Re: Meanwhile: An Interactive Comic Book Download] [FULL]
Sharolyn Uriegas
Meanwhile is a comic, but not an ordinary comic. Follow the paths from panel to panel. Where the path divides, you decide where to go next! A thrilling tale of quantum mechanics and self-discovery with 3,856 story possibilities.
Jason Shiga, the comic creator whose Meanwhile interactive comic book a few years back amazed me and my sons for its innovative use of a choose-your-own-story theme (complete with more than 3,800 choice possibilities), has a new book (and a new series, it seems) that builds on the concept that was in Meanwhile (which Shiga later turned into an app built on the concept of the Infinite Canvas idea of Scott McCloud).
This course examines the shift from traditional cinematic spectacle to works probing the frontiers of interactive, performative, and networked media. Drawing upon a broad range of scholarship, including film theory, communication studies, cultural studies and new media theory, the course will consider how digital technologies are transforming the semiotic fabric of contemporary visual culture. Our focus will be on the phenomenon Gene Youngblood described three decades ago as expanded cinema an explosion of the frame outward towards immersive, interactive and interconnected (i.e., environmental) forms of culture.
This paper focuses on interactive and animated comic books as visual storytelling medium. With the rise of digital media, previous forms and methods of storytelling has been changed and reformed in hybridity and/or as emerging medium. Like movies, documentaries, games; comic books gained digital, moving, and interactive levels to be described and examined.
This research aims to analyze interactivity maps to reach forms of interactivity used in selected comic books as examples representing emerged types of this media under various names such as motion comics, interactive comics, hyper comics, interactive game comics and web comics.
Jason Shiga is a bit of a genius. As if being a Berkeley-educated maths whizz isn't enough - it's certainly enough for me, Jason - Shiga's also a wonderfully inventive comic book writer and artist. He's come up with weekly strips about finding yourself sealed in a phone booth (Fleep) and one-shot stories about the gritty world of library detectives (Bookhunter). My favourite of all his works, though, is probably Meanwhile, a colourful and rather strange sort of book with tabbed edges and glossy pages. It's interactive fiction in comic form, and it's now available on the iPhone and iPad. Hooray!
Even when bound in cardboard, Meanwhile doesn't look much like other comic books. Shiga's trademark round-headed heroes peak out from a familiar collection of panels, perhaps, but those panels are connected to each other by a dense, criss-crossing network of pipes - pipes which often race from one page, over a tab, and then onto another, before snaking back again. The pipes are how you follow your story through Meanwhile's non-linear layout. With the hardback, it can be something of a dexterity test as you run your finger around the paper. With the app, it's a far simpler matter of heading from one highlighted panel to the next. Tap tap tap. Ugh! You died. That was stupid of you.
Meanwhile was developed in collaboration with the interactive fiction expert Andrew Plotkin, and it's an extremely elegant piece of work. To play it is to see the garden of forking paths laid out before you. To browse through it is to risk minutes turning into hours.
The publisher says:
Bigger, bolder and louder than ever before, neo-manga artist Yokoyama Yuichi is back with Plaza. Inspired by Carnaval in Brazil, Plaza offers a maniacal extravaganza of marching, dancing, leaping, firing, cheering, smashing and exploding over the course of 225 eye-and-eardrum-confounding pages. Originally published in Japan in 2019, this oversize English edition of Plaza brings to full, hyper-animated life the spectacular graphic art of this genre-defying work of avant-garde comics. 240pgs B&W paperback.
What might be the world's largest visual work in the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure idiom is now available in digital form, presenting players of this interactive comic book with choices like the ice cream vendor's "Chocolate or vanilla?" The plot rapidly thickens, however, when the juvenile protagonist finds his way into a scientist's lab, and the choices mature to ones like which invention to try: the time-travel machine, the memory-transfer device, or the "Killitron 3000", which eradicates all human life except for the operator. Ultimately judicious use of all of these apparatuses will be required to save the protagonist, but first he will have to render his own world unrecognizable, and then deviously attempt to reverse the effects of his actions.
Meanwhile began in the form of small-press self-published black-and-white comic 'zines in 1999, but developed and was expanded and optimised over the intervening decade. To facilitate with its layout, computers were pressed into service and ultimately found an optimal layout to be an NP-complete problem. The final panel arrangement was achieved through use of "a V-opt heuristic algorithm that ran for 12 hours on an SGI machine."
MEANWHILE is not an ordinary comic. YOU make the choices that determine how the story unfolds. MEANWHILE splits off into thousands of different adventures. Most will end in DOOM and DISASTER. Only one path will lead you to happiness and success.
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If there was ever a graphic novel that was ready-made for its own iPad app, it would have to be Jason Shiga's Meanwhile. The interactive "Choose Your Own Adventure"-like graphic novel came with tabs at the side of each page directing readers to choose the next step in the story -- if they could avoid wiping out all of mankind in the process, of courses.
In this case it seems like turning the graphic novel into an app could actually make it easier to read, as the device does the work of keeping track of where you are in the story and, in theory, lets you move backward and forward to see the various plot points. So it's no surprise that Shiga has been working with interactive fiction writer Andrew Plotkin on a version for the various iOS devices.
This is already cooler than 90% of the CYOA books I've seen. But because it's a branching comic, Shiga has a whole range of artistic tools that the old books never considered. Two story branches can be laid out in parallel on the page. You can't jump tracks, but you are aware of one path as you follow the other. Panels can be juxtaposed and contrasted. You can see storylines as you flip pages. Again: context. Even on your first run through the story -- which will almost certainly end badly -- you get a notion of your goals, your options, and the chances that you missed.
All of that works on the printed page. What does it gain from the dynamic, interactive form? Fluidity, I'd say. You aren't bogged down with the mechanics of page-flipping and line-tracing. You can zip forwards at a natural reading speed, and then back up easily, without the accumulation of finger-bookmarks that CYOA books invite.
This interface took a lot of tuning to get right. I didn't just slap yellow squares onto Meanwhile. (There's a blog post in that design story, eventually.) So the code is very specific to this book. But I am interested in other interactive storytelling projects, and maybe this code will be adapted to something else someday.
Additionally, there were posters that visualize and explain the creative process behind some of the interactive productions, process art, and a continuous program with making of-videos and short artist profiles.
Transmissions: Gone Viral, a digital, interactive comic from the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI), follows the story of three childhood friends who discover dead crows in their neighborhood. Meanwhile, many of their elderly neighbors are getting sick with a mysterious illness. The friends decide to try and discover the link between the two with the help of a veterinary pathologist and an entomologist. Readers follow the protagonists as they gather evidence, look for patterns, and ultimately solve the mystery.
We based our story on real events from the summer of 1999, when huge numbers of crows throughout the borough of Queens and exotic birds at the Bronx Zoo were dying from an unknown disease. Elderly people turned up at hospitals with symptoms mimicking the avian symptoms. But no known pathogen affected both these particular birds and humans. Officials at the zoo and the NYC Department of Health worked throughout the summer and discovered a pathogen new to this hemisphere, West Nile virus. Karen de Seve, a seasoned science writer and creative, transformed a straightforward science story into an engaging mystery, crafting fun and relatable characters and writing strong science interactives that supported the overall narrative.
NYSCI produces a variety of digital tools and apps for use in schools and by individuals. A conundrum we often face is which platform to use, as devices across schools and in homes vary widely. For the comic, to ensure it would be accessible to as many readers as possible, we developed it to be web-based. It can be read on any device as long as there is an internet connection. This did come with trade-offs in our ability to make the interactives open-ended and exploratory, as we originally planned, but we worked with a top-notch developer, Blue Telescope, to create activities that provided a sense of discovery and experimentation for the reader.
As we created the comic, our educators convened an advisory board of teacher consultants. They were all middle school teachers in a variety of subjects including science, English language learners, and reading and comprehension. They informed the development of a supplemental resource guide to the comic for classroom use. A free download from our site, the supplemental guide includes suggestions on how to engage students around the story and offers ideas for additional classroom activities.
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