Reviews for Bottomless Belly Button

The average rating for Bottomless Belly Button based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-10-24 00:00:00 Jim White Is it possible to write a review for a story about a family of eccentric personalities and the comedy and tragedy that results from the comingling of their individual personal dysfunctions without mentioning The Royal Tenenbaums? Apparently not. Now, with that out of the way: Bottomless Belly Button is a story about a family of eccentric personalities and the comedy and tragedy that results from the comingling of their individual personal dysfunctions -but it's also a bravura performance at comic book writing as an artistic medium. After forty years of marriage the paternal hierarchy of the Loony clan has decided to divorce; and so Mom and Dad summon their children home for a week of strained familial bonding as the final papers are signed and ways are finally parted. Naturally, the three Loony children act accordingly and proceed to wallow in their own personal inadequacies. The eldest son'a grown man drawn as nearly always wearing a child's anachronistic football uniform (metaphor!)' spends his week ignoring his overweight wife and young son, devoting all of his time to crawling through hidden passages in the house, sneezing through dusty old photo albums and interrogating his parents on what's the real reason behind their divorce. Middle daughter'a wishy-washy willow of a woman'tries her best to relate with her uncomfortably 16-year-old daughter, while bemoaning her own long-past divorce with a selfish cad of an artist. And youngest son, a 26-year-old anthropomorphic cartoon frog (yes, he has the head of a frog and the four-fingered-glove hands of Mickey Mouse) deals with an abiding sense of self-loathing, angst, and loneliness brought about in part by the casual indifference and lack of affection he receives from his parents and siblings…but hope may be budding on the horizon (i.e. he may lose his virginity to the sweet yet slightly off-kilter beach babe he's just met)! Weighing in at 700+ pages, Bottomless Belly Button is a shockingly compulsive read (I waded through it all in one engrossed, two and a half hour session) that bops around from eviscerating its characters' flaws to sympathetically digging deep into their psyches. Shaw deserves a standing ovation for the way in which he infuses comic exaggeration, a harsh refusal of sentimentality, innovative meta-comic-ing, laugh-out-loud moments of comedic humiliation, marital despair, and touching insight into being old, young, married, alone, unhappy, teenaged, a parent, a child, a failure, and (dare I go there? …Dare!) a human being. Reminiscent of Chris Ware, albeit not quite as hopeless, triple-B is a graphic novel/comic book/words-with-pictures-whatever that I cannot recommend highly enough.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-07-11 00:00:00 Richard Vrhovc This review is kind of like an "it's not you, it's me" break-up, because I should really acknowledge that Dash Shaw's The Bottomless Bellybutton represents a certain side of art-house indie cartooning that just doesn't resonate with me. There is a scene late in the comic when the grandmother is at the grocery store, and the man in line in front of her gives her an angry look for not putting a divider between their items. It seemed like an outrageous response to a fairly common situation, and I realized that most of the world is angry or annoyed at the family that is at the center of The Bottomless Bellybutton. As a reader, I should be sympathetic to their plight in the face of hostility, but truth is, I was angry and annoyed with them, as well. I didn't care at all if they got where they were going, and the book is way too long to put up with a group of people who the author seems to be telling us are really the source of their own problems. It's like watching a remake of Little Miss Sunshine by Todd Solondz. There was one nice moment I really liked, where Peter, a boy portrayed with a frog's head, reverts back to his real face for a moment, when he realizes his new girlfriend doesn't see him as a freak. It's very subtle, revealing that the reason Dash Shaw has chosen to draw Peter as a weird frogboy is because that is how he sees himself, but he's really as normal as the rest of them. The book has multiple instances of characters having warped self-images, but this is the one place where it really comes through as something special. Overall, the cartooning is about as unappealing to me as the writing. It has a rushed, unfinished quality that grows tedious in the book's first couple of hundred pages. Given that the whole novel is 720 pages, that's a lot of unattractive comics to plow through. I suppose Shaw could be trying for what Douglas Wolk calls a "beautiful ugly" aesthetic, but for me he's way too heavy on the second half of that equation. Again, I'm more than willing to concede that all of this criticism stems from my personal tastes and is not necessarily reflective of the quality of Shaw's work. There are actually some very good, emotionally heavy moments in Bottomless Bellybutton that struck me despite my struggles to connect with the overall product. Likewise, though I was originally going to complain about an ongoing annoyance with indie cartoonists being overly obsessed with urine, semen, and boogers, as I read, I saw that this was the low-end of a sophisticated thematic metaphor about the way the transmogrification of water is similar to changes humans go through over their life. In other words, despite myself, I get it; it's just that "it" is not for me.