Credit…Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times Can you redeem wasted time by making art out of it? That’s the question the Belgian cartoonist Olivier Schrauwen asks in SUNDAY (Fantagraphics, 474 pp., $39.99) , an enormous, wonderfully funny exploration of the nature of perception and memory. He conducts his research using an unflattering version of his cousin Thibault as his main character, and though Thibault stays inside his little rowhouse for nearly the entire book, “Sunday” is about, well, everything. Schrauwen is especially trenchant about the nature of language: Thibault is a freelance font designer, and in the book’s sixth chapter, he idly builds a typeface out of the dark spaces in the photos on his friend Nora’s “Instantgram” feed. He begins to think not just in the book’s usual sans-serif font but in these inscrutable glyphs. He wanders past an apparently formless cyanotype print, only to remember the circumstances of its creation, and presto, the image becomes a mildly shocking nude. Olivier Schrauwen’s “Sunday” is structured not to be merely pondered, but to be marveled and laughed at. These shifts — from meaning to unmeaning and from formlessness to form — give the book a genuine philosophical heft. Yet it’s structured not to be merely pondered, but to be marveled and laughed at: “Sunday” is precisely drawn and rendered in vivid Risograph tones, and its length permits Schrauwen to, say, devote a page to the painful slapstick of Thibault trying disastrously to do a James Brown-style dancing split. (Our hero can’t get “Sex Machine” out of his head, and, as you read the book, you will share this frustration.) It’s a masterpiece of openness, a book devoted to locating every kind of experience in as small a space as possible. Schrauwen is far from the only cartoonist conducting these investigations. Chris Ware has built a career as a sort of astronaut exploring the nature of the consciousness, using his own intellect as a spaceship, and he has established a few themes in his gorgeous dispatches from the recesses of inner space: the inadequacy of his own abilities to this task; […]
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Tatiana Schlote-Bonne. — photo by Jordon Walter On the day of the release of her debut, Such Lovely Skin, Tatiana
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have grown so advanced that they can even pass
