The Narrative Corpse

The Narrative Corpse is a chain story, or comic jam, created by 69 all-star cartoonists in the early-to-mid 1990s. A graphic novel compilation of the result was published in 1995.

Edited by Art Spiegelman and Robert Sikoryak, The Narrative Corpse features contributions from some of the most notable cartoonists of its time from the worlds of underground comix, alternative comics, and European comics (as well as Will Eisner and Mort Walker).

The Narrative Corpse

The concept of The Narrative Corpse was based on Le Cadavre Exquis (see exquisite corpse), a popular game played by André Breton and his surrealist friends to break free from the constraints of rational thought.

Story structure

The creative process was designed as follows: a cartoonist would begin the story with three black-and-white comic-book panels, starring an innocent stick figure named "Sticky". This cartoonist passes his or her three panels on to the next cartoonist, who continues the story in any manner he or she wants with three more panels. The next cartoonist receives only the previous cartoonists's part of the story, and so on.

Although the "story" oscillates without beginning or end, it can be said to start (after some creative editing by Spiegelman and Sikoryak) with the panels done by Drew Friedman, and end with the ones done by Richard McGuire.

Some contributors featured