New editions of Longshot Comics are available now through Amazon!

The Long and Unlearned Life of Roland Gethers (Book One) in paperback and ebook.

The Failed Promise of Bradley Gethers (Books Two) in paperback and ebook.

The Inauspicious Adventures of Filson Gethers (Book Thee) in paperback and ebook.

The Saga

The epic account of the Gethers family through centuries of British history sprang from a two-page throwaway story in Angry Comics #3 and would go on to mushroom into a multi-generational saga encompassing many editions, reformattings, and translations. Longshot Comics Book One: The Long and Unlearned Life of Roland Gethers follows the titular character from 1860 to 1949 and his journey through the waning days of the empire. Longshot Comics Books Two: The Failed Promise of Bradley Gethers travels to the New World with Roland’s grandson, and covers the years 1920 to 1993. The brand-new third book details The Inauspicious Adventures of Filson Gethers and tells the story of Roland’s mysterious grandfather and the family’s involvement in the American Revolutionary War, The War of 1812, and the Opium Wars.

The History

The first version of The Long and Unlearned Life of Roland Gethers made its debut in 1993 as an 80-page minicomic. The 3840-panel layout required what was, at the time, the formidable computing power of a 386 running PageMaker 6.5. Since Shane only had a 286, he had to make daily train commutes out to a friend’s house deep in the West Island suburbs of Montreal to get the job done on a mightier machine. Originally priced at one dollar, because that’s the most Shane thought anyone would ever pay for a comic about dots, the project was financed by friends who would sneak him into their places of business after hours to grab as many free photocopies as possible before he was interrupted by a night watchman or the cleaning staff. Within a few days of Longshot Comics arriving on local comic-shop shelves under consignment, Shane started getting calls for individual purchases of as many as twenty copies at a time. Since it took, on average, four hours to cut, fold and staple twenty copies, his time became scarce. Raising the price to two dollars after the freebies ran dry did nothing to deter demand, and eventually Shane began to approach publishers who could fill the void with actual printing presses and distributors.

Slave Labor Graphics of San Jose, California jumped at the chance to publish an edition of Longshot Comics since word of it had already spread to the west coast and they’d been trying to secure a copy for their own reading edification. In the midst of the 1990’s self-publishing boom in indie comics, Shane was accused in some corners of being a sellout for taking his comic to any publisher at all—even one of the alternative bad boys like SLG. Shane’s response to this admonishment was a witty and erudite, “Piss off.” His agreement with Slave Labor carried on to a sequel, The Failed Promise of Bradley Gethers, and saw him travelling far and wide to make personal appearances at the big-league comic book conventions in San Diego and Dallas.

By the late ’90s, Shane was approached by the German publisher, MaroVerlag, to produce a translation of The Long and Unlearned Life of Roland Gethers. This involved a major reformatting of the comic so that the panels could squeeze in all those gigantic German words. Since Shane didn’t actually have to do any of this work himself, he readily agreed. In 2000, this edition won the Max-und-Moritz-prize at the International Comic-Salon in Erlangen, Germany. For this he received a certificate and a medal, neither of which he could read. At the same time as MaroVerlag was working on the German translation, they also produced a limited edition in the same format, but in English, exclusively for Shane to sell himself.

Shane was approached by other European publishers for additional translations, but arrangements for French and Spanish editions kept falling through. Ultimately, it was Italy’s turn to get it right again with Prospettiva Globale Edizioni (or Proglo) in Genoa creating two slavishly detailed volumes in 2007 and 2011. The attention to maintaining the look and spirit of the originals, even in the midst of another reformatting, was astonishing, as was the extensive footnoting to explain all the cultural and historic references in the work.

It was Proglo’s continued enthusiasm that eventually prompted the oft-delayed creation of Longshot Comics Book Three: The Inauspicious Adventures of Filson Gethers. With a contract and an advance in hand, Shane buckled down and completed the script and art that had languished in limbo for twenty years. The Italian translation was released in Italy first, with the original English version (and matching reprints of the first two books) coming out via Amazon later in 2018 for the 25th anniversary of the series.

All three volumes are now available through international Amazon outlets in paperback and ebook for Kindle and Kindle Unlimited. Follow the links at the top of the page to buy your copies today.

Other Appearances

Over the years, short Longshot stories have been commissioned for various magazines, comic books, and t-shirts. Like the three epic volumes of material already available, they too are being remade and offered to fans through Shane’s Patreon page. For a three-dollar subscription, readers can gain access to such scarce material as The High-Flying Adventures of Wilfred Gethers, an account of an ace in the Great Air War, Filson Gethers’s Music Lesson, featuring the titular character’s earliest appearance, and A Little Romance, the very first experimental strip that launched the whole phenomenon.

Other pending shorts include Douglas Gethers’s Worst Job Yet, Douglas Gethers’s Paranoia Problem, and Sean Gethers’s Merchandising Woes, as well as a number of entries from the Movies in Longshot series that ran on the Eyestrain Productions homepage years ago.

Discussion, Analysis and Media

Longshot Comics has been referenced or discussed in a variety of books and articles, notably the examples below. Although there’s no direct mention of it in Hannah Miodrag’s Comics and Language, her book deserves credit here since she did author a later academic analysis of the famed dot comic, thereby officially becoming the first doctorate to weigh in on its value to the world.

Also in the realm of academia, Longshot has been featured in the “Shandyism – Authorship as Genre” exhibit, curated by Helmut Draxler, February 22 – April 15, 2007, at the Secession Building, Vienna. It came up in a lecture about character design at the Pictoplasma conference in Berlin, 2009. And, most recently, it was part of “Talking Pictures Blue (Voices Rising)” at the Songwong Art Centre in Seoul, Korea, June 12 – July 12, 2015.

Lest we take ourselves too seriously, however, let’s all try to remember that this is ultimately a gimmicky little funnybook about dots living, dying, fucking, killing, and wandering, ignorant and narrow-minded, through their brief existences on this earth. Oh wait, that sounds a lot like all of us. Perhaps it really is a profound insight into the human condition and a minimalist deconstruction of both world history and the medium of graphic sequential storytelling that expands and redefines the art form as a whole. With toilet humour.

Comic-Biz Names Rave About Longshot Comics

One of my favourite comics of all time. — Rich Johnston, Bleeding Cool

No discussion of art and writing in comics would be complete without mention of the sublime Longshot Comics…which uses insanely minimal art to tell a funny, affecting and epic story. It’s astonishingly effective comics storytelling. Powerful stuff. — Kurt Busiek, Kurt Busiek Resists

It’s brilliant, it’s hilarious, and it’s mind-blowing. There’s nothing else like this in comics. Mr. Simmons has figured out how to tell an epic story of a life in one regular-sized comic by making the pictures as absolutely minimal as possible. And yet, you can still tell what the dots are supposed to be doing! These books are pure genius. — Johanna Draper Carlson, Comics Worth Reading

Longshot Comics! It’s great! It’s the first minicomic that should come shipped with its own bookmark. The discipline of telling a story with nothing but speeches of fifteen words or less gives the novel a haiku-like intensity. The production is superb. This minicomic should be in every library and comic collection on Earth! — Matt Feazell, Cynicalman

“The Long and Unlearned Life of Roland Gethers” is the funniest thing I have read in a while. A hilarious minimalistic minicomic that kept me thoroughly entertained for a couple hours one night during a long, boring train ride. It’s eighty pages thick and well-written with great dialogue. — Roberta Gregory, Naughty Bits

Everyone should have a copy of this once-in-a-lifetime magnum opus. — Dave Sim, Cerebus

Shane Simmons must get an award. You hear me?! Someone give this man a medal! Longshot is incredible! On sheer size alone it’s overwhelming, 84 pages and 3840 panels make it the biggest mini-comic on record!!! Lordy! Most folks would have stopped there, but no, he actually wrote something in each one. Longshot is the life story of one Roland Gethers, a Victorian era son of a British coalminer. His struggles, victories and boring Sunday afternoons (89 years of ’em) are laid out for us in glorious black and white. How did he fit all this into a mini? Well, the whole story is drawn as if it were a longshot — get it? Each character is a tiny little dot (although Shane swears the details are visible with a microscope). It’s a funny and surprisingly complex story that I’m sure I’ll read again. A monumental achievement. — Mark Frischman, Factsheet 5

The most original mini-comic I’ve seen in a long time, and funny too. — Jeff LeVine, Destroy All Comics

Looking for a good read? Find your attention span too short? Why not try a new comic book called Longshot Comics: The Long and Unlearned Life of Roland Gethers. This is an 80-page masterpiece spanning 89 years on life in the British Commonwealth. Unlike most comic books, the characters are simply dots. Think it’s impossible to become attached to a dot? Think again. Shane Simmons has created a beautiful mini-comic/novella that takes you on the journey of a lifetime in 3840 panels. — Secret City’s Instant Teller, Hour

Every once in awhile, a small press mag comes your way that renews your enthusiasm for small press. This is one of those zines. With Longshot Comics, Simmons tops himself by presenting a story of epic proportions that recounts the life of an Englishman named Roland Gethers, spanning “eighty-nine years in the British Commonwealth” from 1860 to 1949 in the process. What maintains your interest is the storyline and script, which are, by turns, funny, historically accurate, and moving. Although the main character, Gethers, is not an extraordinary man by any means, his life story touches upon many important markers of the waning days of the British Empire. Make no mistake, however, because this is still, at its core, a well-written and hysterically funny story. As he has shown in his earlier work, Shane is a good writer with a fine sense of comic timing. A funny, sophisticated book. It’s even one of the best-produced minis I’ve seen in a long time. Highly Recommended. — Randy Reynaldo, WCG Notes

The Future

Whether the series is capped off as a trilogy or not depends on future sales and Patreon support. Shane has been busy writing novels and short stories in addition to his screenwriting gigs, but has expressed interest in returning to the well for The Many Sins and Few Confessions of Richard Gethers, a pirate story set in the 18th century that might well prove to be the funniest entry in the saga yet.

Plans are also afoot for an eventual omnibus that will collect every scrap of material about the Gethers family under a single cover for one-stop-shopping completists. Follow the blog and subscribe to the newsletter for more information as updates become available.