Bardín the Superrealist

Created over a period of ten years by the acclaimed Spanish cartoonist Max (The Extended Dream of Mr. D, Drawn and Quarterly), Bardín the Superrealist is a suite of stories, musings and gags that, much like Dan Clowes's Ice Haven, can be read individually or together as one overarching story. Heavily influenced by surrealists such as Luis Bunuel, and graphically by "clear-line" cartoonists from Herge (Tintin) to Chris Ware, Bardín the Superrealist begins when everyman Bardín finds himself suddenly transported (well, at least his upper half) to another dimension, where an "Andalusian Dog" (a reference to Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou) serves as his ill-tempered guide. In a series of vignettes, gags, illustrations, text pieces, and dream stories, ping-ponging back between the surrealist world and the "real" world, Bardín examines, questions, and defends his own beliefs, convictions and philosophies while tangling with the Dog and the Holy Trinity in a variety of guises (including a familiar-looking mouse with red shorts and white gloves). In other stories, he imagines himself in a painting by Brueghel the Elder, tries to deal with his onanism in a productive way, is enlightened, dodges his real "creator" Max in the street, has several horrific nightmares and marvelous hallucinations, and, in the book's climactic episode, "The Sound and the Fury," battles a bona fida dragon. Bardín the Superrealist is a playful, hilarious, thought-provoking (and beautifully illustrated) major work by one of the great European cartoonists.