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I've been reading a lot of short stories lately, Dangerous Visions followed by Borges's Labyrinths, and I got to thinking about the relationship between comics and short fiction. It's obviously not something the mainstream market's geared to - the stories of Superman and Batman are millions of pages long already. Even in the indie sector, there's not much consciously aping the short stories most prose-only writers produce. Perhaps that's because there's more credibility in attempting to produce an equivalent of the novel. Novels are the ones that win literary plaudits. A truly lengthy work in comics, though, the equivalent of a novel, runs to many hundreds of pages. This could be one of the elements that alienates the non-comics reader: "You want to read comics? You'll love Sandman/Invisibles/Preacher. Here's book one. Don't worry, there's plenty more!"
Some ground rules to try and keep this on track. Given that a comics story of 40 pages can be marketed as a graphic novel, I'm going to set an arbitary limit of "less than a normal comic" for short stories. Whether that means less than 28, 24, or 22 is your call. (80-page giants aren't and never were normal comics since you're asking.)
Short stories should contain all the information the reader needs within their pages, which means no atandalone issues of longer series. Let's not assume everyone knows who Green Lantern is, or that Captain America runs the Avengers. They should feature character who appear there and nowhere else, rather than being fragments of a larger narrative.
And they should have something to say. Doesn't have to be much. Much as I loved the Flash fragment in Brendan McCarthy's Solo, it wasn't a story so much as sequential art. My personal definition of a short story is something that has a beginning, middle and end, but makes you feel that it existed before and goes on afterwards. It's just that we only read one snapshot moment.
Okay, some examples. Not trying to be obscure here. There just ain't many short stories about.
Adrian Tomine, Pink Frosting
Tomine's one of the few who's consciously mined short stories as a genre. Sometimes he's too obvious in that, copying Carver a little too much. This two-pager about a brief encounter that turns to violence, possibly imaginary, stayed with me for too long. The pictures and the captions come unstuck from each other and juxtapose beautifully, and horribly. It's in the Sleepwalk collection.
Dan Clowes, The Gold Mommy
The text never says so, but this is obviously a dream. Dreams are hard to do in fiction. Someone once said 'Tell a dream, lose a reader,' and that's usually right. This one, partly because of Clowes's matter-of-fact artwork, the visual cues and connections seamless throughout, works a treat. It's not really about anything except a mood, a feeling of unease and important stuff left undone. It ends, like so many short stories, with a bullet. This one is in the Caricature collection.
We'll Sleep In My Old Room, Chris Ware
Again this story bears the influence of American masters like Carver and Salinger, a slice-of-life with an unmentioned but central detail. It winds around the page as Ware's stuff does, which in this case cushions the reader against the pain and emotion - one sharp moment can't be painful when it's surrounded by so many duller ones. It's about a girl, and a relationship she once had, and the failure of time to move on and it's intensely sad. It's in the McSweeney's Comics Issue.
Alan Moore & Rick Veitch, How Things Work Out
Breaking my own rule slightly because this is ostensibly a Greyshirt story, but you'd never know it. Greyshirt is a minor character tied to a chair with, I think, one line. If you've read this, you'll remember it - the one with four panels a page, each a floor of a building, each a time period. The top floor's the 90s, the next down's the 70s, then the 50s, then the 30s. Whoever called Alan Moore comic's greatest formalist was thinking of this. The story runs every which way, ties up like you wouldn't believe and is affecting on an emotional and a structural level. It's in Tomorrow Stories, either #2 or Book One.
The Hollow Circus, Peter Milligan & Brendan McCarthy
If you've not read this, you have to. The best Milligan/McCarthy collaboration ever, not to forget lettering by the late great Tom Frame. It's eight black-and-white collage pages, each a collection of surreal images, and a story that connects them all about a deformed boy and what he did that was wrong. It's the story that made me think there should be more short stories in comics, and it's utterly superb. To quote:
"JOSEPH THOUGHT THAT HIS WORLD MUST BE SO SMALL, WITH SO FEW THINGS IN IT, THAT EVERYTHING HAD TO BE MORE THAN JUST ITSELF. THE THINGS IN HIS ROOM WERE LIKE PEOPLE WHO DID A HARD DAY'S WORK AS A SHOE, FOR INSTANCE, AND THEN HAD A PART-TIME JOB AS A BED OR A BUS, JUST TO MAKE ENDS MEET."
Sadly this is one of the harder to find, in Atomeka's A1 anthology, the first issue.
There are others but I'm knackered. I'd love to hear suggestions, because there must be loads I've missed. Please. |
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