9 / 11 & W.(TF): A Story Minute Selection (Reformatted)

"I dig Carol Lay's work because it's weird yet friendly yet disturbing yet funny -- a good combination." -- Matt Groening

"Carol Lay does these docu-fables that mix deadpan fantasy with a stoic, understated reality. She writes and draws (splendidly) in a cartoon monotone that masks the wit, intelligence, and reflective anger that hums beneath the surface. It's a pleasure to know she's around." -- Jules Feiffer

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -- George Santayana

9 / 1 1 & W . ( T F ) is Carol Lay's as-it-happened perspective on the first half-dozen years of the American Millennium -- fair, but not necessarily balanced -- and with a particularly prescient Epilogue from almost ten years earlier.

[Note: Carol Lay's strip "Ground Zero: 9/13" was selected by Jeremy Adamson as one of the images in "THE IMAGE AS WITNESS: Collecting Visual Materials from the National Tragedy" for the Library of Congress's September 2002 Bulletin.]

STORY MINUTE told twelve-paneled tales designed to be read in about a minute. It told fables; stories about relationships; twisty tales of crime and consequences, peeks into the competitive undercurrents within families; arched-eyebrow looks at humanity's self-destructive impulses; and scenes of the skirmishes between infallible fortune teller Madame Asgar and that less-than-competent devil, Nick.

The strip later evolved into the more-loosely-structured WAYLAY, which continued Story Minute tropes, and allowed Carol (among other things) to offer glimpses into her own world and life.

[] Story Minutes are best sipped, not gulped. []
[] Story Minutes are formatted to read in Landscape orientation. (ie.: Hold your Kindle sideways.) []
[]Press the top of your 5-way controller and hit Enter if you want to full-screen an image. []

Optimized for larger screens. File size makes for a longer download.

Carol Lay's work has appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The Wall Street Journal, More, Mad magazine, and The New Yorker. She has worked for both Marvel and DC, and wrote and drew the underground comic Good Girls.

Her graphic novels GOODNIGHT, IRENE: The Collected Stories of Irene Van de Kamp, and THE BIG SKINNY: How I Changed My Fattitude, her text novel WONDER WOMAN: MYTHOS, and the collection CAROL LAY'S ILLITERATURE: STORY MINUTES vol. 1 (Boom! Town, 2012), which reprints (in hardcover and in sequence) Story Minutes strips from 1997-1999, are available in the Amazon Store.

Carol currently writes and draws SIMPSONS comics for Bongo while developing a new project, not as yet revealed. For updates (and more art) check her out at carollay.com.