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Kevin Huizenga. Ganges #1 and #2. Fantagraphics Books, 2006 and 2008.

As I declared when I finished Kevin Huizenga’s recent collection, Curses, I was impressed and moved enough to seek out some of his more recent work. I ordered the first two issues of Ganges, his entry in the prestige oversized-format “Ignatz” series from Fantagraphics. I was not disappointed: Huizenga’s now-familiar alertness to the mysteries of the everyday, urge to connect small local moments with global concerns, and command of the comics medium are evident throughout these issues. The first ish features stories loosely organized around the theme of time. Some of the stories directly address anxieties about mortality; one story mines Glenn’s obsessive fantasizing about the future life of a litterer for laughs.

But I was especially taken with Huizenga’s innovative use in its opening story of panel borders, thought balloons, and other comics conventions to try to represent the ways in which we think about and experience time . . .

. . . and with the final story, in which Glenn lies awake for a long night next to his sleeping wife. This tale doesn’t highlight formal experimentation the way the opening story does; but Huizenga’s use of a black background for the page and decision to forego panel borders disrupts the traditional relationship between panel transitions and the passing of time to the effect that everything seems to be happening in a single elongated moment.

Ganges #2, however, was the real treat for me. A single sustained narrative about Glenn’s stint at an upstart dot-com in its waning days, “Pulverize” primarily concerns the video game of the same name that Glenn and his fellow workers play every day after work—a multi-player fps game that quickly comes to dominate their lives during, after, and away from the job. As Glenn reveals, it’s not the sort of game that he’s traditionally into, and the several panels in which he describes his usual video games of choice are chock full of a giddy bizarro inventiveness that makes me think I’d like to see Huizenga write a kids’ comic:

The whole office-gaming phenomenon is a mystery to me outside of that one episode of The Office (“Call of Dutyyyyy“) . . .

. . . so it was a treat to read Huizenga’s analysis of its origins, anxieties, and collapse. Though one might expect a story about a video game to be slight, in many ways this is one of Huizenga’s most ambitious stories. It deals not only with gaming but also with politics (electoral and office), labor and economics, the information age’s transformations of consciousness and interpersonal relationships, and maybe even that old standby religion: It’s no accident that the playing field on which Glenn and his co-workers run around trying to shoot each other is an abandoned monastery.

All these elements converge in the ambiguous and vexing conclusion to “Pulverize.” I don’t want to discuss it in too much detail (though this isn’t necessarily the sort of work one worries about spoiling). I initially felt a bit let down by it; Glenn seems to want us to believe that when he and his fellow workers and players lay down their pixellated lives for a soon-to-be-fired employee in a virtual “I am Spartacus” moment, it actually means something—that a bond is formed, that they all feel “a real affection and a kind of sadness.” This rang incredibly hollow to me, given the completely simulated nature of the lives and of the sacrifice. But then I reminded myself that Glenn Ganges is not Kevin Huizenga, and it’s likely that part of what’s being satirized here is the blurring of those lines, the inability to separate the real and the fictional, and moreover, the genuine economic and human costs that result when workers accept a vision of themselves as interchangeable and infinitely replaceable.

Previously on Pretty Fakes: Review of Kevin Huizenga’s Curses.

Tom Spurgeon’s interview with Kevin Huizenga.

Pretty Fakes welcomes review copies with a slice of lemon icebox pie and a glass of iced tea. Contact us at prettyfakes at gmail dot com.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 9:54 am and is filed under Comixx, Professor Fury. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.