Goes Like This by Jordan Crane

I like reading short stories much more than I like writing about them. And I don't read short fiction all that much, so maybe I don't even enjoy even reading them as much as I think I do. That's complicated math, so I'll leave it there.

Jordan Crane has been making comics for thirty years, but I only noticed him with his magnificent graphic novel Keeping Two a few years ago. (Insert the usual disclaimer about the world being huge and full of interesting things, so no one can see all of it they want to.) Since making comics is time-consuming, his next book was Goes Like This, a collection of shorter works - and a lot of prints, actually - originally published from 2002 to 2022.

It is visually inventive, especially the prints, which are eye-popping and stunning. The stories are varied, from wordless one-pagers to longer dialogue-filled full stories. They tend to be sad or depressive at their core, with a surprising amount of death piling up, especially early in the book. (The first two long comics stories, if I remember correctly, sandwich a bunch of prints that all seem to be people falling to their deaths with their mouths open, so I wonder if Crane had a period in his work that was particularly doomy.)

His art style is somewhat malleable - this collection does span twenty years - but it's all in a crisp, indy-comics storytelling mode, his people just a little soft and rubber-hose, their faces expressive with their usually-narrow eyes and other features defined with a few bold lines.

Without diving into individual stories, there's not that much more to say: it's a compelling collection of strong work. The stories stand alone, aside from the first two numbered chapters from a project that I suspect might have been an early attempt at what became Keeping Two. Those stories also tend to have simpler palettes - usually black and white or a few tones - while the prints are often overlaid with bright, jangling patterns. They almost seem to come out of completely different creative impulses in Crane, though you can see some continuity in his people and the situation they're in: the prints are occasionally static, but, especially early in the book, they depict moments, out of context, where something is happening that would not be out of place in his stories.

There is a lot of death in it. Even the stories that don't have on-panel deaths tend to be thematically about things dying or sickly, a relationship or a way of living. Crane does not seem to be a cartoonist of happiness: this is what I'm saying. That's somewhat expected in indy-comics circles, admittedly, but know that Crane goes deeply to that well, both in narrative and in imagery, in this collection.