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This last week’s issue of the Journal de Spirou (#3997) features a very special Spirou adventure. Fantasio a disparu! (“Fantasio Has Vanished!”) is in the style of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, which branches off in different directions depending on the choices you make. To skip this story, keep scrolling. To read on, click on the link below…
From there the adventure quickly branches out, as there are three clues to Fantasio’s disappearance, and Spirou has to decide which one to investigate.
Written by Pascal Jousselin (Imbattable, Voltige), this 18-page adventure is also something of a comic jam, with each of the 71 strips illustrated by a different artist, including Yoann, Tarrin, Munuera, Fournier and Schwartz, as well as Jousselin himself.
The experiment must be considered a success overall, even if the story is necessarily very slight and full of digressions. The fact that there’s an overall script gives it a more coherent feel than other comic jams, and many of the artists contribute very nice and convincingly “Spirou style” strips. And it’s just fun to flip back and forth and see the outcomes of your choices. It’s more trial-and-error than any real strategy, and most wrong choices lead to dead ends (and sometimes death!), but that’s all part of the game, and a few do have more interesting outcomes.
I’ll try to think of a way we could do it as a future scanlation: it would be well suited for the web, with links between different strips, but the trouble is I would really have to post the whole thing at once, since the non-linearity is such a big part of it. We’ll see…
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So, this generally works? I’ve read similar experiments in the Italian Donald Duck pocket books (Topolino etc.) but they mostly come out as quite half-assed attempts…
Yes, it works pretty well, I think. I mean, it’s no [i]Bravo les Brothers[/i], but a fairer comparison would be the [i]Exquisite Corpse[/i] comic or all the various Spirou stories from the anniversary issue, and relative to those it holds up very well as a fun, non-canon adventure with a puzzle-like component. I found the ending a bit disappointing, but other than that was quite entertained throughout.
There’s a few of the Disney stories listed here, but the list seems far from complete.
http://coa.inducks.org/subseries.php?c=Which-way
I’m a fan of Jousselin because of Imbattable and I really enjoyed this too. It was a fun story and it was interesting seeing which artists showed up.