recombinatorial

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/16/26
Playtime: 5m

One of IF’s venerable capabilities is the use of interactive presentation to meter the pace of the work, in the most successful cases using that pacing to make a statement. Sequential art (just say it, comic books) truck in this too, using visual cues, frame design, lines and shadow to usher the eye across the page to specific pacing effect. Every now and then, someone comes along and creates a new visual vernacular that is so effective its novelty never seems to expire, and it becomes just part of the visual language. Will Eisner famously innovated continually through his career, expanding the vocabulary for everyone.

In IF, this vernacular is in page size, link usage, graphical layout of words, fonts and colors. And yes, timed text. (Perhaps heretically, I maintain effective examples of such exist! Just because a knife is dangerously sharp doesn’t mean it can’t be wielded to effect!) These tools are so familiar and pervasive, it is easy to think perhaps all of them have been discovered. Easy as it might have been for illustrators to think Little Nemo and Krazy Kat had exhausted the visual palette.

This work kind of did the unthinkable for me. It invented a new pacing convention that worked like gangbusters. This work is peppered with links, rendered in dark brown on a black background. The effect is to have them register to the eye, but be all-but- illegible. Clicking the link has the effect of turning them white, integrating them into the surrounding text. The effect is to slow the eyes down, demand an excavation of the reader, and subsequently put some weight on the discovered text beyond their plain meaning. It is an analogous effect to underlining passages or ALL CAPS-ing them, but with the added element of active reader participation and discovery.

How cool is that??? SO COOL. An interactive paradigm I have never seen before? It feels innovative and I kind of hope there isn’t any prior art. Yes, to put it on the scale of Will Eisner’s accomplishments is clearly hyperbole. But I wasn’t alive then, was I? As exciting as this was for readers of his day, I inevitably want to consider the impact on contemporary ARTISTS. That kind of watershed revelation, of unsuspected new frontiers in expression? Can you fault me for wanting to be in the vanguard of a taste of that? What a letdown if it exists elsewhere. Never tell me.

I say this because the thrill of this unfamiliar technique is my most dominant impression of this work. The narrative is loosely of a young mariner observing a cruel massacre on a beach as they are morbidly compelled to a singular path. Befitting its experimental UI elements, the work is abstract, poetic and impressionistic. This particular author has a history of battering aside my deeply ingrained resistance to poetry. For some reason, here this effort was less successful. I can’t quite suss out if I was so enamored of the innovative UI that I couldn’t spare the effort to push out of my comfort zone, or if the nature of the narrative and protagonist’s mindset just didn’t land for me. There are still banger phrases to enjoy like “flashlight under covers, red capillary net, light behind your eyes” but the impact of the narrative ultimately eluded me.

Which brings us back to the UI where the impact did NOT elude me. On the ‘final’ page of the work, after rounds of joyous experimentation, suddenly some links DID have function. Narrative function! The surprise of this somehow pushed the bounds just that much further! Clearly, I found recombinatorial worth my time as a showcase for an unfamiliar interactive paradigm. Narratively, I reserve gushing for subsequent implementations. Hey, Eisner had his critically lauded successors too.