Longshot Comics 1: The Long and Unlearned Life of Roland Gethers
Longshot Comics 2: The Failed Promise of Bradley Gethers
Published by: Slave Labor Graphics – 1995, 1997
Written and Illustrated by: Shane Simmons
Each of the two twenty-four-page issues of Longshot Comics are graphic novels in their own right.
Longshot Comics—not to be confused with the Marvel Comics character “Longshot”—was a two-issue miniseries, or two standalone issues, depending on vantage, published by Slave Labor Graphics starting in 1995, with two years passing between the release of issues one and two. The reason for this delay becomes self-evident after reading the comics.
Each issue consists of three-thousand-eight-hundred-forty panels spanning an unlikely twenty-four pages. That’s one-hundred-sixty panels per page. If one were to spend one second on each panel, each issue would take just over an hour to read.
One might wonder, never having seen a page of one-hundred-sixty panels before, how one could fit all that art onto one page. The answer is, apparently, not to. Writer/artist Shane Simmons reduced the art to such a degree of minimalism that each centimeter-square panel features only a multi-word utterance with a line pointing to one of several dots—whichever happens to be speaking—each dot representing a character. The characters are sometimes distinct, such as one character’s wife being a slightly larger dot, but usually are indistinguishable and are only imbued with an identity via their accompanying dialogue.
One might also wonder what would take so long to make a comic with essentially no pictures. To paraphrase Simmons in explaining the lengthy and laborious production process: making three-thousand-eight-hundred-forty of anything will take a long time. Plus, according to Simmons, before tackling issue two, he had to forget how much work it was to make issue one.
Aside from the novelty of a dense, nearly picture-less, comic, Longshot Comics is an endearing farce.
Spanning approximately eighty-nine years, three wars, four professions, half a dozen children, and a couple of grandchildren, the first issue, subtitled “The Long and Unlearned Life of Roland Gethers” opens with the birth of our eponymous protagonist and ends with his funeral.
The second issue, subtitled “The Failed Promise of Bradley Gethers,” spans another seventy-three years and follows the life of Roland’s grandson, Bradley as he goes through school, the military, and a failed career as an actor.
The second issue is, arguably, the better of the two. It is funnier, and the satire is more frequent and more incisive. Where the first follows the orphaned Roland Gethers as he fumbles his way through life from a solitary childhood to an unlearned adulthood—as a rather unformed character whom is more often the victim of circumstance than the master of his own destiny—the second follows both the life of his smarter son and grandson as well as Roland himself—as a more distinctly developed character—in his more opinionated, ornery, old-age.
Simmons’ writing is clever, funny, endearing, largely inoffensive, insightful, and entertaining.
The stories are long and have many ups and downs and manage to create distinct characters without the aid of the art to distinguish them. Each of the main characters has a life filled with many changes—profession, relationships, hardships, and mishaps.
The understated humor that weaves through the narratives brings Simmons’ little dots to life and spans from the tame to the slightly risqué. In one exchange in issue two, a character is introduced as “Dorothy,” or “Dot” for short, and Bradley Gethers then says to her, “You look like a Dot” (insert rim-shot). At the other end of the spectrum, the young Roland Gethers, upon marriage, discovers that neither he nor his new wife understand what sex is or where babies come from. Thus, upon completing a botched experiment in intercourse—not properly understanding the anatomy at play—the two immediately rush to check the cabbage patch and chimney for a child delivered by stork.
Longshot Comics infrequently has a somewhat salacious sense of humor—with one or two humorous sexual misadventures per issue—usually resorting to sufficient vagary in describing sexual matters that a younger reader might be left completely confounded and ignorant of the specifics—perhaps due in part to the utter lack of visual depiction of the acts being referenced. Longshot Comics is therefore almost appropriate for a general audience but is unlikely to offend an older audience.
Oddly, the art cannot be faulted. Though it is merely a grand total of seven-thousand-six-hundred-eighty identical squares and a few thousand dots, it is almost a postmodern, minimalist joke, and for that reason accomplishes what it sets out to do quite well. Is it visually engaging in the absence of the dialogue? No. But, in a weird way, one might find themselves purchasing this book specifically because of the art. I know I did.
The reading, however, is sometimes hampered by the lack of illustration because putting the book down after reading a page or two—which is almost required due to its length—can leave one struggling to remember precisely what had transpired prior to the break since there are no visual cues or narration to quickly remind the reader of what has already happened.
Recommendations:
Making recommendations for fans of Longshot Comics is difficult due to its uniqueness. One comic that comes to mind, however, for fans of the art in Longshot Comics is issue six of the Marvel comic book Alpha Flight from 1984. Titled “Snowblind,” this issue is famous for a five-page sequence that lacks conventional images. It features a superhero in a white costume fighting a white-fur-covered adversary in the middle of a snowstorm. This is depicted as a series of plain white panels embellished with captions, word- and thought-balloons, and sound effects.
Two other comics suggested for fans of Longshot Comics’ art are Floyd Farland: Citizen of the Future and issues sixteen and seventeen of Matt Wagner’s Grendel.
Floyd Farland: Citizen of the Future was the first comic published by comics-darling Chris Ware, best known for Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. The art, though representational, is built of very simple, stark, black and white geometric shapes which are slightly sloppy and sometimes ambiguous. The story is essentially a dystopian farce centering around a case of mistaken identity, occurring in a futuristic world governed by its own logic.
Issues sixteen and seventeen of Matt Wagner’s Comico comics series Grendel similarly cram numerous square panels onto each page in a uniform grid—in this case (usually) twenty-five approximately-one-inch panels per page, with the exception of a prologue, epilogue, and the action-filled denouement which required larger accommodations—totaling nearly a thousand panels in 45 pages. There is, however, art—which is, at times, even somewhat inventive in how it conveys the narrative—but to accommodate that art, the dialogue occurs beneath each panel, rather than within. The riveting story follows a police detective investigating a conspiracy of bribes concerning dirty cops and diamond sellers.
Brian Bigelow
October 3, 2018
