Dave Baker's Mary Tyler Moorehawk Review: A Genre-Bending Masterpiece

Dave Baker's Mary Tyler MooreHawk is out today, and it's one of the most exciting things to hit the American comics market in a long time. Baker's latest graphic novel is an incredibly ambitious work that blends comics with prose, bends reality to its will, and holds a funhouse mirror up to the reader, providing an insightful glimpse into the mindset of modern fandom. If you don't know Baker, Mary Tyler MooreHawk provides a complex, captivating, and dense introduction to his oeuvre -- one that rewards repeat readings and careful scrutiny, while still being entertaining if you're skimming along. If you know Dave Baker—whether from formalist exercises like Shitty Watchmen, character-driven comics like Everyone is Tulip, or from his pop culture podcast Deep Cuts—you will instantly recognize his fingerprints all over Mary Tyler MooreHawk. 

If projects like The Forest Hills Bootleg Society have marked Baker as a talent worth keeping and eye on, Mary Tyler MooreHawk is the exact thing you should have been looking for. Its big creative swings and distinctive voice mark Baker as a master—and masterfully offbeat—storyteller. It feels a little early in his career to call something Baker's "magnum opus," but Baker has been in the industry for about as much time as Alan Moore had when he wrote Watchmen—and like Watchmen, Mary Tyler MooreHawk feels not only like a magnum opus, but also a manifesto—interesting itself with exploring virtually every theme and big idea Baker has expressed through his work up to this point.

As with Moore, it's clear that this first "magnum opus" won't be the end of the road for Baker, who has been working on the graphic novel for five years in the background, while writing licensed comics for IDW and original titles for Dark Horse and Simon and Schuster, often with collaborator Nicole Gioux, all while self-publishing his pop culture pastiche Halloween Boy, which feels like something of a companion piece to Mary Tyler MooreHawk.

If you have not yet read one of Baker's series, don't be intimidated; Mary Tyler MooreHawk touches on the themes that most interest Baker in a way that makes it feel like a satisfying culmination of his prior work, but it easily stands on its own as one of the best original graphic novels you're likely to read this year.

While it strains against the constraints of narrative in a way that spills over into "meta" pretty early on, Mary Tyler MooreHawk's simple, compelling art style, its recognizable archetypes, and rollicking pace make it easy to understand even as you start to realize that the cartoonist behind the book shares a name with more than one central figure in the story. How do they all come together? That's just one of the mysteries contained in its pages.

Mary Tyler MooreHawk tells, at face value, two stories: the first is the adventures of a "not-quite-teen adventurer" (Mary Tyler MooreHawk), whose adventures are in the vein of Jonny Quest or Nancy Drew (albeit with a cosmic twist). The second is the story of Dave Baker, a journalist obsessed with a short-lived TV show that was made based on the Mary Tyler MooreHawk comic book. He is, in turn, trying to track down a different Dave Baker – this one a reclusive cartoonist who created the original comic on which the show was based.

Both the comics and prose pages are rife with footnotes, pulling the reader's attention away from straightforward narrative moments to distract them with context and commentary that ranges from important and compelling to nonsensical and indulgent on the part of at least one of Baker's in-universe doppelgangers. The result not only plays with the book's pacing, but serves to give the reader important context clues about the creators of the art they're reading – even if, by reading Mary Tyler MooreHawk, you're reading it second- or third-hand.

Expect this to end up on plenty of college syllabuses, because its approach to the medium, its approach to storytelling, and the themes explored within the work are all well worth a deep dive. Before writing this review, I've read Mary Tyler MooreHawk three times,and it feels like I've barely scratched the surface of all the little rewards the book has to offer.

In interviews, Baker has cited Infinite Jest and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension as influences. Those two works are wildly different projects that both played with not just their audience's perception of reality, but the very structure of the medium in which the stories were told. It's safe to say that Mary Tyler MooreHawk fits comfortably into that same general description, and I would argue that Baker should feel comfortable shelving it next to those works.

One important suggestion: If at all possible, buy or read this book in print. Both the art and prose are packed with details, dense, and often so small that it's difficult to get everything out of it while reading on a screen. Mary Tyler MooreHawk, like Will Eisner's The Spirit or Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, takes each two-page spread as a wide-open canvas to go as wild as its author can. Each page can be a stand-alone work of art – and often one with complexity and important details that are more obvious to the eye when looking at it holistically, rather than in "panel view."  

Mary Tyler MooreHawk's unique look and its narrative oddities might pose a barrier to entry for some, but it's well worth pushing past your initial misgivings. The book is challenging, funny, dense, and enjoyable. It's also somehow both incredibly self-indulgent and equally disciplined, since any time Baker wanders off to explore a narrative cul-de-sac, it can be explained away as the result of either of two unrealiable narrators in the form of other Dave Bakers further down the rabbit hole, feeding into the subtext of the work. Put simply, Mary Tyler MooreHawk is a masterpiece. It is the kind of graphic novel that will be talked about, pored over, and re-examined for years to come, and deservedly so.

Published by Top Shelf

On February 13, 2024

Written by Dave Baker

Art and colors by Dave Baker