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Cyclopedia Exotica
Aminder Dhaliwal’s cryptid history of our one-eyed cousins.
I had no idea what to expect when I picked up Aminder Dhaliwal’s debut graphic novel WOMAN WORLD; an hour later, I was a fan for life.
Dhaliwal, an animator by day, started Woman World as an webcomic with a straightforward premise: men are extinct…now what?
A large proportion of the strips are episodic, with no overarching through-line — like Peanuts, or more to the point, Sylvia:
https://www.gocomics.com/sylvia
As the series progressed, these one-off gags slowly built into a complex, multi-POV tale, one with real tension and payoff, sensitivity and pathos. Taken as a whole, Woman World is a like a Magic Eye painting made up of isolated gags, out of which emerges a fantastic story.
Today, Drawn and Quarterly published Dhaliwal’s second book, CYCLOPEDIA EXOTICA, a volume that manages that same mysterious Magic Eye trick of making a deep and moving story emerge from comic-strip-length gags about a large cast of characters.
https://drawnandquarterly.com/cyclopedia-exotica
The premise of CYCLOPEDIA is a little more complicated than WOMAN WORLD, though; it’s an alternate world in which another race of hominids — cylcopes with one eye and one breast — have existed alongside us “two-eyes.”
The two species haven’t always gotten along, but now, in the early 21st century, we’ve found an uneasy peace, with the minority cyclopes living within two-eye society, facing all the issue of a visible minority: fetishization, discrimination, division and internalized racism.
CYCLOPEDIA’s characters are in interracial marriages and uneasy avant-garde art partnerships; they’ve mutilated themselves with kook “eye separation” surgery and have encouraged others to mutilation by modeling monoboob-separating binders that simulate cleavage.
They’re climbing the corporate ladder and giving birth to multiple babies — cyclops women have three vaginas and two uterii and they gestate multiple foetuses simultaneously, birthing twins…
