shuffleboil “I’ll try to find you some and I’ll bring them to you.”

It is pertinent,
It’s important
Because
When you consider Barack Obama’s reaction to
And explanation to
His association there
And without him being clear at all
On what he knew
And when he knew it
That I think kinda peeks
Into his ability to tell us the truth on
Not only on association
But perhaps
Other things also
So it’s relevant
I believe
And I brought it up
In response to the New York Times article
Having been printed recently
And I think it just makes us ask the question that,
If there’s not forthrightness there
With that association
And what was known
And when it was known,
Does that lead us to ask,
Is there forthrightness
With the plans Barack Obama has
Or say tax cuts,
Or spending increases,
Makes us question judgment.
And I think it’s fair and relevant

So rampant is the idea of dysfunction in our culture that almost any given person will describe their family as such. Each unit contains an air of mystery and each member flaunts an individuality that can make dysfunction seem real, as if being on your own track is the same as being on a separate one. More often the different tracks of family are parallel, more like lanes than entirely separate roads — but that, as with anything familial, is all a matter of perception.

What happens when a dysfunctional situation is deemed normal even expected? What if a family goes through the motions thereby creating a a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Dash Shaw investigates this matter and many more in the mature and surreal graphic novel “Bottomless Belly Button,” in which the Loony kids grapple with the unexpected divorce of their parents after four decades of marriage. The split seems strangely matter of fact as if this were the expected result of their years together, a passionless and lackluster nod to inevitability — it seems as though they are supposed to split up, so they do.

The children exhibit their reactions through self-fulfilling personal propheies that find their own plummeting expectations of life creating the very dysfunction that their parents are forcing along. Called together for a final reunion at a beach house, gathered to witness the forced family decay together, the Loony offspring are largely too self-absorbed to really pour over the strangeness of the parents’ actions. Frog-faced son Peter continues to plunge into his own awkward, lonely misery until he meets a girl who provides a unique opportunity to blow off his parents altogether. His sister Claire has the exact opposite of her parents — an early divorce that offers her freedom in life that really only enslaves her and sends her wandering in confusion most of the time. Brother Dennis is torn apart by the announcement, obsessed with uncovering the reason behind the absurdity but really reacting to the crumbling of his own safety zone. Meanwhile, granddaughter Jill, an already awkward teen, has now been revealed the futility of the future thanks to her grandparents and the uncomfortable feeling of her own skin seems to be an inevitable and permanent existence.

Shaw works with different kinds of symbolism, from the sand that sprinkles on their skin to the various types of water that can be applied to emotions and family history. It’s no accident that these are the two ingredients used by God to create the hapless, unintentionally wicked Adam, who was surely spiraling towards some kind of legendary self-fulfilling prophecies by eating the apple and being cast from paradise. Such behavior is in our heritage, but that doesn’t make us evil. It just makes us sad.

Shaw’s enormous graphic novel — it’s 720 pages and seems to weigh a few pounds — literally intrudes on the most private moments of the Loony family, a narrative that spirals through their misguided thoughts, as well as their showers, literally stripping them down for rough examination. It’s the level of space and pace that isn’t often directed at mundane family dynamics, but there’s something in there that each of us might recognize and certainly appreciate for the care with which it’s all been dissected.

Wait a minute, this person is not very much like Joe Sixpack at all! Where’s the folksy Sarah we all love? If I wanted this sort of crap, I would watch interviews with Condoleeza Rice!

It’s a good thing Sarah Palin doesn’t coddle the America haters like Barack Obama does. Guess who sponsored this party in a bid to the UN to achieve Alaskan independence? Iran.

When it comes to legendary comic book artist Steve Ditko, there are two paths of interest in his story. One is obvious — as the co-creator of Spider-Man who wrote and drew the first few years of the character’s existence, his skill as an great innovator in the comic book form is of great importance.

There is another side to Ditko, less known to those who might know of him from his work with Marvel Comics decades ago — his unwavering devotion to the philosophies of Ayn Rand and his compulsion to inject those philosophies into his work. It starts out as a guiding principle, but soon, Objectivism overtakes Ditko’s talents, comandeering both the stories he told and the career that never seemed to rise to the level it should have.

In “Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko,” author Blake Bell mixes up a career history and art critique of the legend with a more intricate study of the mental decline of the man. More importantly, Bell provides the link between Ditko’s often outrageous imagery and the mind that conceived of them.

Ditko’s career was as a rather mild-mannered, working cartoonist of obvious brilliance when he hit what, back in the day, was the big time. Ditko became a major player at Marvel Comics, partnering with Stan Lee (antagonistically) and bringing glory to the company through Spider-Man and his other tour de force, Doctor Strange.

A bad experience with the business end of Marvel Comics sent Ditko on his decades-long spiral that had him exhibit extreme paranoia towards associates and fans alike. Equally, his work began to focus more and more on his Randian beliefs so that entire superheroes were created and utilized for the sheer purpose of acting out Randian-fused fables. It was a bizarre descent, one that saw uncompromising principles see public form as erratic and self-destructive behavior and turned his work away from the fresh brilliance of Spider-Man and into screeds often resembling a Randian version of the Jack Chick Christian comics — so much wooden lecture that the words almost crowd the pictures out of the frame.

The real focus of the book, though, is the art and that his handsomely covered through reproduction and discussion. Ditko was a great innovator regardless of his eccentricities and his work deserves to be celebrated beyond the comics medium. No one could depict the psychological landscape in physical form better than Ditko — his visuals were quirky and unique.

Ditko’s demise — he is still with us, but hidden away — is sad and perhaps one of the best arguments against the validity of  Objectivism as full-proof philosophy of life. His story, though, is fascinating and his art, as with so many others touched with creative greatness, will outlive his peccadilloes, even as they function as the physical form of his own psychological landscape.

As the movie world jumps into Apatowmania (or is it Roganmania?), Alex Robinson’s “Too Cool To Be Forgotten” may function as the perfect companion/antidote. Robinson manages to tread the same territory — being a grown-up isn’t so bad, being a man-child isn’t so advisable — while not succumbing to the mentality it dissects. In this way, it’s a lot more like Apatow’s earlier and best work, the television series “Freaks and Geeks,” with a mix of nostalgia and uneasy truths as it examines the cliches that ring true.

Andy Wicks wants to quit smoking and takes his wife’s suggestion of visiting a hypnotist. As he relaxes into his trance, he finds himself trapped in his 15-year-old body in 1985, reliving his high school years, with no sign of ever being able to leave. His mission, as he understands it, is to never smoke his first cigarette, which he did that very summer. What he realizes as he traverses the landscape of a ghost world is that the actions of an adult, even the most everyday ones, are not something to be altered so easily — and painlessly.

As Robinson reveals, the big secret we grown-ups hold is that the high school years, they actually aren’t so great. I think most people settled into their lives and reasonably happy would never want to return to them. Of course, you don’t want to bluntly tell a high school kid this — they live in fish bowls and it’s like cracking the bowl. Besides, they’ll figure it out once they get past it.

The common mistake among high schoolers, though, is to believe that adults are jealous when we’re merely just annoyed at having to relive the horribleness and that we are trying to protect teenagers needlessly from a natural growing process. Be on our end of the road and say that. What adults are really trying to do is prevent teenagers from doing the things we all do that build regrets, obsessions, dysfunctions, wounds that never heal, situations that become repeated behavior . . . the stuff that happens to all of us and send us into therapy and divorces and loads of other depressing things. It’s a thankless and impossible job, but adults are as wired to attempt to prevent that fate for teenagers as teenagers are to embrace it.

Andy Wicks faces all these realizations head on. While plenty of stories in movies and elsewhere have presented the idea of an adult inhabiting a young body, Robinson really investigates the philosophical and psychological side of such an existence in a way I’ve never encountered before. What promises to be a silly and cliched story given the set-up turns into an incredibly mature and thoughtful examination of those years. Robinson draws us into the teenage fishbowl and then drags us out via the implications.

It’s a grand book of anger, disappointment and relief and highly recommended.