A Review of One-Story Chapbook Volume 182: DRAWN ONWARD, a star-crossed comic by Matt Madden (August 11, 2013)

This is either a heavily illustrated story or it is a comic book with an especially heavy load of story.  I think that this attempt is an important first step.  In the last several years, I have begun adding graphics to my own stories and, this year, to my latest novel.  It is a yoking together of two art forms which was often done in years past, but abandoned in the last half century. 

I remember my chagrin as a youth when the books began to have fewer and fewer pictures, and finally none at all—perhaps not even a single one on the cover.  As we know, a good story assembles a series of pictures within the mind of the reader and, if the word count is long enough, then perhaps a world.

An example of the other side of this coin might be the evocative painting of Monet’s wife on a garden bench.  It does not require a strenuous effort to imagine the story of Camille from this.  Monet has two characters, two plot devices and a place.

Just why do we see a comic book, in place of the usual 8,000 word short story?  Is it a manifestation of insecurity about modern fiction?  If this intuition is correct, then it is ironic because the comic finally fails for the very same reason that modern fiction often does.  Drawings cannot save it.  They might make a failure richer, but they cannot replace a failure of imagination.  If the plane is going to crash, playing movies for the passengers is not enough.

Still and all, it was a worthy first effort.  But in the end, there was no story.  It does us no good to redefine a story.  It does us no good to shift responsibilities to the reader.  A story must have an arc raised by a problem.  The arc must have a shape we know and the problem must have a name we recognize.  If Odysseus had stayed with Calypso, it might have been a situation, but it never would have been an epic poem.

I shall explain these 32 pages and their 87 frames.  First, there is both narration as well as dialogue shown in the frame in the conventional manner.  This is the story of a man and woman in their twenties.  They live in a city large enough to have a subway.

It both begins and ends with an artist’s storyboard.  At the beginning, there is a hook advising us that this comic is a “double suicide note.”  It tells us that there is a span of three weeks.  It tells us that the drawings were done to keep from going crazy and also that these drawings have now caused some unnamed great harm.

At the end, we are, once again, told three things.  We read of the artist’s disappointment that she failed to capture the other character’s point of view.  She had told us only her own.  The end also tells us to read the story over again while focused on the clue that the ending of the story is only the halfway point.  Finally, this piece loses all sense of dramatic narrative and crashes into an abstraction.  The author tells us that, while the beginning of her story is the end of his, the beginning of his story is the end of her.  Even as an abstraction that is fuzzy.  End of her or end of her story?  And why talk about the end of her at the end when you began it with the promise of a double suicide?

This can only work if the story line becomes a story ellipse.  And, if it is an ellipse, then both characters are manifestations of the same person.  Just a guess.

In between the beginning and the end, there are two halves.  First, he stalks her around the city and in the subway.  In the second half, she stalks him.  In either case, one runs while the other pledges love.  There is no motivation for any of this and so the reader takes the characters to simply be a “type.”  This turns the story into a fable or a parable or whatever you want to call a story which relies for its existence upon its themes.   Except the writer does not write the end.  The writer does not write the themes.  He sends you back into the story to fetch them for yourself.

In this piece, our author actually tells the reader to go back and do his work for him.  I call such a thing “creative ambiguity.”  However, as powerful an effect as the shock of recognition is, the storyline should not gamble everything on every reader finding whatever it is the writer can’t show him or won’t show him.  When you confuse the reader, you draw a screen across the storyline.  As soon as you force him to hunt around, you’ll lose energy and you’ll lose him. 

That is asking too much 99 times out of 100.  But isn’t that the problem with fiction?  Doesn’t modern fiction “write off” the other 99 readers as stupid or lazy?  Isn’t that the dirty, unmentioned secret of it all?  Remember the Faulkner interview in the Paris Review?  Remember what Faulkner had the balls to actually say?

Lack of plot is often a failure of nerve.  Or, maybe the writer just plain wants to get the damn thing over with.  The latter is too abject to contemplate and so let us assume the former. 

The author worries that showing us the truth of it will not “work.”  So, the writer lapses into creative ambiguity.  Flash fiction often does this simply because the word count is too small.  But here, these 87 drawings were supposed to fully supplement the text.  The word must become flesh.  It must dwell among us.  It must be concrete.  Drama is the Greek word for the deed.  There must be deeds.  By their deeds, we shall know them.  Characters must actually do something.  Things must happen.  It is not enough to simply describe an expressive face.  It is not enough for the place to be evocative.  Creative ambiguity can work, but often when it does, it does in poetry.
It is also very likely that this is not the failure of the concept or of nerve or of dilligence . This may merely be a demonstration of the difficulty of the story-creation-process.  I use this metaphor:  When I write, I have to get all the paint out of the can and up on the wall.  Usually, when I finish, I discover that much of the paint that I thought I'd laid up on the wall, instead remains in the can.

No, I did not hate the piece.  It was an interesting attempt.  Kudos to Madden and to One-Story for getting the ball rolling on this way of doing things.  This could be the start of something good (an occasional something, done occasionally).

Offered by the booktender of the GOOD STORY Saloon

September 2, 2013