This hypercomic by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey and collaborators is a unique and remarkable piece. Read from right to left, the main story is a simple one--a man walks from his house to a store to buy milk. But one soon begins to wonder if that is indeed the main story, for this comic consists of several storylines all intertwined. For nearly each step of the man's walk to the store, additional comic panels above and below show seemingly unrelated events occurring somewhere else in the world at that moment. A chaotic group of people running past, a beggar on the street, a museum in the background--the tales of each of these, and more, are expanded upon as the man walks by.
My feelings about this piece are somewhat conflicted. On the one hand, I love the creativity of the comic. It seems as though the artist couldn't make up his mind which story to tell, so he just decided to go ahead and write them all in, with only a single panel connecting each side story to the main one. It's an incredible accomplishment, but it almost feels messy and more complicated than any story has to be. Perhaps if the side stories had more of an impact on the man walking to the store, it would make more sense, but at times I found myself wondering why a certain element was chosen to focus on--elements like a fly that the man stepped on, or a bottle discarded by the aforementioned beggar. There didn't seem to be much of a point.
However, if the point was to prove the possibility of creating a comic such as this one; if it was to demonstrate the usefulness of technology to create comics of infinite size and scope, impossible to accomplish through more traditional methods; if it was to comment on the sheer vastness of the world around us, and provoke thoughts of how a simple action can begin or continue a chain of events, whether we are aware of it or not--then well done, Goodbrey and company. Well done.
No comments:
Post a Comment