Parenthetical.net

This is from a series called Twisted Journeys, which are Choose Your Own Adventures in comic form. The title pretty much says it all: you and your friend go to an island to help your friend’s aunt, a “world-famous explorer,” do some unspecified research on why a settlement disappeared. Turns out — spoiler alert! — it was ’cause of ZOMBIES!

I heart Choose Your Own Adventures, as any red-blooded child of the 80s must. And so I thought this was a great deal of fun. I followed two adventures from beginning to end, using a different metric in each one: What happens if I make all decisions as though I wanted to be safe and avoid adventure entirely? And, what happens if I make all decisions as though the adults are stupid and I should do the exact opposite of what they say at all times? In both cases — spoiler alert! — I pretty much got eaten by zombies.

So I read the rest the way I read these things when I was a (nerdy, OCD) kid — recursively. I got eaten by zombies a lot. In fine Choose Your Own Adventure style, the paths to safety were capricious.

I thought the visual element added some extra excitement to your standard CYOA. Clearly David Witt had a lot of fun drawing gruesome, horrible zombie attacks. It was a bit strange, though — since it has to be “your” story, by definition the protagonist can’t be shown. But the illustrations aren’t all from the POV of the protagonist, either. So sometimes you’ll see your friend and your aunt walking along a cliff edge, say, and wonder, if I’m invisible, shouldn’t that help me hide from the zombies?

This is in no way a High-Quality Graphic Novel, but it totally entertained me on the bus to my friends’ place on Election Night when my hyped-up brain needed some serious distraction, so points for that.

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