South African graphic novelist Joe Daly worked night after night for about three years to complete Highbone Theater, his seventh full-length book. At 570 pages it is his biggest work to date, and also his most structurally and thematically ambitious.
In his previous books, Daly had fun with established graphic modes, borrowing and bending their conventions in such weird, humorous and intelligent ways that his US publisher, Fantagraphics Books (Daly is published in Belgium and France by the legendary L'Association), can claim on its website that Daly "single-handedly conceived his own ruminative slacker genre".
In The Red Monkey (2003), for example, his first graphic novel, Daly plays around with "the non-superhero European style of detective adventure comic - Tintin being the most apparent example". In Scrublands (2006) Daly samples "the underground comics genre, from the earlier psychedelic underground comics of people like Robert Crumb, to more recent art comics movements like the Fort Thunder art collective".
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Of his three-book Dungeon Quest series, the first of which was awarded the special jury prize at the 2010 Angoulême International Comics Festival, Daly says, "I played with the fantasy role-playing game genre, combining it with the stoner action adventure genre, and I'm also paying homage to the adventure game genre - games like Maniac Mansion, Leisure Suit Larry and Space Quest, where humorous dialogue plays a big role."
Highbone Theater, by contrast, is not nearly as reliant on a specific genre. There are some superhero conventions - the mostly male characters all have deltoids like The Incredible Hulk - and some nods to detective traditions, but these are minor debts.
If anything, Highbone Theater is set to the rhythms of comic book autobiography. It tells the story of Eric Palmer, 30, a gentle, intelligent soul who smokes a lot of weed and ingests high doses of hallucinogenic mushrooms to cope with a doltish world.
Those who know Daly - and few do, since Daly is a reclusive man, living alone (and very much for his work) in a tiny flat in the coastal village of Kleinmond - will recognise the characterisation. Daly, for his own part, admits that parts of Highbone are almost pure autobiography.
"Cartooning is isolating by its very nature," he says, "and then I'm also a deep conspiracy theorist, which is philosophically isolating sometimes."
When every other cartoonist was declaring Je suis Charlie  Daly, on his Facebook page, was worrying about certain "big anomalies in what we're shown on TV footage". He stopped short of declaring the Charlie Hebdo massacre a hoax, but left no doubt as to the depth and nature of his scepticism.
Highbone Theater explores what it means to be such a person - lonely, inquiring and unsure - and to such a degree that the lines between reality and fakery, conscious thought and reverie, are often blurred.
'Highbone Theater' is a tale of individual redemption the likes of which you have not encountered before, and one which, for its artistry alone, you will not regret purchasing
Palmer is Daly's main vehicle for self-expression, and to physically distinguish him from the meatheads in the story (Palmer is just as massive, physically), Daly draws his protagonist bald, bespectacled, and with a groin-length white goatee.
While the meatheads drink beer, hunt sharks and womanise day and night, Palmer prefers to play an instrument called the Mongolian chubush, or read books on Luciferianism, Hoodoo and Root Magic.
This information infects his subconscious mind, and in his dreams Palmer is visited by a succession of gnome-like creatures - emissaries of some secret society, seemingly - who dub him "a strange new fighter in a strange new kind of war" and warn that, "Before there is order, there will be more chaos."
After Palmer watches the ghastly events of 9/11 on TV, his inner and outer worlds start collapsing into each other. Palmer begins to lose his grip, and if it wasn't for the distraction of some highly strange scenes, and Daly's hilarious slacker dialogue, this might make for a sad story.
But Daly isn't that interested in overly poignant narrative arcs, or pitiable lead characters, and he drives Palmer onwards, into a matrix of his own personal interests, which include (to use Daly's own description), "culture creation via the media, mind control, psychological operations, media manipulation, political theatre, propaganda, world-view warfare, et cetera".
Highbone, incidentally, is a corruption of "mahabone", a secret Masonic word meaning "the Grand Lodge door opened". Daly sends Palmer through a series of entoptic doorways, each marking a progression in his awareness of life's many conspiracies and illusions.
Palmer is abetted on his journey of enlightenment by an exceedingly odd work friend (Palmer works in a paper mill) called Billy Boy, a scruffy loser who has a "fart tube" sewn into his work overalls.
If Palmer is a deep sceptic, Billy Boy is a straight-up kook, convinced the world is controlled by "intra-terrestrial Jews ... tunnelling Gokturks", who do the opposite of what terrestrial Jews do, eating lots of bacon and grafting, "like, more foreskin", onto their penises.
Events in Palmer's life combine to produce a crescendo of anger, loneliness and confusion, and just when it seems he might lose it (Palmer's flatmate beds his girlfriend, driving Palmer to very nearly rip the man's testicles off with an iron claw), he takes himself in hand and, no longer concerned what others think of him, begins questing for the truth behind world-altering events such as 9/11.
He follows clues left behind by Billy Boy (who has mysteriously vanished), and stumbles upon the cave-like headquarters of the secret society behind the "Mahabone Theatre", a titanic campaign of fakery and disinformation, necessary, "the Bone Master" informs Palmer, to keep humans from suffering the mother of all collective existential meltdowns.
It turns out that the meathead mates, Palmer's girlfriend and even Billy Boy are all tulpas - "thought forms", or illusions. The Bone Master refuses to allow Palmer to pass through the final doorway, warning, "it's windy ... ah ... downright turbulent out there", but doesn't count on Palmer beaning him with a turnip from his "Root Bag".
Palmer makes it through, and falls into a checkerboard vortex. The remaining pages are taken up with what he finds on the other side.
Highbone Theater is a tale of individual redemption the likes of which you have not encountered before, and one which, for its artistry alone, you will not regret purchasing.
Highbone Theater is published by Fantagraphics Books..