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Cartoonist Kevin Huizenga lives in a Charles Schultz world.

At least that’s what you could think looking at Huizenga’s comics.  His everyman character Glenn Ganges even sports a similar rounded nose to Shultz’s Charlie Brown.  More than the physical similarities, Huizenga shows in Or Else #5 that, like Shultz, he can insert his characters into a variety of settings and stories.  For Schultz, it was the freedom he had with Snoopy.  Whether Snoopy was the World War II flying ace or pet dog or a best friend to a small yellow bird, Schultz could use Snoopy in almost any type of story without ever having to explain what a dog would be doing there.  Like Snoopy, Huizenga’s Glenn Ganges lives in a world that’s slightly more fantastical than our own that doesn’t require explanation or exposition to set it up.

In past stories, Glenn Ganges has been a thinly veiled stand-in for Huizenga, who has been producing semi-autobiographical/semi-magical realism stories for the past few years.  His stories have walked a fine-line between portraying an honest realism and developing a modern mythology as Huizenga explores the world around him without every falling into rigid autobiography.  Even when the stories tip more towards fantasy, they’ve still been grounded in a realistic and even recognizable setting.  For anyone who has spent time in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Huizenga’s stories are littered with familiar spots such as the over-developed and over-retailed 28th Street.

Or Else #5 takes Ganges and plops him into the middle of some alternate earth war story.  Ganges is part of a ambassador’s delegation caught behind the front lines in a war that looks like it’s being fought in the 1800s.  The setting and environment are almost complete changes to how we’ve seen Huizenga working before and he bravely does it with no explanation.  Just like we needed no explanation for Schultz’s Red Baron stories where Snoopy was unexpectedly dropped behind German lines in the 1940s, Ganges needs no explanation either for showing up in this war setting.  We already know the character though various other stories.  Huizenga offers no explanation and the reader doesn’t require one.

Huizenga doesn’t get enough credit as an experimenter in comics.  By so radically shifting the focus of Glenn Ganges’ world from a very realistic here-and-now to some unspecified fictional war, Huizenga expands what he can do with the character of Glenn Ganges and what he can do with Or Else.  Huizenga throws some other experimental comics in this mini-comic, playing with his own artistic style and with the idea of storytelling.  While Huizenga has done some excellent work in Curses and Ganges, it’s the little, almost throwaway pieces in Or Else that hint at where Huizenga may be going with his cartooning and the boundaries he may be trying to push.

Huizenga has already produced some fantastic comics but after reading Or Else #5, it’s evident that he’s still growing, developing and experimenting as a storyteller.  This issue feels like a transitional step, as if something is percolating underneath his storytelling, waiting to be fully concieved and executed in a comic.  Huizenga has produced some great work but it feels like he hasn’t even come close to creating his masterpiece yet.

Or Else #5
Written and drawn by: Kevin Huizenga

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