Preview: Kevin Huizenga’s ‘Curses’ Reissued

Kevin Huizenga‘s Curses collects much of his early Glenn Ganges comic work in a fascinating, enthralling volume, now reissued in deluxe paperback version by Drawn & Quarterly.

Curses contains much of the early adventures of Huizenga’s character, Glenn Ganges, who he’s been chronicling in many forms since his high school mini-comic days of Supermonster. That ran from 1993-2001, after which he increasingly found his stories in demand in comic anthologies.

According to Huizenga’s bio at the D&Q site, Ganges is actually based on his brother-in-law, with the name coming from two towns appearing on a sign on the interstate. But you can’t help but think there’s not a little of Huizenga himself in there as well.

Huizenga’s work is difficult in all the best ways, complex, complicated, fascinating, surreal at times, completely mundane at others. His Ganges character, a pure everyman, allows Huizenga to put his ideas into the world, ask questions of his readers, and go off on some spectacular flights of fancy, telling stories within stories, altering his artwork as the need, or perhaps his mood, takes him.

His more recent River At Night gained him accolades, but the beauty of Curses is that the skills and sheer experimentation seen there come practically fully formed in this earlier work, now, unbelievably, some 20 years on from the first collection.

Also, Huizenga does some incredible rain scenes, something that’s always a winner for me…

Here’s the D&Q PR for this one…

The River at Night cartoonist revisits his early-aughts breakthrough

In the two decades since Curses first hit the shelves, River at Night cartoonist Kevin Huizenga has taken his rightful place on a short A-list of comics experimentalists. Deep research and loopy cartooning serve up philosophical musings while maintaining a classic comic-strip devotion to “the gag.” Huizenga remains one of the funniest and smartest cartoonists working today, and now, the very book that heralded his arrival as a talent to watch  is available once more in deluxe paperback as the early work of a now true genius.

The short stories collected herewith confront the textures of mortality in unique and peculiar ways. Central character Glenn Ganges is a seemingly middle-class, suburbanite whose blank-eyed wonderment at the everyday brings together diverse aspects of our world—like golf, theology, late-night diners, parenthood, politics, Sudanese refugees, and hallucinatory vision—into a complete experience as multifaceted as each of our own lives.

Curses – by Glenn Huizenga, published by Drawn & Quarterly on 20 February 2024