Dogwelder: Redux

There are a few formats that dominate the landscape when it comes to American comics: the strip, the serial, and the long form graphic novel. The serialized story, in comics, is descended from the pulp magazine, which published genre prose, both stand alone stories and multi-part segments. Video killed the short story in prose, and now short prose has been reduced to teaching tool and stepping stone for young writers. This didn't occur in comics, perhaps because respect for comics in the 1950's had nowhere to go but up, or because comics weren't consistently published in novel format until the 80's. In this decade, comics have both critical acclaim and a popular novel length format, and the profits from the major publishers of the 32-page comic books suggest that the end of that era in comics may be near. The purpose of Dogwelder is to promote the self contained short story in comics. "Self contained," because it's something you don't see in comics now, and "short," because I don't want to hear people say: "That was a great story, but when are you going to write a graphic novel?"