From New Yorker cartoonist Walker Tate, Laser Eye Surgery comes to its audience via the Fantagraphics Underground imprint. It represents Tate’s first full-length comics offering and centres on an unnamed protagonist whose corrective ocular surgery gives him a whole new outlook on reality. Having undergone the procedure, at a distinctly dodgy looking establishment, our main player finds himself taking far longer to recover than he imagined. Floating specks mar his otherwise much improved vision and hint at something more sinister, and even otherworldly, going on.
As the days pass he becomes concerned that his vision has been compromised – hijacked even – and that malevolent forces are using his sight to steal personal information from him. So begins a descent into apparent delirium as he finds the walls of perceived reality melting away and seeks to discover the truth about his newfound interactions with the world.
On the artistic side Tate’s clear lines and playful techniques provide us with a narrative that visually toys and teases with ideas of perception and environment, particularly with the use of the floating marks that obscure the main character’s eyesight and seem to also manipulate his behaviour. It’s a clever use of the form that consistently undermines and then re-establishes our confidence in what we are seeing, before pulling it all down yet again. There’s an added layer of the cosmically existential added in for good measure as the shifts between stark reality and unknowable otherness wax and wane before our eyes.
Laser Eye Surgery never quite seems to know whether it’s an exploration of a mind in paranoid freefall or if it’s an allegory for very real 21st century concerns surrounding personal security, identity theft, and autonomy. But perhaps that slightly Kafkaesque idea of the bigger picture always just being that little bit elusive, that teasingly and frustratingly just out of our grasp, is ultimately the point.
The abstract and even sometimes oblique strands to the story won’t be for every reader but those happy to invest themselves in 90-odd pages of epistemological weirdness and the irony of the tagline “Correct your sight — See what you’ve been missing” will no doubt enjoy being lost in its meandering surrealism.
Walker Tate (W/A) • Fantagraphics Underground, $19.99
Review by Andy Oliver
