It's not every comic that starts out with a husband and wife sipping wine with their sick friend and ends with dancing and two girls fighting cancer robots with martial arts. But then, Kochalka doesn't exactly create average comics, as his strange and intriguing line of former publications will attest. Fantastic Butterflies is an odd experience, as it is in many ways a slice-of-life comic, but it features fantastic elements like robots, time travel, talking dogs amidst the everyday elements like parties, baking, friendship and romance. There's an almost stream-of-consciousness approach at work, except that the story is more structured than that, and though it meanders around a bit, there's a definite plot and even a moral to the story, sort of.
Kochalka's artwork and sense of design has always been attractive to me. It's minimalist, in that the characters and backgrounds are very much cartoony and unrealistic, more general shapes than hard anatomy and with a free-floating design that is reminiscent of the "squiggle-vision" of Dr. Katz and Home Movies. While the work is deceptively simple, though, the storytelling is anything but. Kochalka uses single panels in the midst of a white page as well as standard panel arrangements to space out the story, maintaining a pace for the story that can best be described as amiable and leisurely.
In many ways, Fantastic Butterflies is less of a read and more of an experience. You slip into Kochalka's world for about 150 pages, and then slip back out again, but it's hard for those images not to resonate with you. More to the point, the story encourages reflection later on, as Kochalka has slipped in philosophies about life, balancing optimism versus cynicism and anger versus forgiveness into a thought-provoking read. The strange behavior of some of the characters is often funny, but the free-spirited attitude of many of these characters is infectious, and it's hard to imagine putting this book down without a smile on your face.
Which is not to say that Fantastic Butterflies is a light or simply humorous read. Though Kochalka's characters are somewhat emotionally distant, the loneliness and bitterness that surrounds Jason X-12 is easy to relate to, and the idea of running into an angry jerk in a bar isn't something too alien to most peoples' experiences either. Mind you, that angry jerk is rarely a cancer robot, but Kochalka has hit on a universal experience through a most unusual character.
There are a variety of story threads and characters running through Fantastic Butterflies, and at times it does seem like Kochalka is meandering somewhat, but that seems to be the style of the book. Though I usually look for more straightforward and mainstream fare, Kochalka's mixture of art and story struck a chord with me. It's a delightful book that will leave readers with smiles and thoughts to ponder.
