Smith's Adventures in the Supermundane

by Farel Dalrymple

Dalrymple can be an acquired taste.  He is a great artist, best known for his work on Omega the Unknown with Jonathan Lethem, but his stories, like Pop Gun War, have a tendency towards the opaque and obscure. 

Smith's Adventures in the Supermundane is an early piece of work, completed and published in 1999.  It plays with familiar themes from Dalrymple's later work, as we meet Smith, a young boy who is living in some sort of institution that requires he attend regular meetings with someone we assume is a psychoanalyst, and remain under the close observation of nurses and other staff.  Smith appears to be growing eyeballs in the back of his head, and has difficulty making positive relationships with the other kids in the building.

Of course, I'm not too sure what all was going on in some places, but found myself easily swept up in the art and the story.  It's always cool to look an artist's earlier work and see the kernels of what their style will become later on.