In Otters Is A Piece Of Shit." It's a perfect Hanawalt piece, as its illustrations range from cute to absurd to gross, and there's a kind of sweet inquisitiveness that marks the way she looks at the world. The same is true, in a far different environment, in "Lisaaa Las Vegas", in which she is asked to eat at some opulent Vegas buffets. Hanawalt jumps into the experience wholeheartedly while acknowledging the ways in which Vegas is a sort of bacchanalian con. It's not unlike if a magazine had managed to send her back in time to some Roman feast; it's something that's kind of ugly and conspicuous in its consumption, yet the actual experience of eating that food is one so visceral that that aspect of it is interesting to consider. Hanawalt nails that visceral quality with her absurd, almost hallucinatory ideas about food as well as the effects it has on her body.

The true stand-out piece in the book is her "Argentina Travel Diary". I had no idea that her mother was from Argentina, and the story features Hanawalt traveling there with her parents, her brother and her boyfriend. It's among the very best travel diaries I've ever read, as it's bracingly honest and funny about the experience of travel and the confusing & conflicting emotions that often come with it. Her observations about South American food are dead on: it's not spicy, it's European. (My own Chilean relatives acted like they were eating five-alarm chili when they had a stew with a dash of paprika in it. "Calor!"). Her blunt assessments ("Truche Roqueforte" as "Cheese Fish") and Noquis (Gnocchi) as "Bliss pillows" made me laugh out loud. Hanawalt talks about the feelings she gets when she rides a horse, how riding around with her brother made her think about how his girlfriend had died just a year ago, and the sensation after riding of eating some stew that her mother had made ("Nothing has ever tasted better.") Hanawalt's work, in its purest essence, is embracing what it is like to be embodied. To feel the adrenaline of being on top of a horse, with all the risk that entails. To eat nothing but comfort with family and to feel safe and loved. To accept one's body and bodily functions, acknowledging the fears of what other people might perceive if they saw her on the toilet (the image accompanying that made me howl). To savor those moments of beauty that come through meaningful interaction in an existence that is "mostly meaningless", as she put it. This wasn't just wisdom on top of toilet humor, but rather, an acknowledgment that the toilet humor is part of the wisdom.

The Sublime Reference: You're All Just Jealous Of My Jetpack

Tom Gauld's collection of gag cartoons from The Guardian, You're All Just Jealous Of My Jetpack (Drawn & Quarterly), is very much unlike most of his his other work. Unlike his mostly wordless strips about biblical figures, cavemen, guards and robots, Jetpack is almost entirely beholden to references, be they pop culture, historical or literary. This book is a shorter, punchier version of the sort of thing that Kate Beaton likes to do, especially in the way that he mashes up historical and modern references to art, history, music and literature. My favorite example is captioned "Attitudes Toward Sex In The Middle Ages: Figure 1, Geoffrey Chaucer, c1370." The strip features a man riding on the horse. The man sings "(Get Up I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine" by James Brown, with the horse acting as his call-and-response Bobby Byrd. The strip "The Street Tom Waits Grew Up On" is a hilarious imagining of the weird buildings all in a row that surely must have inspired the singer's weird lyrical imagery.

Gauld is also willing to be absurd in making his references, with some of them ending up more in Michael Kupperman territory. Kupperman loves making references to old things that don't actually exist as well as utterly warping history in crazy fashion, like in his Twain and Einstein stories. Similarly, in Gauld's hands, Charles Dickens is an action hero whose "Dickensmobile" rides on tracks under London. In another strip, "The Multifaceted Mister Dickens", there are Steampunk, Song And Dance and Sexy versions of the author. Gauld also loves having god talk or react to to famous atheists like Phillip Pullman, the fantasy author whose His Dark Materials novels are notably anti-religion; in one strip, god tells Pullman what to write for his next book, with Jesus and the holy ghost wanting in on the action as well. Noted atheist author Richard Dawkins is another common subject, as Jesus tells god not to take Dawkins' book The God Delusion personally up in heaven.

The title of the book comes from a strip where a character in a space suit labeled "science-fiction" says this to a group of tut-tutting normal people labeled "proper literature". It's a fitting title, because Gauld loves genre tropes and tries to incorporate so many of them in his strips to get a laugh. Sometimes this is done in a straightforward manner and other times it's one of his many metafictional jokes and slow reveals. His ultra-simple line and restrained use of color make each strip instantly comprehensible as a gestalt, allowing the reader to get to whatever reference he's making that much faster. Gauld makes a lot of references to film and video games, imagining Pip from Great Expectations in a first person quest video game or the Bronte sisters in a multiplayer game. He spoofs political cartoons and their frequently arbitrary drawings and labels. He makes clear the relationship between art and commerce. Probably the funniest strip in the book is an artist who's designed new covers for D.H. Lawrence's books, claiming that he chose "images that represent Lawrence's key themes: class, nature and capitalism". After a silent panel, he says "Just kidding! They're all pictures of sexy ladies!" to which his publishers exclaim "Hooray!" The hit-to-miss ratio in this book is quite strong and his art is so appealing that it's easy to simply tear through the book. While Gauld's long-form comics are more ambitious and rewarding, he's astonishingly good at the art of the sophisticated gag that draws simultaneously from high and low art references.

Sequart Reprints: Short-Form Round-Up: Cahill, Davis, George, Gauld, Dinski

Time to dip into my mailbox and review some interesting new short-form comics that have come my way. It's always exciting to be exposed to the work of a promising young artist for the first time, and this was certainly the case for Christopher Davis' work. Each of the three minis, though quite different, clearly could all take place in the same world. The most introspective of the minis, "I Walk With My Wife In The Evening", still takes flights of often-disturbed fancy in the narrator's mind. The narrator starts off thinking about his wife as they take a walk, but his thoughts then drift to clouds "raining down something coarse and dirty". That leads him to think about some contagion being unleashed in a city, with the government putting up razor wire and quarantining his house, and giving him a body bag for his dead wife. His thoughts then drift to the apocalyptic novel On The Beach, where a group in Australia waits for the world to end after nuclear war. Back at home, he entertains the fantasy that time can't catch up to he and his wife. The sensitivity of Davis' pencils give his meditations some narrative weight, both in how they accent and contrast his musings.

"Why I Never Joined The Strawberry Resistance" stars our same narrator, but this time it's in a very strange world. Bananamen run the world, exploiting snowmen in menial jobs. Those characters, plus a parking robot giving out tickets, all come together in a huge collision. All of this takes place against a high-tension city protest by a group called The Strawberry Resistance. The comic has the tension of a Robert Altman movie with a fanciful twist. The surreal elements help leaven the political content of the strip, allowing for a pleasantly ambiguous ending. My favorite of Davis's minis was "No Buses. Chickens.", a comic that encapsulates Davis' output. A young man is at a bus stop in front of a mini-mall in a city. Waiting endlessly for a bus, he sees a group of chickens devour a young woman who had been sitting motionless on a bus bench. We don't know how he got there or where he's going, and he basically doesn't care-- "If the buses didn't come? Then I guess I didn't have to be anywhere, any time soon, anyway". The deadpan tone and realistic pencils are a perfect balance to the grim absurdity of the strip. Davis has a very interesting future as he decides what kind of stories he wants to tell. At the moment, he's more of a writer who draws than an artist who has fully integrated both skills. His chops are incredibly impressive for a newcomer, as is his sense of composition, but it would be interesting to see him do a story where he relies more on visuals than text.

Things come into focus with the second issue of This Is Still America, by George.  The reader begins to understand that the young boy who is the central character of the comic was sent to live with his vicious father because he was constantly getting into fights. His only dream is to be sent back to his mother. In this issue, his father sees him back down from a group of young toughs, and then slaps him around until he goes out to challenge them. The boy, knowing that he's breaking his word, goes back to those kids and proceeds to pummel each of them in turn--crying as he does so. The comic gets truly intriguing when we delve into the boy's fantasy life. We never see his father's face until one devastating sequence: the father burns the boy's possessions in the backyard and kills a snake with a 2-tined fork. When we finally see his face standing above the fire, he appears as the devil. The boy's dog urged him to leave at the end. Graphically, this comic is much like the first issue: spare and stylized. Something that I picked up on in this issue is the influence of video games on the comic's graphics. When the boy is playing Pac-Man, we later see him walking in the street and the view is directly from above like in a video game. Once again, George's vision is unique. The second issue seems to be leading us to the boy going off on a journey of some kind after leaving his father, but it'll be interesting to see where this story winds up. 

Will Dinski is a favorite of mine, and his two new minis did not disappoint. Endorsement of Smoking is a fold-out mini designed to look like a pack of cigarettes. Once unfolded, the back of the mini shows cigarettes. The front of the mini has a strip where a character discusses the nature of addiction. The payoff, both verbally and visually, is quite satisfying, though on a small scale. What I like most about it is that it couldn't possibly work in any other format than this mini. The payoff is clever, made moreso because of the format. Others, as described in the subtitle, is "two short stories about the disenchanted and solitary". The first story, "The Pressman", is a funny and clever account of a night worker at a newspaper. For fun, he enjoys going to other people's jobs and blending into the background. He watches a corporate scandal unfold and is also in the background at the police station where they uncover the scandal. It's unclear, but implied, if he has any role in the scandal unfolding. "Get Away From Me" is about crowds, and a bird's pontification thereon. After complaining about crowds of people, he desperately tries to join up with a crowd of birds. As always, Dinski's style is utilitarian and assured. His layouts and figures don't dazzle, but instead serve the story and composition. Like many talented minicomics artists, I'm curious to see what he could do with long-form stories.

One of the first reviews I did for this site was for Alex Cahill's The Last Island. His new project is a collaboration with writer Jad Ziade called Poison The Cure. It's hard to pin down exactly what genre this falls under, but perhaps it could be called political science-fiction. The issue I received was the first of four, and it looks like it'll take a couple of years to finish it, especially since this issue was a beefy 104 pages. This issue is almost entirely prologue and set-up, yet the story is a compelling one. We spend the first 16 pages looking at the day-to-day activities of a group of alien explorers of some kind. They're sent to examine an abandoned world and figure out what happened, with the aid of one of the crewmembers who is a professional telepath. He can relive the lives of others (referred to cleverly as being a sort of reality-TV) and finds the "life-trail" of the one telepathically-aware person on earth. In trying to find out what happened to this person at the end of their "life-trail", the alien nearly has his brain fried. Going back a bit in time, the story begins.

The story takes place on Earth at some unspecified time in the future. It's the sort of dystopia where there are shady corporate and government deals. A young man returns to what seems to be his family to find out that a woman has died who is close to them. It turns out they are in a country resembling Mexico and were trying to get information on a corporation dumping toxic waste, and the woman was murdered in the process of this investigation. Throughout the course of the issue, we wonder who it is who will become the telepath. By the end, this is made clear, as the saga truly begins. We know from the ruins we see at the beginning of the story that the telepath will end up in Washington, DC, and so the rest of the story will be about that journey. Poison The Cure reminds me a bit of Megan Kelso's Girlhero serial "Bottlecap". It's a futuristic story where politics is at its core. Even the character Mugshot is someone who could have come straight out of that story. The focus of Poison The Cure is a bit different, however--the political intrigue is secondary to the mystery of how we get to this sort of apocalyptic ending. Cahill's character design is lively and carries a story that must have been challenging to depict. Cahill's secret weapon is his use of black & white contrast. His artful use of this technique makes for a nice shortcut in depicting certain scenes, though there were some occasional close-ups that were unclear and required a lot of time to decipher. That hurt the story's flow a bit, but happily those panels were few and far between. There's a long way to go in this story before it can be fully evaluated, but this is certainly an interesting start.

Lastly, there's this offering from the only "major" publisher in the group, Buenaventura Press. It's Hunter and Painter by the very droll Tom Gauld. The story is just 18 pages, long enough to set up a great gag. In a primitive culture (drawn in Gauld's spare but expressive style), an artist is expected to come up with his next great masterpiece, depicting the latest hunting conquest. He's stumped trying to find something inspiring for his next painting, but knows that all of the big conquests have been done. He hits on doing a painting of the women harvesting mushrooms, which gets him driven out of the village. A hunter who's a friend of the painter seeks him out, and they make a discovery that not only resolves that story, but provides the punchline for the story. Gauld's deadpan style makes him one of the most underrated humorists working today, and his strips are always a highlight of whatever anthology he happens to be a part of (most notably Kramer's Ergot).

Trust Me: Tom Gauld's Goliath

Tom Gauld's first book for Drawn & Quarterly, Goliath, is his latest in a series of deadpan but heartbreaking comics involving futility and the inevitability of the individual in the face of an uncaring universe.  Gauld's retelling of the story of David & Goliath from the latter's point of view is in turns funny, sad, exasperating and ultimately tragic story made all the more so by the ending that we know is coming.  Gauld turns around the ultimate underdog story into a simple misunderstanding as one man gets swept up in forces beyond his comprehension and happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

In Gauld's story, Goliath is indeed a Philistine solider, but he excels at administration and paperwork and has no skill or stomach for actual battle.  One gets the sense that he was swept up in a war with the Israelites against his will, putting him at the mercy of ruthlessly ambitious generals and vain kings.  Goliath is a fairly gentle soul who also has no interest in the main form of entertainment at the Philistine camp: betting on animals fighting each other.  Goliath is not given to speeches or moralizing, other than choosing to act in certain ways.  One gets the sense that he doesn't quite understand why certain things are wrong--he simply doesn't do them.  However, as the story proceeds and Goliath becomes more and more cynical about his task--to march down into the valley and challenge a champion from Israel to face him, winner take all--we see him almost reach a breaking point with regard to loyalty to his country and army.  His captain, who came up with the scheme thinking that the Israelites would be too scared to send one man against the hulking (but secretly gentle) Goliath, told him to simply trust him.  Throughout the course of the story, that trust is eroded as no one emerges from the enemy camp.  The only thing keeping Goliath there (he had abandoned his old camp to stay in the valley) was concern for the young shield-bearer who came out every morning.

On the day of his death, Goliath is felled by someone who's a combination of his shield-bearer and his captain: someone idealistic, faithful, ambitious, ruthless and crazy.  Only Goliath's concern for his shield-bearer allows David (in full speechifying mode) to get the drop on him with his sling, and that's that.  I don't get the sense that Gauld is passing judgment on David or casting him as a villain (indeed, the villain is really the captain), but rather portraying him as just a kid pushed by circumstance.  He happens to be in the right place at the right time as much as Goliath is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Rightfully so, the story ends right after David chops off Goliath's head as the captain's clever scheme backfires spectacularly. 

Gauld wrings a lot of humor out of this story thanks to his spare line and use of simple but powerful figures.  Goliath is really a triangle with an oval on top of that, with two lines appearing as legs and thinner, curvier lines acting as arms.  When the characters are viewed as a distance, this is literally what they become on the page--just shapes.  The heavy use of brown is a nice reflection on the dust on the soldiers.  While it's not an uncommon trick to retell classic stories from the point of view of the antagonist, Gauld is restrained in how far he takes this technique.  He doesn't set out to make Goliath a hero or a tragic figure undone by his own hubris.  Indeed, it's Goliath's sheer ordinariness that makes this such a moving story.  This is the way the world works: the ordinary are punished for things that they have nothing to do with for no reason at all.  It's a bleak conclusion, both alleviated and exacerbated by the many moments of humor Gauld injects into the narrative.

The Joke's On Us: The Gigantic Robot

Rob reviews Tom Gauld's new book, THE GIGANTIC ROBOT (Buenaventura Press).

Tom Gauld's comics have often had the hallmark of juxtaposing frequently tiny, minimalist figures against vast backgrounds. His comics are frequently about futility and humanity's struggle for relevance as a cosmically absurd battle that can't be won. Gauld is best known for working small, with minicomics-sized entries for his stories that nonetheless focused on emphasizing small figures buffeted by forces stronger than they were. For THE GIGANTIC ROBOT, Gauld goes in the opposite direction, using an 8x10 format with image and text alternating on each page. That adds an extra layer of opposition to Gauld's narrative and creates a nasty comic tension that only escalates as the story unfolds and eventually collapses.

Gauld begins the book with the phrase "The war rages on.", but the facing page is almost completely blank, with only some rolling hills and a leafless tree providing any contrast to the all-engulfing white space on the page. In this comic, even the environment is insignificant in the face of the story. When we meet the people who convene for a secret project, they are minimalist even by Gauld's usual standard. They're little more than a few lines, slightly elongated. They're stretched out like a Giacometti sculpture, and their faceless nature certainly reflects the existentialist quality of the sculptor's work. They share that same hunched-over posture, the same long legs, the same sense of restlessness. They're walking and working, but to nowhere in particular and for no good reason, as we soon learn.

When the scientists create their gigantic robot superweapon, the first page upon which it's revealed sees the huge figure nearly fill up the entire page. This is where working big started to pay off for Gauld in this comic, selling the contrast between figures and environment. The robot is a huge Something, something big enough to fill a void. It represents a promise of action as an expression of pure will, a sense of mastery over others and the environment. Gauld then deflates the reader on the next page by revealing "The gigantic robot doesn't work." Here, the hunched nature of the scientists reveals their defeated and puzzled states as they try to figure out why their creation is immobile and one of its hands has fallen off.

Gauld then gets darker and darker as his joke gets sharper. The war ends, ending the need for the robot. The robot is no longer an expression of will but rather a monument to failure. We never even saw any evidence of the war, which made the peace insignificant. Each subsequent page features a heartbreaking image of decay as the robot falls apart further. Even as the reader is informed "Another war begins", getting up one's hopes that the rusting robot might eventually serve some purpose, Gauld pulls the rug out by finishing the sentence on the next page "and ends". He brutally finishes off any investment the reader had in this symbol of potential by simply having the narrator drift away, saying "Things happen elsewhere." and then cease altogether for the last two pages. Those pages saw the robot completely disintegrate and become part of the background.

The robot's fate is both tragic and comic. Its purpose was to be an engine of destruction, and it was not a bad thing that it never got off the ground in that respect. The robot was comic in that its creation and proportions were an act of defiance and almost hubris that was smacked down before it (and its creators) had a chance to exercise any kind of will to power. Ultimately, the secret weapon was abandoned by its creators and destroyed by the passage of time and the elements. It's a suggestion that no weapon of man could ever be as destructive as nature itself. Going a step further, Gauld suggests that any creation is doomed to eventual irrelevance and decrepitude. That said, Gauld in many of his comics has saved special venom for those projects of man's that glorify vanity, brutality and sheer vulgarity over beauty & self-expression, and this book is his most savage indictment of those former qualities. In THE GIGANTIC ROBOT, Gauld has created a beautiful-looking book about ugliness that is almost meta in the self-indulgence of the format. The simplicity of his line and the huge amounts of negative space he used in this book act as a sort of self-parody in parallel to the hubris of the scientists we see from a distance. In the end, the scientists no doubt went on to build some other pointless device in an effort to stop thinking about the fact that everything they will ever create will fade into oblivion--just like they will.