After finishing volume 3 of the Jeff Lemire series Sweet Tooth, I had a thought about apocalyptic comics and their relation to the decompressed storytelling that’s all over the place these days.
These damn kids and their lack of compression.
Because I feel like I can talk about it more openly without spoiling anything, I’m going to talk about it in the context of the Walking Dead instead of Sweet Tooth, purely because you should really give Sweet Tooth a try, and I feel like if you haven’t already gotten into the Walking Dead yet…sorry.
(By the way, if you want to learn what this decompression stuff is all about, read the awesome article here)
The Walking Dead has a tendency to oscillate between very fast-paced, intense storytelling where a main character might be shot one minute, then another main character the next, then possibly someone gets axed in the head. A couple issues later, we might get a long, drawn-out discussion of who the REAL monsters are.
The thing that I’ve noticed is this: As the physical environment contracts, the story decompresses, gets slower. An example in Walking Dead is the time that the characters spend in the prison. When they are locked away and safe, they spend a lot more time talking and discussing, less time dying and decapitating.
As the environment expands, for example in the moments as the characters flee the prison, the story becomes more compressed, a lot of shit happening in a short time.
I guess it’s kind of a no-brainer when you think about it. Say you’ve got two pit bulls who want to do nothing more than kill each other. Put them in a gigantic office building and you’ve got time on your hands. Put them on a basketball court and we’ll see action right off. Put them in a refrigerator box and there will be nothing BUT action.
The thing that bothers me most about decompression, because as a trade paperback reader it has less effect, is that sometimes it becomes difficult to establish a sense of time in a book.
Which brings us to Sweet Tooth.
Sweet Tooth shares a lot of similarities with Walking Dead in tone and the fact that we’re talking about a post-apocalyptic situation. But what Walking Dead does a little better is let me know about how much time has passed. Sometimes it’s clumsy, like, “Can you fucking believe we be in this bullshit for 8 months and 17 days?” or something along those lines. But I can live with it.
Sweet Tooth, with its accordion-like story, doesn’t help out as much. Could be months, a year, maybe three hours. I really don’t know, and it doesn’t seem to be too important.
I can live with it to an extent, but the passage of time, which is fairly unimportant when you are IN the apocalyptic situation, is of importance when you are READING ABOUT it. In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, we don’t get much exactness in anything, but we do see the seasons change a bit and time passes in terms of food consumed, how desperate things are getting, and the aging of the characters.
I guess it’s just something to think about, how important time is in these apocalyptic stories despite the fact that I can’t imagine it would matter to the characters at all.