The Wild Kingdom
By Kevin Huizenga
(Drawn and Quarterly, Hardcover, 9781770460003, 108pp.)
Publication Date: August 31, 2010
Categories: Literary
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Description
The new master of Comics Experimentalism returns with his Everyman, Glenn Ganges
Standing out among his contemporaries, Kevin Huizenga’s subtle mastery of themediumhas earned himcountless accolades and awards. His comics are at once straightforward and experimental, serious and funny. His character is the suburban everyman Glenn Ganges, a modern-day Dagwood Bumstead,who tackles and stumbles with such heady topics as mysticism and science.
In TheWild Kingdom,Glenn Ganges blindly interacts with the nature of his suburban neighborhood: dead houseplants, a recipe for graysquirrel brain, and pigeons eating discarded french fries in the parking lot of a fast-food joint. Huizenga juxtaposes Glenn’s ignorance of his surroundings with television commercials highlighting society’s needs for cure-all pharmaceuticals and “hot new things” like teeth whiteners. Starting off wordless, The Wild Kingdom grows more complex page by page, ending with encyclopedic entries, biographical excerpts, anthropologic flowcharts, and a cataclysmic encounter of nature and technology.
About the Author
Kevin Huizenga lives in St. Louis with his wife; he is the author of the graphic novel Curses and the comic book series Or Else and Ganges.
Praise For The Wild Kingdom…
Praise for Kevin Huizenga:
“One of the most promising of a new generation of cartoonists, Huizenga’s stories use a combination of the quotidian and the surreal to explore themes of science, nature, religion and family.” —Time
“With art that ranges from clear-eyed cartooning to swirly expressionism, Huizenga takes his characters through poetic explorations of the profound.” —The Washington Post
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The Light Between Oceans ML Steadman Scribner |
