Meanwhile

Pick Any Path. 3,856 Possibilities 
by Jason Shiga 
Amulet / Abrams 2010  

2010 Cybils Winner for Middle Grade Graphic Novels 

It seems like such a small decision – chocolate or vanilla ice cream? – but whichever one the reader chooses for Jimmy will send them both down one of 3,856 paths.  Some paths lead to death and the end of the world as we know it, some lead to a parallel dimension, some sort of loop back around to the beginning. Time travel is involved, and a squid (sort of). Jimmy's initial choice of flavors is what sets the story hurling toward a trio of inventions, the luck of a coin toss, and the reader's memory of an access code that alters and reshapes the story along the way. 

What would happen if you mashed up a choose-your-own-adventure (COYA) story with a graphic novel?  Meanwhile is the answer.  Everyone starts at the same place, but the choices they make along the way determine the outcome of the story.  Like the CYOA stories, many of the choices lead to death and so presents the reader with challenge of making the right choices in order to survive.  The difference is that the CYOA stories left readers with an emotional or moral dilemma on which to peg their decisions, but in Meanwhile decisions are sometimes simply a question of blind luck.  Sort of like life where the smallest of hesitations can have profound effects.  

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Those 3,856 paths are a bit of a technical inflation: the book does not contain that many actual stories or endings.  Where some paths diverge and follow one set of story ideas they will eventually come back to a one of a few shared end strand.  I haven't mapped the book out – I'm sure that sounds like a fun activity for some people – but if you've ever wondered what a CYOA-type book looked like mapped out, check out this link. Despite The Mystery of Chimney Rock having only 44 choices and 36 endings it does add up to a crazy-big number of "possibilities."  It's no surprise that Shiga's book plays up the numbers as he is not only a cartoonist but a mathematician.

The technique for making choices is unique and worth note. Each panel of the graphic novel has a little "tube" that connects it with the next panel in sequence.  These tubes, either by choice or by necessity of space, run off the edge of the pages and onto tabs that lead the reader to the next page. Following the tabs sends the reader backward and forward (like a time traveler, if you will) through the story, but the tubes do more than that.  By directing the reader across the page in this fashion, Shiga can place three or four separate sequences on a page that may have no connection to one another.  They are impossible for the reader to ignore (like telling a jury to forget what they have just heard) and so these extraneous panels become a tease to the reader.  Will they end up back at this page in the future?  If so, how do these panels connect?  And if the reader doesn't make it back to that page, they at least have knowledge of it, which means that once they've finished one run through the story they have seen glimpses of Jimmy's parallel lives and can be enticed back into the story to see if they can find a particular strand.  This layout, while showing all the paths along the way, makes it nearly impossible to casually flip through the book.  No single page makes any sense without knowing what comes before or after which forces the reader start from the beginning and rethink their path.

But what about the story itself?  Shiga takes the element of time travel and the reader's physical interaction with the book to explain and demonstrate the concept of infinite universes existing in parallel time. Just as the reader can flip between stories and change paths if they want to see where their decisions might have lead them, the various story lines exist in a parallel world (the book) where only the separation of pages prevents the characters from seeing "what might have been." It's the kind of a thing that will either wash right over a reader, expand their thinking about time and space, or just blow their minds. 

As a reading experience though the book can become quickly tiring.  Once you get the gist of several possibilities, once you've encountered a few endings or doubled over the same path a couple of times, you become tired of reading what is, essentially, a very short story with little character development or emotional investment. There is a certain adherence to fate in that there are a limited number of characters and locations that the story takes place in, suggesting that no matter which path the main character takes, they will eventually come to the same places and meet the same people.  Only the decisions change. In our daily lives we often fantasize about what small decision would change our lives and our experiences, and if I had a main criticism for Meanwhile it would be that for all its paths the scenery remains fairly limited.

This book is a natural for an entire generation wired into video games, who have learned through "multiple lives" that trial and error will eventually lead them to the most satisfying ending they can find.  It's a great approach for creatives and those who like a good puzzle with their reading.  Too bad our daily lives don't allow us to backtrack and explore alternate paths the same way.  At least not in this particular universe we're in.

The Giant of Seville

A "Tall" Tale Based on a True Story
by Jan Andreasen
Abrams 2007

Playing off the size of the subject at hand, this book isn't so much a tall tale as much as it's a tale about a tall gentleman named Captain Martin Van Buren Bates.

Captain Bates has arrived in Seville, Ohio hoping he has found a suitable place to start up a home. The Captain's concerns center around his (and his wife's) eight-foot frame. Captain Bates has arrived by train with his legs stretched across the aisle over both sets of seats, his torso hanging out the window to accommodate him. He makes his way to a rooming house in town and inquires about a room for the night. When he sleeps in a normal bed his legs from the knee down hang out the window, warmed at night by the fire set and stoked by the boarding-house owner. In the morning he eats an army's worth of flapjacks. He joins everyone at a dance that night and while he's mindful of bumping his head on low ceilings he manages to break through the floor and climb out the basement embarrassed.

In the end Captain Bates decides it's time to move on, that he and his wife could never settle in Seville, but the townfolk have a surprise for him. They have begun the framework on a proportionally sized home for the Captain and his wife. And that was how Captain Bates became the giant of Seville.

When it comes to tall tales we make allowances for exaggeration because that's a large part of what American Tall Tale folklore is about. Pecos Bill lived with coyotes and used rattlesnakes for ropes and rode tornadoes the way other cowboys rode broncos. Paul Bunyan clear-cut the Dakotas and dug the Erie Canal with the handle of his axe (and with the help of a giant blue Ox named Babe). And where folk heroes were based on real people -- Mike Fink or Davey Crockett -- their real exploits were often exaggerated, retold, or taken out of context in ways that made them sound more interesting than they might have been if truth had been strictly adhered to.

I'm mentioning all this because there really was a Captain Martin Van Buren Bates who was nearly eight feet tall and was married to a woman just slightly taller than himself. Given that this story is based on a real individual would put its telling in semi-fictitious camp, asking us to forgive certain exaggerations in favor of telling a tale based on truth. But the only truth in this story is the fact of the man himself and his setting up home in Seville upon retiring from the circus; Everything else is pure fancy, and most of it a little baffling to me.

A railroad car might not be the most spacious of accommodations for an eight foot tall man, but he wouldn't be able to stretch his legs across the aisle and hang his upper body out the window. Nor would he dwarf the folks of Seville so much that they all appear half his height -- that is to say nearly four feet at the tallest. And assuming even a short bed at five feet long the Captain's legs might have been able to rest on the window sill (as they do in the first shown illustration) and not bend at the knee outside the same window (when you flip the page).

Yes, I am being picky about this because the exaggeration, and the inconsistency of the exaggeration, undercuts the telling of the story almost as much as the factual detail included at the end of the book undercuts what we have read up to that point. Davey Crockett fought at the Alamo and was a US Representative but he also allegedly killed him a bear when he was only three years old. Killing the bear wasn't the important part of the legend, it was doing it at a young age. Being tall doesn't make one a folk legend, it's what you do with it, and it requires more than sleeping with your seven foot long legs hanging out a window or falling through the floor. The Captain was a tall man and he fought in the Civil War and worked with the circus but none of that comes out in the story, and you can't just hang a tall tall on a tall person and expect that to be the whole story.

Ultimately this is a dull little story that attempts to make a real person legendary without really giving the reader anything to feel awestruck about. Honestly, the man may have weighed as much as two hefty men, but are we supposed to find heroic his eating enough pancakes to feed a town? Perhaps if that eating brought with it the strength and prowess of a John Henry...

Here's a new rule of thumb for future picture books: No more "based on a true story" books. Either tell the story of a real person or make up a story inspired by a true person or event -- without mentioning the source. No more of these hybrids or attempts to lend credibility and weight to flimsy storytelling.