“What is art? What switches does it flip?”
I first heard of this weird, obscure volume in Scott McCloud’s ingenious book Understanding Comics. At the time, if McCloud said it was good or used it as an example of anything, I wanted to read it, but for some reason it took me a while to get around to this one. Shame on me.
By all accounts, this is a weird book. It’s part ant farm epic, part funny book, and part mythology. It’s about “the affinity of life,” according to Marder, and the story centers on a population of creatures called beans. they change and evlolve along with their seemingly self-contained world, and when something upsets the order of their lives, they adapt to it. They have to deal with outsiders attacking their way of life, religious conflicts, how to respond to new religious experiences, and major social shifts, all with the utmost lightness of heart, drenched in joyful slang.
These stories have a tinge of something both alien and deeply familiar, some connection to a mythic sensibility, while on the surface exhibiting a hooting pleasure in simple play. He effortlessly mixes the strange sexual and social relationship the beans have with an underworld of creatures that provide them with food with goofy accents and simple narration, disarming the readers while drawing them in.
The beans also have a distinct spiritual life whose focal point is Gran’ma’pa, the tree that gives them life and sustains them on a daily basis. They look to it for guidance and meaning, and Marder handles this with supreme grace. I hardly stopped to think of how this could comment on preexisting religions while I was reading it because the invitation to care about and follow the beans had been so irresistible.
The artwork seems to suggest that the whole world occurs in 2 dimensions, more or less. There is nary a cube or a sphere in sight; the beans are collections of blobs and sticks, and their world is strictly up and down, although occasionally bits of y-axis perspective sneaks in. Couple this with the rich mythology built in and you’d think it was discovered on a cave wall or hieroglyphs on a temple if it didn’t have bear a distinct imprint from Krazy Cat creator George Herriman. The art is a cartoonish mosaic, iconic and constantly entertaining.
This work defies classification. It’s called an “eco-fantasy” on the back, so I guess that’ll do. As soon as I read the next volume, my thoughts on it will be here.
