Review: Cyclopedia Exotica

Cyclopedia Exotica by Aminder Dhaliwal

Drawn & Quarterly (2021)

I bought and read Aminder Dhaliwal’s Cyclopedia Exotica on New Year’s Day 2023. It had been on my radar for some time, so I was happy to pick it up, but I’d be lying if I said my expectations of the book were more than middling. I thought it would be nothing more than a collection of entertaining comics based around the premise of cyclopses being real. Let me say first that this book is much more than this reductive premise, and I absolutely love it. I assumed at first that the title was merely a cheeky play-on-words, but it actually points to the framework of this book, which presents as an encyclopedia on cyclopses in the fictional world in which they exist as a way to quickly bring the reader into this world. But the book keenly guesses that this is not the best way for it to tell its stories or explore its themes and pulls one of the greatest moves I’ve ever seen in comics, using a character discussed in the encyclopedia to step out of the book, and move us into her life and the lives of the other characters that make up this book. What follows is a wonderfully wavering, knotting string of storylines that explores othering and the treatment of minorities in a way that at first seems blatant but which grows into a very rich and detailed nuance. Finally, while a lot of graphic novels have the tendency for their “graphic” element supersedes the “novel,” Cyclopedia Exotica rises to the promise of the genre and surpasses it, showing an awareness of the form and what can happen when words and pictures marry so elegantly.