FANTASTIC BUTTERFLIES

Kochalka flutters on

By Mike Whybark     November 27, 2002

James Kochalka has been beloved by critics since he first started publishing his thoughtful little comics, and I'm no exception. Kochalka's work is highly personal, and mixes autobiographical slice-of-life style incidents with the fantastic. He executes his comics in a simple, open style which relies on brushlines and clear, contrasty use of shapes. The effect is to make FANTASTIC BUTTERFLIES fast - the pages speed by.

Despite this surface smoothness, the book actually offers a reflective atmosphere. This effect - of speed and stillness - is, paradoxically, the result of the wordless panels, which are used to illustrate both moments of thoughtful isolation and intense action.

The plot, such as it is, follows Kochalka's main character, a pointy-eared elfin young man (in other works sometimes called Magic Boy), through a day or two in his community, a bucolic, wooded slackerville that will be instantly familiar to denizens past or present of America's finer college towns.

The sweet isolation of the community from the rest of the world is creatively emphasized by the artist. In a long shot, the camera's gaze up over night trees reveals the Earth, whole and shining, illuminating the woods. Our protagonist employs a public, coin-operated time machine to arrive at a party, where he finds himself quite drunk on arrival.

There are robots about as well, including the dog-slash-robot, Jason X-12, and a particularly snarly apparent relative of Bender from FUTURAMA who starts a full-on bar brawl. The brawl is resolved when the young man's wife and her pal invoke their magic powers as the FANTASTIC BUTTERFLIES of the title.

Generally speaking, Kochalka employs fantastic elements as specific metaphors. The grouchy robot in the bar could easily be the violent redneck of every punk kid's life story; the time-travel trip to the party can be understood as a drinking binge, and so on.

There's a particularly successful use of this technique in which a frog-headed alien, New Guy, plays softball wearing the classic goldfish-bowl space helmet. An accident both breaks the helmet and racks him when a ball hits him in the crotch. As he lies on the ground in pain and characters either slip away or gather in concern, New Guy's inability to speak takes on a tension: is he speechless because he's dying without the helmet, or because he's taken it in the 'nads?

In the end, New Boy joins the community; he no longer needs the helmet.

There's quite a bit more to the narrative, and it all profits from this deceptively simple set of storytelling techniques. One distinctive characteristic of the story is that often creators who draw so clearly on personal, day-to-day experience rely on satire for energy and direction.

Kochalka's story is decidedly non-satirical. I found it tasty and beautiful. I should note that I grew up in one of the towns in the United States in which that splendid combination of poverty and creativity enables the lifestyle depicted in the book. We didn't have time machines, robots, or new guys in pressure suits, but we didn't feel like we lived on the same planet I read about in the papers on a daily basis. Reading this was like a little visit home.