Write A Really Short Story In 50 Words Or Less

It is a comics. talking about super heroes...

taken from Amazon.com
Has any comic been as acclaimed as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen? Possibly only Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, but Watchmen remains the critics' favorite. Why? Because Moore is a better writer, and Watchmen a more complex and dark and literate creation than Miller's fantastic, subversive take on the Batman myth. Moore, renowned for many other of the genre's finest creations (Saga of the Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta, and From Hell, with Eddie Campbell) first put out Watchmen in 12 issues for DC in 1986-87. It won a comic award at the time (the 1987 Jack Kirby Comics Industry Awards for Best Writer/Artist combination) and has continued to gather praise since.

The story concerns a group called the Crimebusters and a plot to kill and discredit them. Moore's characterization is as sophisticated as any novel's. Importantly the costumes do not get in the way of the storytelling; rather they allow Moore to investigate issues of power and control--indeed it was Watchmen, and to a lesser extent Dark Knight, that propelled the comic genre forward, making "adult" comics a reality. The artwork of Gibbons (best known for 2000AD's Rogue Trooper and DC's Green Lantern) is very fine too, echoing Moore's paranoid mood perfectly throughout. Packed with symbolism, some of the overlying themes (arms control, nuclear threat, vigilantes) have dated but the intelligent social and political commentary, the structure of the story itself, its intertextuality (chapters appended with excerpts from other "works" and "studies" on Moore's characters, or with excerpts from another comic book being read by a child within the story), the finepace of the writing and its humanity mean that Watchmen more than stands up--it keeps its crown as the best the genre has yet produced. --Mark Thwaite

Oh...
I think it is one of the best i ever read..

Okay, that's what I thought, I wasn't sure. I only read one brief anecdote from the Watchmen, and that was because Green Arrow's mug on the cover caught my eye in the library.

Thanks for the kind comparison--incidentally, the three characters in that brief little snippet are intended to be a focus for a graphic novel I'm planning :D.

No problam.... you should look for it if you have the time.

Oh cool.... i tried so many times to draw comics.. but my drawing skills aint that good..
any how good luck.. i'll hope i'll have the chance to read it. :)

Hehe--I'm not very good at drawing either, though when I started work on it, I tried. After two covers and 2 and a half pages, I restricted myself to just writing the comics rather than trying to do the inking/shading/pencilling myself. Borrowed a book by Dennis O'Neil from the library on writing comics to get myself started.

cool...
sound interstaing.. i have one on drawing by an Israely comics .. maker.. but it aint that good,,,

Sounds interesting... though... comics never really caught my eye. I prefer books and writing normally. I always set aside what I write(which is not a lot) from what I draw(which is also not a lot). Anyhow... I have already posted my short story in another thread. Turned out to be longer than I expected.

She's sitting in a corner, crying. She has never been this scared in her life. She could remember her mother saying that crying was never the solution, but she didn't know what else to do. Suddenly, she heard the voice, calling out to her again. Her nightmare was becoming real.

An angel held the wish cards before me.

"Pick three." (luminously)

All I could think of was a nursery rhyme:

One for my master
One for my dame
One for the little boy who lives down the lane.

"These three." (intuitively)

The angel vanished, leaving...money, love, life - forever.

Snoring, snoring, until the morning
.....p
...U

......D
........O
.........W
...........N

.....P
...U
with every breath, she must turn the volume up on Dateline. Why must it be so? What kind of God would create snoring? I believe it is to torture the awaker sex. Note to self: buy ear foam.

50 words exactly.

And then, to her surprise, the alligator egg hatched. But the baby wasn’t an alligator. It unfolded a pair of tiny wings and looked at her, coughing a spark that set her sleeve on fire. Putting the flame out, she realised that this was no alligator. It was a dragon

"Knowledge," he said (strategically raising an eyebrow) -- "wasn't that what Adam and Eve pursued and obtained in the Garden of Eden?"

"You fool," she said (looking down on him), "there is no Adam and Eve, no Garden of Eden. They're figurative, not literal."

"What of knowledge, then?"

"I don't know."

Having finally put away the holiday decorations, he sat in the room that seemed suddenly cold. Ghosts of seasons past then passed before him. Next year would be different, he decided -- less sparkle, more substance. He'd light more candles.

The door squeaked angrily at him when he closed it.

Saturday, seated on a pine bench, I am silent, listening. Wind, birds, children.
They play at playing. The structure: primary colored plastic; for them an entire world.
Tiny voices, “you want to go down the blue slide?”
Quiet, friendly, she speaks. Gently instructing the younger in the art of playing.

The old dog watched the young man from the corner of the room. The man rushed out of the apartment without looking at the dog. The dog sighed and wearily laid down. He watched the door, awaiting the man’s return.

Later, the man returned. He was greeted by silence.

He wasn’t invited. The rat and all the animals of the forest were invited, but did anyone even think that a bird should be there? Who else sang to them morning and made their day happy? If that’s how much birds were worth to HIM, maybe they would just pack up and leave this cursed forest.

I was duplicated last night. I think it was a criminal gang. Maybe Russians. Anyway, there's two of me now. And he's got my certificate of authenticity. I'm hiding in the backstreets and alleys. But it's really only a matter of time before...

Poised on a precipice, the hurt offer up one last prayer; to and for what they don't know. Perhaps one prayerful act might soothe the ache that drives them mad. Or maybe the longing for one last drop of water, one soulful song to bring them life. I don’t know.

The Faerie princess wearily slid off her bedraggled sweating pony. Lips parched, desperately hungry and fatigued. She felt imprisoned in her grimey gown, her body unbathed since yesterday.She would not give in to the enemy.
"You're good at role playing games" said her father.
"Thanks she said smiling.

Some creative non-fiction:

Those leaves danced across the road like New Yorkers in a crosswalk at lunchtime. He'd be waiting for her at home and they'd do their own dancing. She tapped her feet on the floor of the car. Oh no! Her shoes!

Then...car connected with cat. How sad is that?

Jamestown Williams never mentioned the second syllable of his first name, and if someone else did in his presence, they were liable to receive a frigidity of manner from him that would never dissipate. Katerina made that mistake. Then she fell in love with him. Unfortunate things like that happen a lot hereabouts.

"She was fu--" but a punch to the face shut him up. Laid him out on the pavement. Blood dripped out his nostril, and probably some out his head too.
"Don't talk 'bout my sistah," I said. Don't think he heard me, but that don't matter. Ain't much I could'a done about it.

‘One phone call… That is all it takes’, she thought. ‘One phone call and you are human again.’ Vulnerable and helpless, she let the phone fall on the sofa where she had been sitting until the phone rang to remind her that they were, after all, mortals.

It was carnival in Venice and everyone had on masks of demons. Two people dressed as demons, a man and a woman, met and decided to go home together. There the man took off his mask.
“Now you,” he said.
So the woman takes off her pants.

:brow:

“You’re barking up the wrong tree, you know?” a voice behind.
Turning, I saw an old woman, hair bunned, “Do I know you?”
She grinned, toothlessly, and spat into the road. “There!” - emphatically. Where her spittle landed was a key.
I left it where it was. She was too weird.

XC

She glanced in the mirror: Lipstick, hair, a deep breath and a smile. She opened the door and got out, pushed her shoulders back. As she locked the car’s door, she forbade her eyes to glance towards the back. Looking only ahead, she walked through the shards of glass, each step taunting: ‘Female driiiiiivvveeeeerrrr!’

“Did you?”
“Not yet.”
“But you will?”
“I will.”
“You’re sure?
“I said I will.”
“But will you really?”
“I will.”
“When will you?”
“When you stop asking stupid questions.”
….
….
….
….
….
“I stopped and you still haven’t.”
“That’s because you started again!”
“Please!”
“Oh shut up!”

XC

Doleful, don't you go! I rather like your gray wrapping round me today, a suit of soft muslin sighs borne from the lies of one who claimed to be true
(no, not you!).

Doleful, stay! It's cold and I'm scared (feelings need to be shared) ...
wrap warm round me today.

It's raining...
'Please buy one, Sir!', the little boy implores the man, trying to keep his newspapers dry.
'Go away!'
'Please, Sir!' the boy holds the man's shirt.
'Your hand dirties my shirt', the man shouts at the boy and throws his newspapers away. It keeps raining...

I’ve never known anyone with hair like hers. It is haphazard in a way that makes me want to take a comb to her head. At the same time, it is such a part of who she is that I wouldn’t change a strand.

Her parting is such sweet sorrow.

XC

In this little box of hers, she rarely takes the time to peer over the sides. When she does, invariably the box wilts from the weight and dumps her out on the cold, cold ground. Occasionally the sides are too high for her to scrabble back over; and she's stuck outside, cowering and shivering..

The woman gazed at the chubby baby in her pram. "Poor little bag of pudding, helpless and knowing nothing of the world" she thought as she straightened out her newspaper and looked over to see if the bus was coming."Poor ugly woman, all alone"cooed baby to her mama.

The truth is in here somewhere. Past all the bone, blood, flesh, tissue. Ah…. Here it is. Pulsating. End of debate. They said mother was heartless. This, here, proves them wrong.

How soft it is, like a little babe, cradled in my arms. Why did she never give me love?

"would you kindly show me the way to zero," asked the butterfly of the lily. but she was snoring and didn't answer, so he followed the Z's up the morning mist and saw where they broke into dreams, then slid down their spiral into the beginning of all endings.

No one was on the road that night as she drove into the snowstorm feeling like she was in a Star Trek episode and the Enterprise was traveling at warp speed, so that when she broke on through to the other side she didn't need to worry about parking spaces.

Goz rapt rownd the werld (sad plase!), and all on it cudent se rit.

Someone said: "Peel it! Lift it!"

All the hands razd hi, pooshd hard, an pokd hols into heven.

"Now wut?" thay askd.

Someone sighed.

She was different from the other runway models in that she had hair and teeth, but none of the other normal features of a head. Her 'Seaweed Diet' book was doing hot business at the time and it was her moment, but she kept falling and spraining the same ankle.

The rent was cheap because the son of the previous tenants had murdered them there, then hung himself. In one of the cupboards we found the mother's sketchbook - a series of identical drawings of a gas fired heater.

Spends hours in the shower. Does yours do that? – Yeah. Think there all the same. The time they take to do their hair! – And I hate the way he stereotypes all us women. – Yeah I know what you mean, mine’s like that. They all treat us like possessions

“We’ll keep it up till you tell us how you regenerate!” He smashed his baton into the creature’s face, watching as it reformed instantly.

The Xorx siphoned off another delightful draught of the man’s hatred, fear and anger, converting it to energy and readying itself for the next delicious blow.

XC

Hollow tree, your empty echo, honeybees buzzing, throbbing earth beneath my feet;
the whine as the saw blade descends; I would breathe life into your veins, return your fiery gifts. Hollow tree, so unaware, undone. Days later, the smell of campfire smoke in my sweater reminds me of you.