Kevin Huizenga

A man has trouble falling asleep and reflects on his life, marriage, and time itself In The River at Night, Kevin Huizenga delves deep into consciousness. What begins as a simple, distracted conversation between husband and wife, Glenn and Wendy Ganges—him reading a library book and her working on her computer—becomes an exploration of being and the passage of time. As they head to bed, Wendy exhausted by a fussy editor and Glenn energized by his reading and no small amount of caffeine, the story begins to fracture. The River at Night flashes back, first to satirize the dot-com boom of the late 1990s and then to examine the camaraderie of playing first-person shooter video games with work colleagues. Huizenga shifts focus to suggest ways to fall asleep as Glenn ponders what the passage of time feels like to geologists or productivity gurus. The story explores the simple pleasures of a marriage, like lying awake in bed next to a slumbering lover, along with the less cherished moments of disappointment or inadvertent betrayal of trust. Huizenga uses the cartoon medium like a symphony, establishing rhythms and introducing themes that he returns to, adding and subtracting events and thoughts, stretching and compressing time. A walk to the library becomes a meditation on how we understand time, as Huizenga shows the breadth of the comics medium in surprising ways. The River at Night is a modern formalist masterpiece as empathetic, inventive, and funny as anything ever written.

The River at Night

"One of the brightest, most interesting new comix authors to appear in the last five years." -Time.com Delving into mythology, belief, and spirituality,Kevin Huizenga's short stories are based on the lives of familiar characters confronting the textures of mortality in unique and sometimes peculiar ways. Huizenga fuses the most banal aspects of modern culture with its most looming questions in a consistently genial style. Lighthearted, but with a healthy dose of nineteenth-century spine tingling, the narratives presented in Curses are insightful portrayals of reality. Huizenga's central character in his comics is Glenn Ganges, a seemingly middle-class man living in the suburbs whose blank-eyed wonderment at everyday experiences brings together such diverse aspects of our world as golf, theology, late-night diners, parenthood, politics, Sudanese refugees, and hallucinatory vision, into a complete experience as multifaceted as our own lives. Huizenga is regarded by many as one of the most promising young cartoonists of his generation, whose artistic talent, singular writing, and studied substance prove the versatility of his skill. Curses collects his work from Kramer's Ergot and The Drawn & Quarterly Showcase, his award-winning and nominated comic-book series Or Else, and Time magazine; it is the most extensive selection of his comics to date in a single volume.

Curses

"Everyman Glenn Ganges ruminates on the simple times of the dot-com era when the reality of business was propped up by the unreality of addictive technology and hope. Kevin Huizenga cleverly parallels that unreality with the unreality of addictive networked first-person shooter video games, and the attempts of people around him to genuinely connect with each other. Huizenga's elegant neo-clear-line style brings a crispness and humor to these low-key slice-of-life stories, and the gray-blue duotone he has picked gives the art a new depth and complexity."--Amazon.com.

Ganges

Combines the mundane interactions of everyday life with existential dissections of what it is that holds life together.

Gloriana

Glenn Ganges dans le flot des souvenirs

The new master of Comics Experimentalism returns with his Everyman, Glenn Ganges Standing out among his contemporaries, Kevin Huizenga's subtle mastery of the medium has earned him countless 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 gray squirrel 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.

Kevin Huizenga

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