Max Riffner

The Parlor

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To Decompress or Not?

I’ve been struggling most of yesterday evening with storytelling in comics; the trend for the last few years has been decompression, where you spread the story out. This works particularly well for my style of storytelling since I am naturally more cinematic. The downside to this is that were one to pick up a single issue of a comic, you wouldn’t find much story. In fact, you’d find that you would breeze through the book briskly wondering what you had bothered to spend your two dollars on, more than likely. Decompression works well in long form work, like graphic novels.

I’m writing a new 28 page comic (more on the details later) which I had originally planned to do as a graphic novel. I had also planned on handling the illustration chores. I have an artist who is perfect for the story, but doesn’t want to get tied up into a long form work (mainly since he is doing his own long form work). Some might see it as a compromise; I see it as a chance to write a single comic issue with meat on it. It will be dense. There is a lot ideas I want to cram into this one story, and the more I think about it, I only really need one story to tell it. It doesn’t need to be the sprawling epic I had planned on, but a tight, minimal package that explores my thoughts on the theme.

Oh, this will be my first horror comic, also.

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