Craig Pressgang, the larger than life character in 3 Story by Matt Kindt, is the subject of a cruel experiment executed on wide frame panels across nearly 200 gorgeous pages.
He’s also also fantastically tall man turned CIA pawn only to be repeatedly abandoned and embraced throughout the painful duration of his life. 3 Story fits the mold of good science because the book takes an implausible but intriguing premise to it’s extreme. What would happen if a person never stopped growing? Well, life would suck. Craig Pressgang hurts his loved ones and turns from a wonder of nature into a society-menacing liability. Like his antithesis the incredible shrinking man, Craig Pressgang’s condition never halts and eventually he disappears as if a giant man had never walked the earth
Sure it’s all a bit melodramatic, but 3 Story off is a great graphic novel because Kindt deftly teases out a sympathetic plot from a sad ending that’s all but foreseen from the drab greens and browns on the books cover. Pressang’s enormous life, or at least a sliver of it, dominates nearly every page of the book, but the reader only hears his voice for a few brief moments from the pages of a posthumously discovered, you guessed it, sad diary.
I had the opportunity to interview Kindt a few months ago. Kindt is also the author of the excellent espionage thriller, Super Spy. Also worth checking out is giant man a mini-story released by Dark Horse via Comics Alliance. Interview after the jump
How’d this story come about?
My initial thought was just to do a book that imagined what it would be like to be a giant for real. Which is kind of how I go into all of my books. For Super Spy, I just thought, “what would it be like to be a spy?” Then I just go from there.” Try to think what I would do in the situations I come up with, what problems and conflicts would arise.
Any particular reason?
I have a cousin who I met a few years ago… he’s a really big guy. Like like seven feet tall with big hands and big head. I found out later that it was a tumor in his pituitary gland that was making him grow. And if they hadn’t found it and cut it out, he would’ve just kept growing till he died. So I thought, “that’s a googd idea for a stroy. Let’s have them not find the tumor and let him grow as tall as he can. Scientifically, obviously, it couldn’t happen, but I used a little artisitc liscence to make him grow.
What did you do graphically different this time around?
I don’t write in the same way everytime. I’m usually trying to write and draw a new story from scratch everytime. It all depends on the project. With this one I really liked the idea of layering perspectives. This guy is a giant.. what are things going to look like from his point of view? From his wife? His Daughter? I had a lot of fun playing with that.
The most important thing to me was to tell giant man’s story but not form his point of view…. you get it from three women’s perspectives but never from his point of view.. There’s one little cheat.. where his wife is listening to the audio tapes. You have to figure out what he his and what he’s about without listening to him.
Is this all a metaphor…?
Well I don’t want to say it’s a metaphor for anything because I kinda hate stories that are like, “He’s not really a giant man, this is what he really is…” The story is a real downer If I had to guess, I think it’s a lot about being a father. This is the first book I’ve done since I had a daughter. As much of a downer as it is, everybody dies.
Like in Super Spy, you returned to spy theme this time.
I had this idea, when I first started working on the project, and I was trying to figure out how to have fun with it. What kinds of interesting things a giant could do. If I was a giant, what kind of things would I do? And, yeah, I was coming off Super Spy too. I like the idea of a giant being both a celebrity and courier of secrets. He’s not the most obvious spy. It’s not like he can go any where in secret.
What about the small book, wide panel format?
I started doing it when I was working on Super Spy, because as I was doing it, I’d put it up online and then you could download it. I actually formated the panels to fit the PSP so you could download it and read it on your portable game thing. It sort of forced me to use this apsect ratio… sort of a wide screen format… I liked it so much that I started writinn thigns in my brain with that in mind. There’s no reason to do it that way anymore because I wasn’t doing it online, but the other thing is that I like books to be book size… I like the feel of that. If it get’s bigger it starts to get heavy and I don’t like as much. Dark Horse did a nice job, It’s hardcover and the binding is solid and if you’re a book nerd like me that’s important.