I saw Dash Shawâs animated feature film My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea at last yearâs Portland International Film Festival, where I was pleased to see the personable humor and torsion of reality that I always expect from his work. Shaw is a well-respected indie comics artist whose graphic novels, like Bottomless Belly Button and Cosplayers, mix entertaining, well-written stories with cool ideas that threaten to conceptually blow the doors off the whole biz. My Entire High Schoolâwhich features voice work from the likes of Reggie Watts, Lena Dunham, Susan Sarandon, and Maya Rudolphâfinds teenagers facing a couple of different disasters.
As I was thinking about My Entire High School at the festival, a lady next to me in the bathroom line blurted out, âI could see a Q-tip at my house!â She was referencing a part of the film that discusses the illicit thrill of using Q-tipsâeven though doctors repeatedly tell us we shouldnât. So of course when I got on the phone with Shaw, that was the first thing I told him.
I donât know if she was talking to a friend in the stalls. There didnât seem to be anyone.
What? Thatâs amazing! What a strange thing to say.
Yeah just, âI could see a Q-tip at my house!â Maybe she was angry because people get angry when theyâre afraid. After spending an hour getting entrenched in your movieâs 2-D world, I will admit that suddenly seeing a huge, real Q-tip on the screen was terrifying.
I thought the Q-tip would do a few things. One, what you saidâbe shocking and disruptive. Two, I knew the Q-tip would look really good on a long horizontal screen. When you scan a Q-tip, itâs just a shape, so I hoped for a second it might not even look like an actual object. It might just look like a shape. Itâs part of the sensibility of the movie where Iâm trying to make small, abstract things very exciting.
I love how the lunch lady character has these gradually ramping up super powers. At first sheâs in the background. Then you find out sheâs been putting stuff in the cafeteria food to make the kids really strong. Then by the end she can fly.
I took that from my younger self. I looked back at the comics I made in high school and, for whatever reason, there were a lot of lunch ladies in there.
And thereâs a high school Dash in this movie. Heâs kind of a dick.
Well, heâs trying to warn everybody.
There were probably people in the audience that didnât know this movie was directed by a person named Dash.
Well, it says my name at the beginning, but itâs true, most people wouldnât notice or care. I went to see the new Tim Burton movie [Miss Peregrineâs Home for Peculiar Children], and the main character in that movie is a total Tim Burton stand inâa tall goth kid with a mop of hair thatâs lonely and wandering around. When I was leaving the theater, I was thinking, âWhat if that person was named Tim Burton?â
Thereâs an assumption with movies that the main character is the perspective of the audience but, in my mind, all movies are obviously the directorâs fantasy. We know that George Lucas created Indiana Jones and George Lucas loved archeology, but if he named that character George Lucas, heâd have crossed a line.
In a comic, it doesnât seem strange to have a character that has the authorâs name. The joke of an autobio comic is that the person is obviously altering reality to favor them. Itâs like the long exhale of Justin Green or Julie Doucet. When I read autobio comics they always seem like theyâre more about the cartoonistâs perspective than anything real.