The Wild Kingdom

Kevin Huizenga

The new master of Comics Experimentalism returns with his Everyman, Glenn GangesStanding out among his contemporaries, Kevin Huizenga's subtle mastery of the medium has earned him countless accolades and awards. His comics are at once straightforward and experimental, serious and funny. His character is the suburban everyman Glenn Ganges, a modern-day Dagwood Bumstead, who tackles and stumbles with such heady topics as mysticism and science. In TheWild Kingdom, Glenn Ganges blindly interacts with the nature of his suburban neighborhood: dead houseplants, a recipe for gray squirrel brain, and pigeons eating discarded French fries in the parking lot of a fast-food joint. Huizenga juxtaposes Glenn's ignorance of his surroundings with television commercials highlighting society's needs for cure-all pharmaceuticals and "hot new things" like teeth whiteners. Starting off wordless, The Wild Kingdom grows more complex page by page, ending with encyclopedic entries, biographical excerpts, anthropologic flowcharts, and a cataclysmic encounter of nature and technology.