Some thing that I didn't get to in yesterday's review of Nightmare on Zombie Island:
* The degree of interactivity in choose your own adventure-style text matches well with Reader Response notions of the individualistic reading experience.
* According to closure theory, comics also require readers to fill in the blanks and make decisions about what has happened between panels or off-panel.
* This isn't a weakness, nor is it without precedent. Many Greek tragedies let the heinous stuff happen off-stage, letting the scenes become as horrific as they could be in the mind's eyes of each spectator/participant.
* This higher degree of overt participation and interaction, if not control, situates choose your own adventure-type texts well into 21st century literacies and those considered Multimodal.
* The concept of alternate or simultaneous realities essentially exists in these texts, tying them to string theory and some pretty high-level physics concepts. As I reflect, I wonder if my interest in these texts, while possibly being part of the reason I became a little neurotic about decision making, also helped develop my sense for seeing multiple points of view and considering problems from different angles. I also wonder if some of the magic I found in mulling over multiple and alternate realities resurfaced as I decided on some of my favorite graphic novelists/comics writers, like Alan Moore and Warren Ellis, both of whom deal with issues of time, space, and multiple and alternate realities and dimensions in their writings.
All this from those "worthless little paperbacks" -- they had so much in common with that other "trash" reading from the get-go. Adding the sequential art element to them? Brilliant!
* The degree of interactivity in choose your own adventure-style text matches well with Reader Response notions of the individualistic reading experience.
* According to closure theory, comics also require readers to fill in the blanks and make decisions about what has happened between panels or off-panel.
* This isn't a weakness, nor is it without precedent. Many Greek tragedies let the heinous stuff happen off-stage, letting the scenes become as horrific as they could be in the mind's eyes of each spectator/participant.
* This higher degree of overt participation and interaction, if not control, situates choose your own adventure-type texts well into 21st century literacies and those considered Multimodal.
* The concept of alternate or simultaneous realities essentially exists in these texts, tying them to string theory and some pretty high-level physics concepts. As I reflect, I wonder if my interest in these texts, while possibly being part of the reason I became a little neurotic about decision making, also helped develop my sense for seeing multiple points of view and considering problems from different angles. I also wonder if some of the magic I found in mulling over multiple and alternate realities resurfaced as I decided on some of my favorite graphic novelists/comics writers, like Alan Moore and Warren Ellis, both of whom deal with issues of time, space, and multiple and alternate realities and dimensions in their writings.
All this from those "worthless little paperbacks" -- they had so much in common with that other "trash" reading from the get-go. Adding the sequential art element to them? Brilliant!
(Left: The marriage of comics and choose your own adventure-style texts drives these two to drink -- for celebration)
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