Little Nemo meets Calvin and Hobbes

Every few months or so I make a point of grabbing a beer and burger at Grumpy's with my pal Eric, then heading over to Big Brain Comics for an hour-long comics jam. I never leave disappointed--except for the fact that we're both so crazily busy that we never seem to have enough time to hang out--but it usually takes me a while to figure out which of the books in the pile I lug home are gems and which are just, you know: "That was interesting."
Not this week. This week I made a discovery. Pretty breathless, I know, but seriously: check out Peter Blegvad's The Book of Leviathan. It took me all of an hour to add it to about a half-dozen of my lists of favorites.
Like, for instance, my "secret books" list. Just about every writer or book-lover I know has a couple of "secret" books they hoard for the sole purpose of foisting them on the unsuspecting bored and cynical in their presence. Books that are incredibly fascinating, but just never took off with anywhere like the rocket ship passion they instilled in you when you read (and re-read) them. Books in my foisting arsenal include Lewis Hyde's The Gift, Tom Phillips' A Humument, and Mario Vargas Llosa's The Perpetual Orgy. A friend of mine is still handing out copies of John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure (which I realize as I type is only half as old as the three books I noted in the previous sentence: damn, am I getting old).
Now these books have new company and what weird company it is. A few stabs: "Winsor McCay meets Bill Watterson (at a party in honor of Slavoj Zizek)," "The Terry Gilliam-Edward Tufte Surrealist Mash-Up," or, in the finely nuanced words of Matt Groening, "...one of the greatest, weirdest things I've ever stared at."
Blegvad's Leviathan would be brilliant if only for its visual and intellectual play, which is fantastic: Where else would you expect to find an infant and his cat taking inventory of Hell's Kitchen, with its Hell's Fridge, Hell's Stovi, and Helsinki? Or a panel series featuring the Ghost of Hegel's lectures to an infant in green jammies and his pink bunny? Good--no, great stuff. But what made it immediately permanent for me (I know: setting myself up for a fall!) is its resoluteness in portraying the persistence of love and hope and longing in the face of life's often horrifying incongruities.
If I frequently found myself saying things like "the funniest thing about the human comedy is probably that it's so tragic" while reading Leviathan, I was much more often stopped in a quick and silent wonder at the marvel that Blegvad so smartly, so humorously, captured our willingness to endure the pain and the paradox to find out whether the promise of--no: I'm getting schmaltzy here. A great book can do that to you.
So... no more summaries or superlatives: just go and find this book. It won't change your life, but it will make you indescribably happy, even as it perplexes, wonders, depresses, just plain frustrates--and otherwise messes with your mind.