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Post by massivesubsidies on Dec 18, 2022 3:16:56 GMT
Is there a small crowd here to compare notes on Wade's journey, especially regarding what is/isn't a red herring?
I was pleasantly surprised by how Lovecraftian this one got. The "madness" ratcheted up subtly - even down to the relative direction/inconvenience level of specific page-turn prompts.
Once I "successfully" completed the story I realized I had a number of items on my memo pad left unresolved, including:
*The garbled speech coming from the radio
*The insane "998 billion dreams" memo (outside of the code #s)
*The Cyrillic/Russian memo in the giant room
*Arthur Macmillan
Worth puzzling over more? Just extra color and flavor from the creator? The narrative gelled well enough with these question marks hanging, but I am curious what others felt were essential vs. "distracting" details.
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Post by BubblesZine on Dec 18, 2022 20:24:39 GMT
I made it halfway through, but loved it a ton. Definitely need to commit an afternoon to this book and report back.
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Post by mikesheawright on Dec 18, 2022 21:24:19 GMT
Have not been convinced this book is worth the effort but a thread to discuss its intricacies might change my mind...
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Post by massivesubsidies on Dec 19, 2022 14:45:42 GMT
+ Impressively paced and planned on a structural level, teaching you what you need to do in subtle ways. Only a couple of glitches in the page turn prompts I noticed, which I suspected were narratively intentional though they could be printing errors? There is even a "gutter track" built in accounting for sloppy, disoriented "play".
+ The melding of physical body horror and Windows 95 aesthetic worked for me, kind of like a vaporwave version of the film Jacob's Ladder. Summed up at the beginning when Wade finds a strange ethernet port leaking with some sort of fatty fluid.
+ Wylesol recognized the limits of putting this kind of game in book form when it comes to "deaths". Readers are just going to flag the big decision pages and quickly backtrack, rather than start over with a forced reset. Thus, death scenes start to include clues and significant details, resuming momentum.
+ For some reason, I found the long strings of hallways and stairwells more satisfying than annoying.
- The puzzles mostly boil down to decoding PINs that represent three digit page # turns. Wylesol did due diligence varying the process, but this is probably one of the biggest shortcomings.
- My fingers were a bit raw from all of the flipping by the end.
- Mileage may vary with the art style vs. the horror elements. Some of the grotesques did feel a bit spookier with a less-is-more Microsoft Paint sketch. Others, like the Shadows, not as much.
Overall, I think it's a worthwhile read for any serious comics fan, if to contemplate the medium's ability to stretch in this direction.
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Post by mikesheawright on Dec 19, 2022 23:05:08 GMT
ordered it from copacetic! will return when read.
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Post by justareed on Dec 30, 2022 5:59:18 GMT
Thanks for this thread, this book wasn't on my radar but it looks absolutely fascinating. Looking into ordering 2120 now!
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Post by mikesheawright on Nov 23, 2023 13:43:34 GMT
One year later I grabbed this off the shelf haha. I went through three different "endings", although I cheated a little bit and went back to key moments like mentioned above, instead of starting all the way over. I'm looking forward to picking it up again in a month or so and re-exploring, still feels like there's a lot of stuff to find in there.
It's a great reading experience, not frustrating at all like I thought it might be. It's true that most of the "puzzles" are just code numbers but I wonder if he was concerned about asking too much from readers to do like a sudoku game or something. I know I would balk at any sort of math-related thing so the simple seek and find approach worked for me and I didn't get bored at all. I didn't have any hangups, although a couple times I went to the wrong page because I read it wrong, I haven't seen any printing errors in my book yet. It also somehow avoids its own spoilers, which was another concern of mine. While flipping forward and back I would catch glimpses of things but they're so strange and abstract that they don't really mean anything without context, which is a neat trick.
Story/vibe-wise I adored it, I think this might be the only comic I've read other than From Hell that got under my skin a bit. The fact that all the lights are ON somehow makes it way scarier than if this was all shadows and darkness. That also makes it so when you get to a dark stairway or air duct it seems way scarier by contrast. When you look into a dark room you assume something is there somewhere, when you look into a bright empty room you assume something is just out of your vision, which is way scarier. His drawing style suits the story so well too, the way he draws those weird people. Pulling the lever and scrambling myself will haunt me for a while.
Do we think this book is about anything?
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Post by alaird on Nov 23, 2023 16:51:29 GMT
oh man, i really love george wylesol. he's kinda right in my q-zone for like using the comics medium to tell creepy pasta/liminal horror type stuff. i loved the book he did before this as well, "internet crusader." it's cool he was like "let's do that vibe, but non-linear." i do kinda wonder if this is something that could be expanded upon/improved as just a point and click computer game, but i really like it being weird and clunky in book form as well.
i liked having to write down codes and stuff in my notebook to keep everything straight. i think i ended up cheating a tiny bit bcuz my book had a print error in it, if i remember? or maybe i was near the end and i kinda just figured out and assumed what all the extant storylines were and didnt bother with code stuff since there was a limited page count left to explore...? i forget my approach. but i def followed through with most of the storylines and felt satisfied.
i agree that the stilted nature of navigating the story as a book, somehow makes the horror more palpable, i think bcuz of the medium and everything feeling limited/muted. it's an interesting phenomenon! def needs to be explored more...
i'd like there to be a larger contingent of this type of horror/scifi art comics personally...i've dipped my toe a few times here and there, plus have made some similar vibed animations as well. would be cool to see others do it too. if anyone has any interest in this type of storytelling i can recommend a few animations/games/youtube series.
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Post by mikesheawright on Nov 24, 2023 2:36:55 GMT
i'd like there to be a larger contingent of this type of horror/scifi art comics personally...i've dipped my toe a few times here and there, plus have made some similar vibed animations as well. would be cool to see others do it too. if anyone has any interest in this type of storytelling i can recommend a few animations/games/youtube series. i'm interested! i don't find comics that aim for like a traditional sort of "horror" genre to be interesting at all, but this kind of vibey unsettling discomfort seems more suited to the medium and i'd love to check out more stuff in this direction. i'm definitely interested in doing something "scary" at some point, curious to see what else is out there. |
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Post by pentimento on Nov 24, 2023 2:53:21 GMT
What's the deal with this book? I love the way it looks (from samples online) but is it anything more than a mash-up of Martin Vaughn-James, The Backrooms, Skinamarink, that sort of thing? Does it add up to something meaningful, or is it just a puzzle?
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Post by alaird on Nov 24, 2023 5:48:32 GMT
the puzzle and ambiguity is part of the fun to me. i'd say it does! there's the "gimmick" that it's a choose your own adventure, where you have options of where to go, and explore, but the paths narrow as you go on. it proves to be an interesting format to tell the story it's telling in it's weird cryptic way. wylesol is the real deal in my opinion. he just had a new book come out that looks like a collection of his older work? curious how it is. there are some stories from earlier books that ive read that i think are pretty weak (there's one that has that weird modern memphis look that's pretty unreadable/unenjoyable), but then it's also got some 2120 looking newer stuff as well. i def want to pick it up. it's a bit reductionist to say it's a backrooms/skinamarink mash up, especially considering this book came out before skinamarink. all this new horror floating around are working in the same milieu, and it's cool to see george explore his version of it through comics. there's definitely the shallow kinda spooky meme teen stuff, but there's some really good juicy stuff that haunts you for a few days after watching/engaging with it. anyway here's some of my fav stuff vaguely in this style PetsCop, it's 24 part youtube series. each video varies in length, from around like 5min to 30min. it's pretending to be a lets play of this game that never got a proper release, and the more the guy plays the game the more fucked up it gets. the cool part was that when these video were being released, people didn't know if this was real or not bcuz the channel didn't post any other info. it also referenced real life spooky events. creepy stuff! there's a whole dedicated subreddit if you wanna dive deeper too. youtu.be/6e6RK8o1fcs?si=gf63ZVBZfYwpKju7MyHouse. You can play the mod, it's a bit of a pain to set up, but it might be worth it if you wanna get spooked a bit, but I ultimately just watched this summary vid. i don't want to say too much, but basically it's using the format of a doom mod to tell it's own story about an old friendship from childhood youtu.be/5wAo54DHDY0?si=ZwlVAo47dQ3AyBFralso most video stuff by Alan Resnick if you can track it down. the first one that really clicked with me was this website he set up as part of the world he had made for a video he released with adult swim back in 2014 called "Unedited Footage of a Bear." In the video there's this fake allergy medication called "Claridryl" and they have a link to the website (it's since been shutdown though) and you could explore the website and there was something a bit off about it. here's a vid of someone recording that. reminds me a bit of 2140 tbh, you'll see why! youtu.be/idZtDeLjK-0?si=Mq6dXeuxiGMejqVUi think what i like about these styles of horror and 2140, is that they're using the format in a certain that enhances the immersion, which is pretty critical to pull you in for proper horror. often it's using the medium in tandem with how you would actually use it, and then subverting that, but with something like 2140, it's the act of exploring/decoding/engaging with it in a different matter than a normal comic that i think sets your expectations in a different place. obviously there's been choose your own adventure books before it, but it's not really referential to that. i still need to watch skinamarink as well! i've def read some more comics in this style but nothing is jumping to mind right away. i'm gonna keep thinking on it. anyway, can you tell i'm jazzed about this stuff? im curious if anyone has any recommendations in this world. i think it's great. |
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Post by BubblesZine on Nov 24, 2023 13:24:40 GMT
I think 2120 stands on it's own as a great read and inventive object, I couldn't help but think of my old friend Crimson Room that scared the shit out of me when I was 12 haha. Just the idea of being trapped! I've been reading Jason Shiga's Adventure Game Comics as well, and it's like 2120 where you have to solve little puzzles and you turn the book all around to "solve" it. But it's more for kids. Like if you can play one of his books at the library go for it, but I wouldn't recommend it to most adults. Good gift for the kids though haha. I've always like choose your own adventure books and I really can't believe it took this long until we got one where like solving a puzzle revealed the page you had to turn to. It's such a simple innovation that makes the books 10 times more interesting. Has anyone seen this done before 2120? I feel like this book should be sold in game shops everywhere. Not sure it is, but it's as much fun as Exit The Games which I really like as well. And thanks alaird for sharing the Petscop thing, looks really interesting! |
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Post by arecomicsevengood on Nov 24, 2023 16:59:09 GMT
The time I was reading the Jason Shiga book Leviathan at the shop I got stuck navigating the map and couldn't move on to the next part. I agree they would be good for kids but it's interesting - the idea of bringing choose your own adventure to comics might seem like it makes intuitive sense, but the books themselves are more like video games, downscaled to the lower tech book format as opposed to a computer. (There was a New Yorker article about the Choose Your Own Adventure books that said they declined in popularity as computer games became more widely available.) So Wylesol and Shiga are doing something genuinely new that still feels rooted in nostalgia for a different era. Kids do like the Shiga books, which is interesting, because to me the mechanics seem so close to stuff they wouldn't have experience with - but in the books they get to encounter it for the first time.
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Post by mikesheawright on Nov 24, 2023 17:39:50 GMT
man i loved Skinamarink so much, i saw it at IFC and the audience was 10000% silent and i was just fully immersed. i'm not sure how well that movie would hold up watching it at home but that experience really worked on me. i guess i can see the comparison to 2120 in a loose vibey way but they're so wildly different i would never say one is swiping from the other. but they're both sort of abstract tonal exercises, impressionist horror?
they both did hit a nostalgic note for me, mainly reminding me of physical spaces i encountered as a kid. Skinamarink felt like being 6 years old and waking up at 3 am with a fever and my parents are asleep and i'm confused about what to do and where to go. 2120 felt like walking through offices my parents worked in, but without all the workers. they both create familiar spaces and then tweak them to make them uncomfortable in really effective ways, without relying on any genre tropes at all. neat tricks that feel super fresh.
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Post by alaird on Nov 24, 2023 23:11:15 GMT
man i loved Skinamarink so much, i saw it at IFC and the audience was 10000% silent and i was just fully immersed. i'm not sure how well that movie would hold up watching it at home but that experience really worked on me. i guess i can see the comparison to 2120 in a loose vibey way but they're so wildly different i would never say one is swiping from the other. but they're both sort of abstract tonal exercises, impressionist horror? they both did hit a nostalgic note for me, mainly reminding me of physical spaces i encountered as a kid. Skinamarink felt like being 6 years old and waking up at 3 am with a fever and my parents are asleep and i'm confused about what to do and where to go. 2120 felt like walking through offices my parents worked in, but without all the workers. they both create familiar spaces and then tweak them to make them uncomfortable in really effective ways, without relying on any genre tropes at all. neat tricks that feel super fresh. i keep putting off watching skinnamarink...but that sounds great. but yeah really well said. like using nostalgia in a very specific way, and just zero-ing in on one universal feeling most people had as kids and then subverting it. i think youll def dig my recommendations. they all tap into some like weird quiet feelings from childhood that make for very potent horror. |
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