A major new graphic novel from a major new talent.

The Bottomless Belly Button is a comedy-drama that follows the dysfunctional adventures of the Loony Family.

After 40-some years of marriage, Maggie and David Loony shock their children with their announcement of a planned divorce. But the reason for splitting isn't itself shocking: they're "just not in love any more." The announcement sparks a week-long Loony family reunion at Maggie and David's creepy (and possibly haunted) beach house.

The eldest child, Dennis, struggles with his parents' decision while facing difficulties of his own in his recent marriage. Believing that his parents are hiding the true reasons behind their estrangement, Dennis embarks on a quest to discover the truth and searches through clues, trap doors, and secret tunnels in attempt to find an answer. Claire, the middle child, is a single mother whose 16-year-old daughter, Jill, is apathetic to the divorce but confounded by Claire and troubled by her own "mannish" appearance. The youngest child, Peter, is a hack filmmaker suffering from paralyzing insecurities who establishes an unorthodox romance with a mysterious day care counselor at the beach.

In a six-day period rich with atmospheric sequences, these characters stumble blindly around one another, often ignoring their surroundings and consumed by their own daily conflicts. Visually, Shaw employs a leisurely storytelling pace that allows room for exploring the interconnecting relationships among the characters and plays to his strength as a cartoonist — small gestural details and nuanced expressions that bring the characters to vivid and intimate life.

If the controversial R. D. Laing wrote an episode of The Simpsons, it might read something like The Bottomless Belly Button.

"Shaw's stunningly conceived and executed comic opus captures one moment of change in a family. Maggie and David Loony have called their three adult children to their childhood home to announce that, after 40 years of marriage, they're getting a divorce. Dennis, the eldest, desperately searches for an answer to why. He believes that if he just finds the right old letters, he'll understand what's happening to his parents, only to find that his answers say a lot more about his own marriage and infant son. Claire, the middle child, has been through her own divorce and is now struggling to raise a teen daughter by herself. The youngest, Peter, who has always felt like a changeling in his family and is drawn with a frog's head, is going through a delayed coming-of-age. Shaw's style deftly combines cartoon drawings with slavish attention to detail. The result feels reminiscent of a photo album, one person's quest to remember everything from the floor plans of the vacation home to the texture of the sand on the lake beach. Masterfully using the comics medium to juggle all the different characters, weaving their stories together seamlessly, Shaw allows the Loonys' emotions to play out naturally without forced resolutions, leaving a wistful hopefulness that feels just as conflicted and confusing as every family is. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

The young cartoonist Dash Shaw comes down firmly on the symbolic end of the comics continuum. Shaw isn't much of a draftsman in the conventional sense, but he's got a gift for evoking what things feel like and mean, rather than what they look like. His 700-plus-page brick of a graphic novel, "Bottomless Belly Button," chronicles the disintegration of an extended family gathered together one last time... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) before its patriarch and matriarch get divorced, and the sexual awakening of one of their sons, a self-loathing pothead named Peter. Much of the book is concerned with the relationship between space, time and cathexis — the emotional charge attached to things and places — and Shaw painstakingly diagrams how everything in the story relates to everything else.

There are codes and symbols throughout the book: Its title refers both to a decades-old love letter written in cipher and to the family bonds that connect all of these characters. Shaw develops his own symbol system here, lingering over abstracted images of water and sand as they combine and separate near the family's seaside home. When he can't quite convey something in a drawing ("tries to open" or "no towels," for instance), he just writes it out as text in the panel; he uses long sequences of images to linger over individual characters' sensory experiences, like standing in the sand as waves come in and retreat. He draws Peter with a goony-looking frog's head for most of the book; a single panel in which he doesn't reveals that this is only how Peter sees himself. All of Shaw's formal experimentation, though, works in the service of the story's emotional impact: It's a sprawling mess, but a fascinating, affecting sprawling mess, whose raw invention and sentimental core justify each other.

Douglas Wolk is the author of "Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean."

Reviewed by Douglas Wolk, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"[T]he graphic novel of the year, combining youthful exuberance, sage storytelling, and visual experimentation....[A]n emotional jolt that's sometimes absent from the work of other graphic novelists, even those as acclaimed as Ware and Clowes." New York Magazine

"Dash Shaw's mammoth new graphic novel is a sweeping tapestry of a family in crisis. It's sad, it's thoughtful, it's dirty and funny and hesitant and right in your face....You find a lot of [Shaw] inside his new book, but you'll find even more of yourself." Alan David Doane, Comic Book Galaxy

"I like Dash's intelligently-restrained creativity with the comic medium, such as portraying one of the adult Loony children as a frog, because he thinks the rest of the family members see him as one. I was mesmerized through the entire book." BoingBoing.net

"Although not a perfect book, Dash Shaw's ambitious The Bottomless Belly Button reaches so high and executes so much of what it does so well that it shames you into reconsidering every other book you may have praised recently." The Comics Reporter

Dash Shaw lives in Richmond, VA.