I find Dash Shaw’s work to be strangely invigorating. I admit I had some reservations when I first saw the daunting heft of his Bottomless Belly Button, with its absurdly extended passage of a man running and profusely sweating, drawn in a style so crunchy that it makes Gary Panter look slick. The idea that all we cartoonists must now draw books that are at least three inches thick and that take several years of deprivation to accomplish thanks to the efforts of obviously dedicated workhorses such as Shaw and Craig Thompson was not a pretty one. But I was eventually to resign myself to this new order.