I love good metafiction. I know it’s got a bad rap because authors far too often rub your face in just how clever they are, but the good stuff? The good stuff gives you a deeper appreciation of storytelling, of medium, and maybe even existence itself. And comics make metafiction look easy. Whether that’s Chris Ware’s Building Stories, which disassembles narrative into a “you try building a story you lazy bum” experience, a character peeking between panel borders, a Jim Steranko cover playing with the title lettering, or even Deadpool talking to the reader, metafiction is almost second nature to us comic readers.
Beyond the narrative meta-ness so common in comics though, the medium itself perpetually prevents any sort of immersive experience like a traditional novel or film; we have to keep filling in the blanks of the panel segmentations. Where literary fiction might try to sand its edges and lull you into a smooth telling of a story, metafiction can’t help but push you out of the narrative and say, “See what I did there? See how goddamn smart it all is?” Pretentious, I know. But outside of three-second videos to trigger the dopamine drool, what isn’t?
I was prepared to hate The Mortal Coil Shuffle. When I first read the solicit for “a comic book in fifty-five playing cards” part of Image’s Ice Cream Man series, my hackles raised. Just another gimmick to sell to collectors? To speculators? To idiots like me? Now, if I’d read Ice Cream Man, I would have known the creators’ penchant for playing with the comics form, for their meta-embellishments of colors and panels and lettering to add just a bit more horror, but I didn’t.
I didn't read Ice Cream Man for a few reasons. Firstly, I didn’t want any feelings, either positive or negative, to shade my reading of this deck of cards. Secondly, and paradoxically, a good metafiction piece needs to stand on its own. It can point to all the different things, challenge its own narrative structure, and break the fourth wall, but it still needs to be good. And lastly, I’ve been very busy reading profoundly un-fun academic articles on comics and had to think of a creative, yet plausible way to integrate my dilettantism. This is that way.
The Mortal Coil Shuffle is good metafiction, which is more difficult to write about than the bad stuff with its heavy-handedness and "wink winks" displayed in typical existential oblivion. It’s good because it maximizes the form in which it tells the story, which can be done in a couple different ways despite the cards having a distinct order.
A reader/player begins with the full deck and flips a card off the top where each reveal functions like a comic panel. As a reader/player, you can place the new cards next to the previous ones in a long row, build a grid out of them into “pages,” or place one on top of the other, which gives the whole thing a bit more weight in its eclipsing of the previous card. Where Mortal Coil excels, though, is that it pushes beyond the comic form and does things only a deck of cards can do.
Which is the same place one might find a flaw. The reader/player of Mortal Coil must be familiar with cards of varying types to really catch everything. For the superhero readers, you probably know your way around a good kitchen table game of Magic the Gathering. For the readers of exclusively avant-garde, genre-breaking, and mind-fucking comics brilliance, you can just pretend you don’t. But either way, you’ll all enjoy cards like:
You’ll also need to be familiar with other cards, like playing cards and business cards and tarot cards. Maybe their chosen medium is self-selecting in that way. If you aren’t familiar with cards and card games, why buy a deck of Ice Cream Man cards featuring a story told in cards? I don’t know, but it’s time to get past the critic’s attempts at wit and to make some points before either affirming or subverting the review’s prevailing sentiment.
Mortal Coil works because it takes its medium seriously. Much like the turn of a comic page builds dramatic tension, so does the flip of a card. If at first that tension is simply the novelty of the form—a reader/player curious just how this is going to work—then by the end it bears real dramatic stakes. As we near the bottom of the deck, each flip takes on even greater narrative weight, the reader/player knowing that the next card may be the very last for a character, refuting even our own wish to put the card back on top and keep them alive for just one more moment. But no matter what we do, we know which card they’ve been dealt.
As the text on the side of the deck box proclaims, “The Deck Is Stacked!” It may be a bit on the nose, but it’s the element of Mortal Coil that maximizes the deck of cards medium and elevates its horror from the mundane — however mundane an Ice Cream Man with magic powers is, I suppose — to the cosmic. The horror genre often begets horrible things, but the adrenaline rush in watching a horror film or reading a horror comic is the possibility of escape, of figuring out how to survive this unfolding atrocity because someone inevitably must, right?
Mortal Coil unequivocally denies that possibility and reaffirms a cosmically fatalistic worldview. Sure, you can go against the instructions, reshuffle the deck, throw it up in the air and read it all Naked Lunch style. But no matter what you do, no matter how many times you shuffle and deal, one day, you’ll draw your last card.
Yeesh.
Maybe it’s not Calvino or Sarraute or Barth or Barthelme, but W. Maxwell Prince and Martin Morazzo tell a story that can only be told in a deck of cards. That means something, to meta-lovers like me, anyway. And even though it is good metafiction, you might still hate it. Hey, that’s the card you have to play.
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Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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