This is one of several comics this week that I had no intention of picking up until I saw its cover.  No, the cover art isn’t breathtaking or, in fact, much different from a lot of the art that passes over our non-super hero shelves, but it has the phrase “Exquisite Corpse.”  And I host a writers’ group at my house, where we often engage in surrealist word games, and I hoped that the phrase splashed across the cover was about the word game, and not just a fancy way of saying “gorgeous cadaver”.  And it sort of is.

The magic behind Exquisite Corpses is that you are making a story/a picture/a poem/a set of definitions with one or several other people without seeing what they wrote.  For example, TheNextChampion may write a place name on a piece of paper, fold the paper up, and then pass it to JesTr who has to describe the place, without unfolding the paper to see which place he’s supposed to be describing.  So TNC might have written “Deadpool’s Underwear Drawer”, and JesTr might write “where sinners spend eternity after laughing at too many poop jokes”, which in this case worked out rather nicely, but that’s a coincidence.  The object is to see if you and your conspirator are on the same wavelength.  Usually the first person writes something like “Michigan” and the second person writes “The capital of Narnia”.

There’s a visual art version where you generally use three people.  The first person draws a head and shoulders, and folds the paper so that the very bottom lines of the shoulders show, but not the rest of the head, and the second artist starts from there, and draws a torso, and folds that so that only the area below the belly shows, and a third person (or the first again if there’s only two of you) draws the legs and feet.  I assumed that was going to be the method used here.  A writer writes a four page story, and sends only the final page to the next writer, who has to continue it.

Sturges played it a little safer, and made it so that everyone got to see all the preceding pages, but had to pick up the story where the other writer left off.  He alludes to a caveat of something akin to “no making it all a dream sequence”.  And it does appear that nobody used cheap tactics to get out of the story that the previous writer left.  And Willingham started out with a douchey (and I mean that in the most admiring way) twist in his final panel.

This is a great group of storytellers, and they have combined to make one engaging, well-plotted story.  There is only one team of penciler/inker/letter/colorer because…well…have you seen books inked by more than one person?  Did you notice them in a good way?

You can pick this book up not having read a single comic from the Sandman corner of the Vertigo Universe, where this series resides.  It’s a great read.  And, if you’ve read every spin-off and guest appearance of Sandman since 1989, you’ll enjoy this, too.