Graphic Short Stories, Beautiful Art

Increasingly, it appears that literary journals are opening their doors to graphic short stories, graphic novel and memoir excerpts and good old-fashioned comics. The rise of this trend was underscored at this year’s AWP, when four highly accomplished graphic artists (Matt Madden, Luca DiPiero, Gary Sullivan, and John Dermott-Woods) held the panel “Understanding Comics as Literature.” The audience was filled with teachers and students in MFA programs who wished to learn more about incorporating graphic stories and comics into the creative writing pedagogy.

This is exciting news indeed. Graphic stories are awesome.

For anyone interested in these morsels of bite-size beauty, Mome is a wonderful resource. It is produced by Fantagraphic Books, a publisher which is essentially the mother ship of graphic literature. (Just about every time I pick up a graphic novel and see who published it, the answer is Fantagraphic Books!)

A small editor’s note at the beginning of the journal warns readers that while Mome does take unsolicited submissions, they have very little space in the journal to publish such work. “Put on your patience cap before sending anything,” the editors advise. “You are no doubt going to need it.” Indeed, the competition is stiff for this lovely little mag and the standards are exceptionally high. If you have written a graphic piece and shown it to your friends, and their first response is not, “Wow,” or “Holy god, that is freaking incredible,” it is likely not a good fit for Mome.    

Mome’s fall issue opens with “Blind Date 2,” an adaptation of the TV show in which two people go on a blind date with each other, off-screen cameramen interviewing both people before, after and during. David Shaw paints a bleak portrait of this manufactured romance, using a simple palette of blue-green, white, black, and the occasional yellow-gold in a combination of color washes and ink scribbles. It seems the show’s story line has been recreated here frame by frame. While the romance here is grim, the understated beauty of Shaw’s images is quite uplifting.

Sara Edward-Corbett’s images are much more precise ink drawings. Her story tells of a bird, a mouse, and a handful of worms caught in a love triangle. Corbett’s images are crisp and exact, while the story’s content remains full of whimsy and playfulness. The story may appear like a children’s tale…until you get to the end. Here our heroic worm takes a plunge into danger, never to be saved. Readers with an appetite for the absurd will delight in this pretty little morbid tale.

If I have one complaint about Mome, it is that much of the stories here are actually continuations of stories published in previous issues. Thus while one can appreciate the artwork (and the incredible diversity of the many pieces), it is not always easy to fully understand the stories.

“The White Rhinoceros” by Josh Simmons is one such story. At the outset we see a military officer laying face down in the grass and groaning. As he awakes we learn that he feels “horrible,” his mouth so dry that “It feels like the inside of Shirely Booth’s vagina.” As he wanders around the forest in a head-throbbing daze, he encounters a small black boy who informs him that the name of the place is Racelandia. Indeed, the white rhinoceros’s horn is full of “Racial Magic.”

The characters are wonderfully expressive. I particularly enjoyed the droplets of sweat flying off the army officer’s forehead. Simmons’ aesthetic seems to favor a 1970s look, with bright oranges and yellows, and title lettering that mimics Grateful Dead posters of that era. The surfaces are broad and flat, with puffs of green for treetops and bushes, evoking similar work by Dr. Seuss, although with a great deal more action--a wild chase scene with the heavy stomps of a rhinoceros hot on the characters’ trail ends the story, until it is “to be continued…”