The Wild Kingdom

by Kevin Huizenga

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770460003
Publisher:	Drawn & Quarterly
Publication date:	08/31/2010
Pages:	108
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Kevin Huizenga splits his time between Chicago and Minneapolis. He has lived near the Mississippi River for almost twenty years but only swam in it once. His favorite river is the Wabash. His character Glenn Ganges is based on his brother-in-law and the name is a reference to two separate towns that appear on the same sign on the interstate.

Editorial Reviews

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 on Kevin Huizenga

“With art that ranges from clear-eyed cartooning to swirly expressionism, Huizenga takes his characters through poetic explorations of the profound.” —The Washington Post on Kevin Huizenga

From the Publisher

The book is propelled by its own bank of reappearing motifs, which become funnier and more frightening with each iteration: Mutual of Omaha, a hapless squirrel, a "truth" fish that eats "Darwin" fish, the phrase "I was saved from my own life." Every few pages, there's a hilariously inventive piece of cartooning…
—The New York Times

Douglas Wolk