Thread by @doctorow

I had no idea what to expect when I picked up @aminder_d's debut graphic novel WOMAN WORLD; an hour later, I was a fan for life.

memex.craphound.com/2018/09/11/wom…

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Dhaliwal, an animator by day, started Woman World as an webcomic with a straightforward premise: men are extinct...now what?

A large proportion of the strips are episodic, with no overarching through-line - like Peanuts, or more to the point, Sylvia:

gocomics.com/sylvia

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As the series progressed, these one-off gags slowly built into a complex, multi-POV tale, one with real tension and payoff, sensitivity and pathos. Taken as a whole, Woman World is a like a Magic Eye painting made up of isolated gags, out of which emerges a fantastic story.

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Today, @dandq published Dhaliwal's second book, CYCLOPEDIA EXOTICA, a volume that manages that same mysterious Magic Eye trick of making a deep and moving story emerge from comic-strip-length gags about a large cast of characters.

drawnandquarterly.com/cyclopedia-exo…

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The premise of CYCLOPEDIA is a little more complicated than WOMAN WORLD, though; it's an alternate world in which another race of hominids - cylcopes with one eye and one breast - have existed alongside us "two-eyes."

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The two species haven't always gotten along, but now, in the early 21st century, we've found an uneasy peace, with the minority cyclopes living within two-eye society, facing all the issue of a visible minority: fetishization, discrimination, division and internalized racism.

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CYCLOPEDIA's characters are in interracial marriages and uneasy avant-garde art partnerships; they've mutilated themselves with kook "eye separation" surgery and have encouraged others to mutilation by modeling monoboob-separating binders that simulate cleavage.

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They're climbing the corporate ladder and giving birth to multiple babies - cyclops women have three vaginas and two uterii and they gestate multiple foetuses simultaneously, birthing twins separated by a monthslong gap.

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And all of this is presented as a series of lighthearted gags, many of which made my literally cry with laughter. It's an incredibly, admirably sneaky way to tell a profound story about race and gender and class.

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If all of that is hard to imaging you should try it for yourself. Drawn and Quarterly have posted an excerpt from the book:

drawnandquarterly.com/sites/default/…

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Meanwhile, I will be helping Dhaliwal launch CYCLOPEDIA EXOTICA Wednesday night at an event hosted by @chaptersindigo. I hope you can join us!

crowdcast.io/e/udbva8py/reg…

eof/

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/05/11/uni…