Taking FLIGHT

I have always liked short stories.

I don’t know what that says about me as a reader. Do I perhaps enjoy their ability to get right into the meat of the story? Is it that I can finish a whole story in one sitting without having to put it down, thus breaking the spell that a good tale casts over me, the reader? Do I have some deep-seeded fear of commitment?

In honesty, it’s a little bit of all those reasons (minus that last one) and one other: the short form allows the writer a greater ability to experiment. Unlike long form, they aren’t tied to their creation for hundreds of pages or multiple storylines…or at least, they needn’t be. So it should come as no surprise that when I came across the Flight series, I was hooked.

If you enjoy comics or graphic novels, then may already be familiar with Flight. Edited by Kazu Kibuishi, Flight collects short stories told in the comic format. Flight’s brilliance is a result of the sometimes vastly different styles of storytelling that take place in each volume. Whole stories are offered up sans words, allowing the actions and expressions of the characters to fill in. Other times, you are presented with what you might call snapshots of a character or a life or an event.

Some stories are serialized (The Saga of Rex); still others are excerpted or feature characters from an established series (Delilah Dirk: The Aqueduct, Flight 5). Many are offered as stand-alones.

I could go on and on, but instead of that, I’m going to offer you a few of my favorites across a couple volumes of Flight and why I think they stand out. If you’re familiar with the series, I’d love to hear about your favorites as well-just talk them up in the comments section.

“The Saga of Rex” by Michel Gagné
The Saga of Rex is difficult to explain. It is the story of a small fox (or fox-like creature) who, after sacrificing itself to save another life, is reborn on an alien world. At least, that’s what it’s about so far. Writer and artist Michel Gagné has stated that these serialized stories are chapters to his “200+ pages work-in-progress graphic novel.”

If this is true, then The Saga of Rex might be a graphic novel phenomenon in the making. Would I dare to say it’s on the level of Bone? I might. It’s tough to draw that comparison having only read a handful of chapters, but the series feels well on its way.

Artistically, The Saga of Rex uses soft, bright colors and animation-like drawings that give the panels an almost playful appearance, but there’s very little about Rex’s adventures to this point that could be considered playful. Give Rex credit for imagination, he is reborn with a crystal in his head after hatching from an egg to a world filled with seal-cum-slug shape shifting creatures, enormous floating brain things, mysterious caves with cave drawings, and that’s only within the first couple chapters.

You smell that? It smells like a fantasy-adventure that bears watching to me.

“The Forever Box” by Sarah Mensinga
Sarah Mensinga’s The Forever Box is a tale of innocence, loss, and ultimately rebirth. In fact, the rebirth metaphor is almost literal as a character gradually withdraws from her life by squirreling away into a box (the aforementioned Forever Box) and is then buried inside the box, only to emerge later to a new outlook on her life…or did she?

The story is narrated as a flashback by our heroine. She begins by telling us about her earlier life with her two brothers in Toronto. She was living a pretty hum-drum life, when her bargain-hunting brothers bring home an old chest from an estate sale. Inside the chest, she finds a piece of paper detailing the supposed true nature of the chest: it is a forever box, meant to keep its inhabitant alive and untouched by the hands of time for as long as they are sealed inside.

It seems like a child’s story, until her brothers are killed in a car accident, then, grief stricken, she seeks solitude inside the forever box. And here is where we must decide if the rest of the story is literally true or a work of imagination revealing an emotional truth. It is difficult to discuss this any further without giving away the ending, but spend a little time on the final two pages (the last one especially) and you’ll begin to see that there are more layers to this story than at first there appear to be.

“So Close, So Far” by Bannister
Bannister (or Nicolas Seigneret)’s So Close, So Far is by far my favorite entry in any of the Flight volumes thus far. It is not an epic adventure, nor is it a commentary on society or an exploration of deep-seeded feelings.

But it is grand.

So Close, So Far runs only a handful of pages and features rich, Fall-like colors and artistic styling caught somewhere between manga and what we Americans might consider traditional animation. The story is about a brief encounter between a young man and young woman on a bus. They do not speak to one another, sharing only brief eye contact and smiles until one of them must get off the bus.

That’s the story on paper, but the real story is what happens behind what is presented. We’ve all been in these characters shoes, we know the waters they are navigating, these brief encounters with others where we feel as though we could be on the tip of something greater. And maybe we find out more, and maybe we don’t. This story isn’t concerned with that, instead it’s content to show us a simple pleasure of shared experience and a smile.

The old adage goes, sometimes less is more. Under Bannister’s pen, sometimes less is grand.