The Narrative Corpse

The Narrative Corpse (edited by Art Spiegelman) was a graphic chain-story by 69 artists based on Le Cadavre Exquis (see Exquisite corpse), a popular game played by André Breton and his Surrealist friends to break free from the constraints of rational thought. The Graphic novel had a limited run in 1995 of 9500 copies and was the winner of the 1996 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for Best Graphic Novel.

The creative process
The idea was first conceived of, in May 1990, as a project for Raw. An artist would begin the story with three black and white comic-book panels, starring an innocent stick-figure named "Sticky." This artist passes his three panels on to the next artist who continued the story in any manner he wanted with three more panels. The next artist received only this artists' part of the story, and so on.

To expedite the project, two strands were started simultaneously, one in New York by R. Sikoryak, the second in London by Savage Pencil. Nevertheless, the project kept growing (outliving RAW itself, which ceased publication in 1991) until it was brought to an end five years after its inception.

Although the "story" oscillates without beginning or end, it can be said to start with the panels done by Friedman, and end with the ones done by McGuire. It is also of interest that a background or guest character seldom goes more than 3 contributions in a row. Some contributors have walk-ons by their own characters (Mort Walker's Sarge or Eisner's Spirit, for example.)