I saw Dash Shaw’s animated feature film My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea at last year’s Portland International Film Festival, where I was pleased to see the personable humor and torsion of reality that I always expect from his work. Shaw is a well-respected indie comics artist whose graphic novels, like Bottomless Belly Button and Cosplayers, mix entertaining, well-written stories with cool ideas that threaten to conceptually blow the doors off the whole biz. My Entire High School—which features voice work from the likes of Reggie Watts, Lena Dunham, Susan Sarandon, and Maya Rudolph—finds teenagers facing a couple of different disasters.
As I was thinking about My Entire High School at PIFF, a lady next to me in the bathroom line blurted out, “I could see a Q-tip at my house!” She was referencing a part of the film that discusses the illicit thrill of using Q-tips—even though doctors repeatedly tell us we shouldn’t. So of course when I got on the phone with Shaw, that was the first thing I told him.
MERCURY: I don’t know if she was talking to a friend in the stalls. There didn’t seem to be anyone.
DASH SHAW: What? That’s amazing! What a strange thing to say.