WILD KINGDOM (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95) has something weirder. At first, the book poses as linked stories involving the Everyman character Glenn Ganges, groping his way through places where the natural world and human detritus collide. But it gradually succeeds in violently shaking away any semblance of sense. The closest thing it has to an organizing principle is the calm, clarifying tone of natural history, absorbed via the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck’s essays and various illustrated books, then run through the shredder (the “index” is in fact a collage of other books’ indexes). The book is propelled by its own bank of reappearing motifs, which become funnier and more frightening with each iteration: Mutual of Omaha, a hapless squirrel, a “truth” fish that eats “Darwin” fish, the phrase “I was saved from my own life.” Every few pages, there’s a hilariously inventive piece of cartooning, like a series of drawings of “fancy pigeons” that start out looking almost convincing and end as horrifying abstractions of feathers and eyes, or a set of deadpan explanatory diagrams that dissolve into gibberish on examination (a caption for a drawing of a beetle: “Dangerous. Unite to form Devastator. There is no you”).
