Sea Change: A Choose-Your-Own-Way Story
Comic, Caitlin Skaalrud, talkweirdpress.com,$10
Remember those book club circulars from primary school? [To say “yes” continue reading. To say “no,” skip to next review.] Whenever one of them came home I begged my mom to order as many of Troll or Bantam Book’s Choose-Your-Own Adventure books as her purse could muster. These books usually had some sort of mystical or sci-fi element, with death lurking around every corner (page). Caitlin Skaalud’s comic riffs on this second-person POV genre, right down to its evocation of sea creatures (i.e. badass mermaids).
Your story begins with Remí, a depressed fisherman who discovers his dead dog Bosco outside his house. This puts you in the position to decide: either stay at home and wallow in your grief, or hit the seas and go to work (spoiler: choose the former, and your story is disappointingly short). All told, there are probably eight to10 different plots packed into this standard-sized, 50-page, perfectly-bound comic — some of which are more arresting than others. The black-and-white, photocopied drawings run to the pages’ edges (with a few margins sloppily cropped), and when Skaalrud decides to split one of your decisions down the centerfold, the impression is striking. Each plot ends cryptically with a different epigram attributed to a diverse group of authors that are only revealed (to the attentive reader anyway) at the end of the comic. Between these kinds of discoveries, flipping back and forth through the narratives, and handling the lithographed, card-stock cover, Sea Change feels more like an activity than a comic. (Jason Luther)