Igort, Baobab #1-3 (Fantagraphics, 2005- ), $7.50 each.
I
have been mesmerized by Igort’s Baobab since the first issue appeared in 2005,
inaugurating the international publishing experiment, the
Ignatz Collection. Over the intervening months and years,
we have touched upon some of the many highlights in this
series of beautiful comics albums, but we have yet to write
one word about the series by the man who started this
strange and wonderful enterprise rolling. I have been
waiting for the clarity and precision to describe
Baobab
properly, rereading precious
issues waiting for the illumination to allow me to describe
in words what he is doing on the page. Now that the third
issue is finally published, however, I realize I have been
waiting in vain. There will be no burst of illumination to
hold it all in place, at least not in the lifetime
of guttergeek. This is a dream history of dreamers and
the picture stories they tell resist, in the best sense,
our desires to condense it into plot summary or prose
narrative.
Once completed (when? how long?), we may begin to
understand the connections between the two main storylines,
one set in early 20th century Japan and one in the
fictional South American island of Parador. But I don’t
believe that the payoff of the series will lie in such
tyings-off, or even on the level of story at all.
Technically, Baobab is a virtuoso performance, one that puts
on display a creator at the height of his powers allowing
himself to expand and dilate in the safe spaces of these
broad pages. It is also an experiment in uncovering an
unconscious history of the collective dreams that led to
the birth of the modern comics form in the early years of
the last century. Once completed, it will rival
The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier and Clay as the most searching and illuminating
inquiry into the fears and fantasies at the heart of our
love of this form. But unlike Chabon’s masterpiece,
Baobab
will continue to resist our
attempts to summarize its discoveries, requiring us to
return to the pages to recover our sense of the global
connections that sequential comics have forged.
Some of these global connections are realized, of course,
in the other creators Igort has invited into the Ignatz
series.If Baobab is in part a tribute to the pioneers of
sequential comics who created this form and set in motion
its magic more than a century ago, it is also a celebration
of the ongoing and ever-widening circles of magic that
define it today. In the pages of Baobab it is hard not to see a kind of
call-and-response to some of those who have joined in the
Ignatz series, including the dark magic of David B., the
dilated grief of Anders Nilsen, the magic realism of
Gilbert Hernandez, and the witty intelligence of Kevin
Huizenga. Baobab is as much about the magic that the
Ignatz series itself represents as it is about the scene of
origins that is its setting, and as Igort absorbs and
learns from those he publishes, his comic continues to
evolve. This is why, ultimately, this will not be a graphic
narrative easily blurbed; nor, if it were to be collected,
would it be as meaningful and beautiful separated from the
other volumes in this series.
