He Becomes Who Kills Him - A Horror Story by Matt Larsen and Zander Cannon

Short stories that hold substance are hard to pull off in the medium of comics. It takes many many pages to build an effective story when each page can be read in a matter of seconds. To get any nuance out of character or story is difficult to do in a story that can be read in a matter of minutes.

I bought this mini from Zander Cannon in San Diego. It is a twelve page story in a five inch by five inch black and white photocopied pamphlet, but its diminutive size belies the amount of story that the author's manage to tell. It helps that the pages are packed with nine panels each, allowing for a breadth that one might not expect.

Not that it's necessary for the impetus to be anything other than it is a story that the authors needed to tell, but I have no idea why this story was produced. I'm simply impressed that a story this strong could be thought of as only being worthy of a photocopied mini. It story held sway over me after initial reading in a way that I didn't expect. I am aware of mini-comics capable of depth, just that they are rarely a one-shot, and are usually built for length from the beginning.

The subtitle, "a horror story," indicates that a simple spine-tingle was the goal, but I found that the level of technique allowed for an appreciation through rereadings. The first thing I returned to was the seemingly unrelated prologue that comprised page one. A simple three panel shot of a man killed by a scorpion, I forgot the introduction after a page or two of unrelated story, but the end of the tale brings the metaphor into focus.

It seems as though it was drawn to size, based on the fact that the art is looser and has a bold black line that indicates a lack of size reduction. His art has always had a confident brush line, even in the early years of my awareness when his work was a little less polished, and he doesn't sacrifice that here in pages that look like they could be drawn with a brush pen. This art (or reproduction) style doesn't hamper the storytelling, and in fact helps bring the immediacy of the story to the reader. Cannon holds to his nine panel grid for the whole story, save opening and closing splash panels, even using reverse white on black text panels as transitional captions rather than using a small text panel in the corner as is custom. Cannon frequently uses this to add to the story flow, achieving a cadence that breaks up the nine-panel pages to provide a bit of variety. He also uses the claustrophobic panels to great story affect by allowing them to inform the suspense that the story provides. The panels that consist of even several words of dialogue basically become talking head panels, but this allows the open panels to feel even more open.

The story hits its mark if it's goal is as simple as the subtitle indicates, and it is so well done, that it achieves the rare level of being worthy of rereading, a goal that all authors aspire to, and so seldom achieve.