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.
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.
The idea was first conceived of in May 1990, as a project for Raw magazine. To expedite the project, two strands were started simultaneously, one in New York City by project co-editor R. Sikoryak, the second in London by Savage Pencil. Nevertheless, the project kept growing (outliving RAW itself, which ceased publication in 1991) until it was forcibly brought to an end five years after its inception.
In order to bridge the two strands, R. Sikoryak's original opening panels were cut, although he later drew the oddly-shaped "splash panel" that now begins the narrative. Spiegelman himself drew the three panels that link Strand 1 to Strand 2 (bridging the contributions of Joe Sacco and Savage Pencil),[2] while Richard McGuire was brought in to link Strand 2 back to Strand 1 (bridging the contributions of Carol Swain and Drew Friedman).[3]
