Genius Animals?
Vali Chandrasekaran, writer; Jun-Pierre Shiozawa, art
Self-published, 2020
A graphic novel that covers a lot of ground. The first chapter is a romantic comedy about Alexandra and Todd. After meeting at a Brooklyn bar their courtship is almost entirely wordless: a visual tour-de-force that is rare in comics. When Todd mysteriously disappears Alexandra searches for him, a quest that becomes the real focus of the story. She finds herself involved with conspiracy theorists, who think Todd is gone because of his work on interspecies communication. Talking to animals, in other words.
It turns out that a cartoon rabbit--clearly a Bugs Bunny analogue, along with an ersatz Elmer Fudd--was actually based on a real rabbit that was developed by the U.S. military. She and her girlfriend follow the clues to the Woods Hole Marine Laboratory, There they encounter a genius level octopus. Alexandra finally meets a talking dog who confirms that he has united the genius animals to end the era of human domination.
As the dog predicted, no one believes her. She encounters Todd in the mental institution she was taken to. So he's alive, but appears to have forgotten everything she has learned while hunting for him. The big climax is everything they feared. So the unlikely ending manages to unite both the romance and the thriller, a climax to all of the crazy ideas in the graphic novel. Shiozawa's art is a good match for the story being told, especially the cartoon elements of it.
The creators kindly sent me a PDF of the graphic novel so I could read it on my tablet like many other things reviewed in this blog. But it is freely available online at https://geniusanimals.net/
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