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⬅️ Previous capture (2024-03-21)
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If you are a member of my comic book Whatsapp group, then you'll know that 2024 kicked off with the first ever story about pipe-smoking bore Bruce Wayne and his alter ego "Bat-man". We followed this with a story from 2021's Batman Black & White #5:
The story is eight pages long but we've been reading it for two weeks. It's written in Choose Your Own Adventure style and I've been sharing one or two panels a day along with a Whatsapp poll for the group to choose which path Batman/Bat-man/Bruce should take. (Incidentally, this obscure corner of the internet now contains an admission that I am reproducing and distributing copywritten material without the express permission of the copyright holders. This will likely be what they get me on in the end, à la Al Capone and tax evasion.) In the story Batman is chasing the Riddler through the "Unmaze" (the F fell of the sign) and based on the group's choices he has come to various unpleasant ends.
For me, the story went up a notch when we came to a fork with three options - fight Killer Croc, fight the Riddler, grab a box filled with secret plans (ignoring both Croc and Riddler); we tried the three options in what seemed like the sensible tactical order and died in all three cases. At the end of the grab-the-box option, which I reckon Kieron Gillen knew we would pick last, Batman realises with his dying breath that he cannot win a game where Riddler sets the rules.
By this point I had drawn a directed acyclic graph to track which options we had tried - with all completed paths now ending in "Edward Nygma wins". We tried some of the remaining branches, got chopped up by lasers and exploded by a bomb, and then the second strange thing happened. We read panel 8.
The story begins at panel 1 - you have the option to proceed to panel 3 or panel 5. 5 tells you to go to 10. And so on. Nothing tells you to go to 8. (At least, nothing I've read so far.) I read 8, and shared it with the group, because we had run out of options, and 8 is the first panel (in numerical order) that we hadn't read yet. It's also a little different because it features Batman standing behind Riddler who says "What? Where did you come from?" Riddler is reacting to Batman breaking the rules of his game!
This is a very Kieron Gillen turn of events. Having listened to Gillen talking a lot about writing and about games (before working as a comic writer he was a game critic and co-founded Rock Paper Shotgun), I probably should have predicted that he wouldn't be content to just write a Choose Your Own Adventure story when he could break that structure apart and put it back together to do something more. (I didn't predict that... I walked into a maze filled with lasers and was chopped into little bits.)
What I know this morning, and the other members of the Whatsapp group have yet to find out, is that panel 8 doesn't work out either. It is an entirely new path in the story, with two options, both of which end in Bat-death.
So what next?
I think the rules of the game that Gillen is teaching are that you follow the paths as normal and when you run out of options you then go chronologically through the pages until you see a new starting point. That's what I'll try anyway. What I'm hoping is that Batman will say something towards the end about how he broke the rules, jumping from narrative to metanarrative and back to narrative again like Keiron Gillen hopscotch.
When all is said and done we'll go back to the first choice, because the group smartly didn't fall at the first hurdle which meant they missed the best joke in the comic. We'll get there, unless there is an infinite loop somewhere along the way.