Longshot Comics by Shane Simmons is at one extreme end of the comic book artistic spectrum. In Scott McCloud’s book Understanding Comics, McCloud talked about the different types of art in comic books. From realistic to shapes to words are the corners of the art triangle. Longshot Comics deals deep inbetween words and shapes, by presenting all the characters as dots. That’s right every character is represented by a small dot. And to make sure the dot doesn’t get lost in the panel, the book is composed of 24 pages of 160 panels. Each page has 16 rows of 10 columns of panels each of which has 1 or more small dots representing people. Now if you figure that a regular comic book has about 6 panels per page. this 24 page book is the equivalent of 32 regular 20 page comic books. Now is it worth reading?

The book is advertised as being about the life of Roland Gethers from his birth to his death 89 years later. The book shows Roland born into a family of twelve kids, he attends boarding school, gets married, goes to war, comes back and has his own family and finally dies. The concept is hilarious, but it wouldn’t be worth reading if the story or writing wasn’t upto the task. The book owes a lot to British comedy (the Monty Python type insanity as well as loads of dry humor). This story combined with the brilliant concept makes this a wonderful comic to read.

Simmons also wrote a sequel about the life of Gether’s grandson Bradley as well as a forgettable 5 issue series about talking money called Money Talks. Neither of the Longshot Comics were ever collected and can really only be purchased from Simmons’ website. He’s selling the two books for only $4 each (or $12 for the English translation of the German translation of the first book and no that doesn’t make sense to me either). Highly recommended.