© 2004 Schalken / Bries

Dutch artists Stefan van Dinther and Tobias Schalken have to date produced four issues of Eiland, an occasional avant-garde comix anthology filled with mesmerizing formal experiments — and a kind of visual poetry that is bemusing and ravishing in equal measure. At first self-published in collaboration with a third artist (the now-departed Stefan van der Heijden), Eiland has been published since #3 by the Antwerp-based company Bries, Ria Schulpen's alternative comix imprint specializing in English-language editions of work by young Flemish and Dutch artists (www.bries.be). On the basis of Eiland, plus van Dinther's and Schalken's respective websites, www.allow-to-infuse.com and www.tobiasschalken.com, it seems safe to say that these two are doing as much to bridge the worlds of comics and fine art as any practitioners currently working. The results are protean, free-minded and unbeholden to comics tradition — in fact startlingly original.

Issues 1 through 4 of Eiland contain installments of Schalken's long-term project, Balthazar: a miracle play in five parts. With Balthazar Part I: Dark was the Night — Cold was the Ground (published in September 2003), Bries has wisely re-launched the project in its own distinct package. Part I consists of material reprinted from the first two Eilands, but adds a frankly mind-blowing prologue in the form of a chronological "exhibit" of artifacts somehow related to the narrative.

	Prologue

Similar in format to Eiland #3 and #4, this new Balthazar is a squarebound, softcover album of thirty-two pages, craftily designed and gorgeously printed. It comes replete with large end flaps and (per Eiland practice) a mocking, eccentrically detailed "biography" of the artist. The entire project, almost Borgesian in its deadpan scholasticism, exudes an air of monkish discipline and, on the other hand, exploratory indulgence — as well as a surplus of arch humor.

Balthazar Part I boasts the same radical coherence, the same thorough integration of global design and narrative purpose, as, say, any issue of Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library, but with a wholly different vocabulary of style and effects — and a tone so unlike anyone else as to be disorienting. While puckishly knowing in its dead-on, slyly insinuating parody of scholarship (a dense crust of peritext on par with Acme's mock-editorializing), Balthazar also manages to be authentically mysterious. As its main (?) narrative unfolds, it becomes at once enticingly cryptic and eerily suggestive. The story — here only begun, a teasing forechapter of contracted scope — is carefully parsed out, an evocative unspooling of images, symbols and visual metaphors.

Opening

Schalken works in a symbolic register, achieving the sort of nigh-mystical atmospherics one associates with, say, Germany's Martin tom Dieck. The through-line of his narrative may be less evasive, but still resists paraphrase. What I can say about the story is scant:

Men float in dark (ocean?) water, and a rowboat passes by, bearing a man and a dog, obscurely glimpsed. Cut to another man observing from a distant window, in a building overlooking the shore. Then a different man (the rower, returning?) enters the room and seems to study a spot of blank wall. Suddenly this newcomer knocks out the first man (the one who has been gazing out the window). He then opens the door to a third man, who scales the dark stairwell leading to the room and enters, toolbox in hand. This man listens as the other recounts (untruthfully?) the story of his rowing, his return, and his encounter with the still-unconscious man on the floor. The man with the toolbox then takes up various odd devices to bore a hole into the wall, whereupon he dons earphones and listens to a sound (a single tone?) emanating from within (?). This sound enters his ear, graphically, and literally takes shape, appearing as a (female?) figure in a series of diminishing panels and finally devolving into a small, glowing star. The story abruptly comes to a hanging pause, a teasing blankness, with the words "to be continued" (as indeed it is in subsequent chapters in Eiland, which further develop certain situations and symbols).

	Pictography

The final image of the star resonates with the "Balthazar symbol" described in Schalken's mock-scholarly prologue: the hermetic emblem of a falling star which, as I understand Schalken's notes, apparently caused a case of immaculate conception (hence the Balthazar legend or "theomancy"). Of course, exactly how (or whether) Schalken will clarify this connection remains to be seen.

Plot, obviously, is not the driving impulse in Balthazar (I felt ridiculous trying to summarize it). Just as obviously, readers wanting a discrete, well-rounded chunk of story will be flummoxed by Balthazar's dense prolegomena and by its narrative opacity. As of now, the connections between Schalken's mute narrative and the elaborate religious-cum-scientific mysteries of his prologue have not quite jelled; why the book is subtitled "a miracle play" is not yet clear, and I doubt Schalken will resolve the book's hermetic puzzles into a conventional well-made story (even of the mute variety). Nor does Schalken observe the niceties of linear, panel-to-panel transitioning: a single set of nested panels may invoke several different moments, actions and possible meanings.

Sonography

In short, Balthazar straddles the presumed divide between traditional narrative and more free-associative, avant-garde comics. In its rapt explorations of mystery, symbol and form, the book dares all the usual complaints about the impenetrability of "art-first" comics. Yet I never found the work frustrating — rather, I was drawn onward, inward, by Schalken's inventiveness and breadth of knowledge, his playful erudition, and the overpowering, almost auratic quality of the book as a designed object, an emanation of craftiness and vision.

With Balthazar, Schalken extends the formal grapplings of his previous work into a sustained long-term project that still partakes of Eiland's stunning diversity of means — the result being both a challenge and a pleasure, surely among the most hypnotic of today's high-formalist comics. Reading it entails having one's mental map of comic art summarily redrawn. Strangely, Balthazar manages to be both like a dream and like a whip-smart scholarly exegesis of said dream upon waking — yet its fundamental open-endedness remains. 

(For further information on Balthazar, readers are urged to consult the Eiland website, at: www.eiland.cc.)