From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Daşetməsi
This article documents an ongoing underground series. For other comic adaptations, see Adaptations by medium.
Daşetməsi (literally The Breaking; a title evoking both fracture and interruption) is an experimental graphic novel series created by an anonymous or pseudonymous Baku-based collective and hand-printed in limited runs since 2015. The work adopts a fragmented, recursively-layered narrative structure that treats the Beach Surgery cycle not as a coherent story but as a problem of identity recursion, temporal slippage, and the instability of character across loops.
Unlike canonical adaptations that foreground Leif and Katita as protagonists, Daşetməsi focuses on the Mechanic—a minor character in the source material—and proposes that the Mechanic may be Leif in a different iteration of the cycle, that across multiple loops of the story, the same consciousness inhabits different bodies and social roles.
Artistic Method
The series employs a distinctive hybrid visual language:
- Photorealistic pencil-work (precise, high-detail) appears in scenes of apparent stability: the garage, the police station, the service counter.
- Heavily abstracted line-work (nearly illegible, expressionistic) appears whenever identity fractures or multiplies. In these passages, the boundary between figure and background collapses; it becomes difficult to distinguish person from place.
- Persian miniature-painting composition: pages sometimes adopt the ornamental, densely-layered spatial logic of classical Persian art, compressing multiple moments and viewpoints into a single image. This reflects the post-Soviet Azerbaijani context: Baku has long occupied a cultural intersection between Russian, Turkish, and Persian traditions.
Speech bubbles frequently shift languages mid-conversation: Azerbaijani becomes Russian; speech becomes mathematical notation; notation becomes image. The reader is expected to experience partial illegibility as a feature, not a flaw—the reading becomes an act of interpretation and refusal.
Plot: The Mechanic's Multiplicity
Volume I: Identity and the Service Station introduces the Mechanic as a figure at an automated service station at the edge of a grey, semi-industrial city. He repairs vehicles. A police officer arrives asking questions about suspicious activity; the Mechanic and the Officer discuss the case. Gradually, it becomes unclear whether they are two people or one person seen from different angles.
Margin notes (in an unknown hand, possibly added post-publication) suggest: "The mechanic is Leif. The officer is also Leif. They are the same person at different points in the cycle. He does not know it yet.")
Volume II: The Mechanic Splits opens with a three-panel sequence that becomes iconic:
- Panel 1 (rotated 45 degrees clockwise): The Mechanic at his workbench. Detailed pencil. Speech in Azerbaijani.
- Panel 2 (vertical, centered): The police officer at a desk. Same level of realism. Speech in Russian.
- Panel 3 (rotated 45 degrees counter-clockwise): A third figure—ambiguous, half-drawn—in a mirror. The image is partially redacted with hand-drawn black marker, as if censored or obscured after printing.
The three panels, if overlaid, occupy the same space. All three figures have the same scar on their right shoulder.
As the narrative progresses, the three versions of the Mechanic begin to interact with one another. They argue. They offer contradictory accounts of the same events. One remembers the service station; one remembers flying; one remembers exile. Their speech bubbles overlap and contradict. Readers cannot determine which voice is "true."
The Mechanic (version unclear): I remember the wings. Or I remember refusing them. Or I remember—— Daşetməsi, Volume II, page 31
The line is never completed; the page cuts off mid-sentence.
Volume III: Mylar's Question expands the scope to include the tale of Mylar and Rico the Architect, reimagining it as a blueprint for identity multiplication: if Rico can build cities inside other bodies, what prevents one person from building alternate selves inside the folds of a single consciousness?
The final pages of Volume III show the Mechanic standing before a mirror that contains not a reflection but three separate images—three versions of himself, each in a different colored ink (blue, red, black). The caption reads (in transliterated Azerbaijani): "Which one is the original? Which one is the copy? Which one is the breaking?"
The issue ends abruptly. The final page is blank except for a date and a Telegram channel name.
Publication History and Lost Volumes
Volumes I and II circulated widely among Baku's underground comic communities and at the annual Caspian Comic Fair. Both have been scanned and archived in restricted-access fandom forums.
Volume IV: The Fourth Loop was promised for 2020 but has never appeared. Multiple rumors circulate:
- The creators Gülşah & Fuad abandoned the project.
- The work was suppressed by ██████ [citation needed].
- The manuscript was completed but intentionally withheld—a final refusal of closure mirroring the core structural glitch of the source material.
- A bootleg manuscript circulates in encrypted channels; its authenticity is disputed [citation needed].
Each printed volume of Daşetməsi includes margin notes in varying handwriting—attributed to different editors or contributors, sometimes contradicting the main narrative or adding supplementary information. Scholars debate whether these notes are authorial intent, reader annotation that was photographed and reproduced, or deliberate additions by the printer.
Reception and Theoretical Significance
Daşetməsi has become canonical to franchise discussions of identity recursion, the glitch as narrative instability, and the mechanics of adaptation as fragmentation. A 2021 essay in the journal Adaptation Studies Quarterly argues that the comic's refusal of legibility is itself a form of faithfulness to the source material: by making the reader unable to determine which version of the story is "correct," the comic instantiates the unresolvable gap between the two halves at the level of visual form.
The work is frequently cited in theoretical discussions of post-Soviet aesthetics, Azerbaijani identity and cultural hybridity, and comics as a medium of multiplicity. It has also become a touchstone for franchise theorists interested in the proposal that the cycle cannot be broken, only inhabited differently.
The mystery of Volume IV—whether it exists, whether it will ever be published—has become part of the work's canonical ambiguity. Some fans argue that the absence of the final volume is the point: that the cycle must remain open, the Fourth Loop forever unarrived.