Curses

As poignant and dead center an evocation of suburban life at the turn of the millennium as anyone could hope for. Sort of a post-modern O'Henry (though it's much more fun than that makes it sound), Huizenga skewers the absurdities and obsessions of modern life without ever losing his compassion for his characters. A real winner! Glenn Ganges IS everyman.

Kevin Huizenga, Curses (Drawn and Quarterly, 2006) I think that, were Glenn Ganges a real person (and I believe that he is, at least partially, Kevin Huizenga himself), that he and I would get along famously. Ganges seems to take an approach to the world very similar to my own, and we have things in common I never expected to find I had in common with, shall we say, an artist's rendition. Thus, I will freely admit to bias in my review of Curses, Huizenga's first book of Glenn Ganges stories. (A second, Ganges, was released the next year by Fantagraphics.) The Ganges stories here vary greatly in length, from a three-page quickie that appeared in Time magazine to a forty-page adaptation of a Sheridan LeFanu story ("Green Tea", for those keeping track). Ganges and his wife are the only solid connectors between the stories, but incidents and characters crop up again and again in different stories, so the volume has more of a feel of coherence than it otherwise would. Much of it reads rather like a magical-realist memoir; there's a realistic setup (e.g., Glenn and his wife trying to have a kid...) that leads to a thoroughly absurd conclusion (...and the only way to do that is to steal a feather from an ogre who lives somewhere beneath 28th Street), or vice versa. It's a good deal of fun, and Huizenga's somewhat minimal drawing style is adaptable to just about anything (and there's some wonderful versatility to be found between these pages). Definitely worth a look. ****

Glenn Ganges sounds just like someone you probably know. He's in his mid-to-late 20s, slim build, slightly balding, and lives with his wife in a smaller American metropolis. They've been trying to have a baby for some time, but without success. He enjoys reading about the unknown, and thinking about the little things in life that most of us bypass with barely a second thought. On the surface, Glenn could be that friend you had from college - the one you used to study with late at night over coffee at an all-night diner (you remember that guy, don't you?). Except for one thing: Glenn Ganges is a fictional character in Kevin Huizenga's comics repertoire. This is a simple, obvious fact which is easily overlooked throughout Mr. Huizenga's latest book, Curses. Glenn's just got that kind of a personality. Bigger than life? No. Stands out in a crowd? Not in the least. But he is charming in ways that don't exact great amounts of understanding from the reader. That is to say, the reader has known Glenn Ganges throughout his or her life, and it is wholly natural to allow him back in. What Mr. Huizenga does with such a regular-guy-type character is amazing, though, and proves to be the strength of Curses. The reader isn't exposed to thinly-veiled autobiography or self-indulgence (as is the case with Bren Collins' 6 Ways from Sunday franchise), but to worldly stories that could come from anywhere. "28th Street," for instance, is a stirring Glenn Ganges story which originated as a folk tale from Italy, and has been filtered through Hometown, America for the reader's consumption ("Hometown, America" in this case happens to be Grand Rapids, MI - perhaps the epitome of any North American city of moderate size). A veritable mythology is acknowledged, formulated, and shared in such a way that we can all get it, not just on a local or regional level. The book has heart, and Mr. Huizenga emphasizes this with his superb selection of non-verbal images. The case which makes itself is within the short story "The Hot New Thing," a satirical view of how people tend to analyze and anticipate those things which we are told by media are The Hot New Thing. Glenn and his wife Wendy are just like us in that respect. They talk about The Hot New Thing for days, follow trade journals and popular magazines featuring the unspecified object, and finally attend the initial unveiling of said item. And here's where the humanity comes into play: On their way into the Expo, Glenn and Wendy become so wrapped up in the anticipatory moments leading up to the pinnacle moment in their lives (The Hot New Thing's revelation!), they actually hold hands as they approach - they've fallen in love all over again. Curses is a book every bit as profound as anything by Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Boy on Earth) or Jeffrey Brown (Clumsy, and I Am Going To Be Small), and sometimes surpasses them with regards to accessibility to the general readership. Each of the stories can be read indepe