Your Adventure

One of the more unique/creative expressions of comics in the past several years has been Meanwhile by Jason Shiga. The comic is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style setup, but very cleverly implemented with diverging and reconnecting pathways and literally thousands of possible combinations. And, unlike the classic Choose-Your-Own-Adventure texts, it's virtually impossible to "cheat" and look ahead to see what the various outcomes of your decisions might be. It's exceptionally clever and I have not seen anyone even attempt anything like it since he first published his mini-comic version in 2001.

Until now.

Rianne van Duin has put together a book with a similar concept. You, as the reader, decide which paths you follow to progress the story forward. It uses a tab structure not unlike Shiga's; however, it goes a step further by including a inventory! The story outcome changes depending on which items you find and pick up, and it seems as if the icons/tokens for these inventory items interact with the book itself! She apparently self-published a Dutch version back in 2009, which has long been sold out, but she now has a crowd-funding campaign to both reprint the Dutch version as well as produce a brand new English translation! The book actually seems pretty reasonably priced for the insane amount of specialty printing that must be involved -- only €35 (roughly $40 USD) -- and the biggest drawback for people like me here in the states is international shipping. (Note: shipping costs are not automatically added in, as they are in other platforms like Kickstarter. You need to add the amount manually to your pledge/donation.)

Her crowd-funding campaign can be found here. The English translations on an individual page come up easily enough to get the gist of things (it's not Kickstarter or Indiegogo or something more familiar to Americans, but a platform called Voordekunst) but some of the login/navigation seemed a bit awkward to follow because of the translation issue. Still, it seems like an absolutely amazing project, and I highly suggest you check out the campaign page itself even if you choose not to pledge. I can't quite decide if this is comics strictly speaking, but it sure is innovative as hell!

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