Seaweed: Lush, hilarious oversized indie graphic novel


Ben Balistreri's Seaweed is a gigantic, gorgeous indie graphic novel with all the hallmarks of a pull-out-all-the-stops personal project from a very talented, very demanding creator. The oversized hardcover book is absolutely gorgeous, from endpaper to endpaper, and the spreads and layouts ooze care and delight.

Balistreri is an award-winning animation veteran with a genius sense for comic timing and character design. Seaweed Book 1 tells the story of Mildew, a tubercular, blind, dying bat who charters a scow called the Salty Sugar from Seaweed (a bitter, crippled pelican sea-captain) and Poisson (his mate, a French sardine with a flamboyant personality) in order to locate the "cure for death," contained in the Devil's Cookbook.

The adventurers are beset by mercenaries, sarcastic dolphins, monstrous chieftans, and horrible frogs, and the story ends on a cliff-hanger that has me slavering for book two.

Balistreri's layouts have to be seen to be believed. Dense with sight gags and possessed of an enviable cleanliness of line, each of these pages justifies its giant, oversized presence (this book is so tall I had to sit on the sofa to read it — I couldn't fit it between me and my desk).

There's plenty of scanned pages to appreciate on his site, so don't take my word for it.

Salty Sugar: Seaweed Book 1