We’ve reached the end of the Atrus-centric installments, which leaves only one direction to go: the backstory. Backstory is an important part of any fictional universe, as the additional details we learn from it add to the believability of the world overall. The Myst series, having created this vast edifice of D’ni to support Atrus’s story, has an almost infinite amount of space for additional backstory. We want to know more about D’ni, its inhabitants, and its history. Myst: The Book of Ti’ana, and our final two games, Uru and Myst V, give us a glimpse of the days before Atrus and the span of the D’ni society of old. As we move through the D’ni-centric arc, we’ll consider the following questions: can backstory itself be a story? If not, what does it take to make a backstory into a frontstory? Let’s begin.

As I stated back in the Book of Atrus review, the Myst novels as a whole become a sort of “backstory bible” which fills in the story gaps left by the games. This is most true of the Book of Ti’ana, the only installment of the series which takes place before the Fall of D’ni. The book opens with a tunneling operation in progress; the D’ni are mounting an expedition to find out what lies on the surface of Earth. (Note for the uninitiated: The Cavern, where the D’ni live, is below the surface of Earth, but the D’ni themselves are not from the surface. They linked directly into the Cavern from a different Age. And yes, that does mean that at some point someone wrote a “Book of Earth.”) Among those in the corps is Aitrus, grandfather of the Atrus-without-an-”i” who we know already. He is a young guildsman, brimming with enthusiasm and eager to set foot on the surface. Most of the storyline at this point revolves around the fact that the tunnel to the surface may or may not be completed due to various whims of D’ni politics. This is largely a false sort of tension, as we already know fromThe Book of Atrus that the tunnel was eventually completed, and while it succeeds in establishing that the project is controversial, the same could have been done in far less than the sixty-plus pages the book devotes to the subject. While the tunneling continues we also become acquainted with Veovis, a lord from the Guild of Writers who seeks to befriend Aitrus for reasons which are never fully explained. Toward the end of the chapter, Aitrus rescues Veovis from a tunnel collapse and their friendship is, for a time, cemented. The tunnel is ultimately completed but sealed and unused, the D’ni electing to continue existing in secret rather than expose their society to the unknown factors above. Much like the events it describes, this first act is a lengthy and inconsistent thing. While it establishes two of the book’s primary characters, much of what they do is humdrum routine. In one of its few breaks from this monotony it describes Aitrus going exploring by himself, but his “adventure” is arguably even less interesting, since character interaction, already pretty sparse, is rendered impossible. While the book opens in medias res (leaping straight into the story without trying to explain the context), it doesn’t really take full advantage of that technique, as it jumps in at a point before the story is actually interesting.

In the next act we cut to the surface, where we meet the title character, still called Anna at this point (she won’t actually be called Ti’ana until more than halfway to the end of the book). Anna lives in the desert with her father, a prospector who searches for valuable minerals on behalf of a vaguely-Arabic lord. When her father dies, she decides to explore a tunnel they discovered earlier, which naturally turns out to be the tunnel to D’ni. She manages to get all the way to the City itself, where she quickly becomes the center of a massive controversy. The D’ni, distraught over this violation of their precious secrecy, debate what to do with her: they won’t let her return to the surface now that she knows of their existence, so the only choices are to let her remain in D’ni or banish her to a Prison Age. Due to her intelligence and lack of ill intent, she’s allowed to stay in D’ni, and is taken in by Aitrus’s family. The story follows the predictable course from then on: Aitrus and Anna become friends, Atrus reveals D’ni secrets to Anna (such as the existence of Linking), and they eventually fall in love and decide to marry. The controversial relationship between Aitrus and Anna drives most of the conflict in the book, as many people, most notably Veovis, are against allowing Anna to be a member of society at all, much less to actually mix D’ni and human blood. The friendship between Aitrus and Veovis is ultimately destroyed by these tensions, and Veovis is so distraught over the issue that he becomes disenchanted with D’ni as a whole, driving him to become the evildoer we see in the final act.

If it seems like I’m glossing over these events, it’s because they’re honestly not that exciting. As in the opening, the characters are defined too vaguely to be very interesting, and much of the action follows the same format: Aitrus pushes the envelope with Anna, Veovis gets mad about it, and everyone moves on. Sure, the chip in Veovis’s shoulder keeps getting bigger, but no one else really changes much. The relationship between Aitrus and Anna is at least not saccharine-sweet, but neither is it that original. By their proximity we can predict that they’re going to fall for each other, and the book never once tries to make us think otherwise. This section is, sadly, just sort of predictable, and once we learn that the protagonists always get what they want, even though it makes Veovis angry, anything that might have passed for tension otherwise is somewhat defused.

The third and final act details the infamous Fall of D’ni, in which Veovis plays a major part. Veovis is overwrought by Aitrus’s marriage to Anna, believing that the immorality of their union is self-evident and unable to understand why the Council ruled in its favor. His friend Suahrnir, a member of the Guild of Maintainers (D’ni’s police force), encourages him to speak to a defrocked guildsman named Ae’garis, now a convicted criminal who writes fiery political screeds. While Veovis is often blamed as being the direct cause of the Fall, a close reading reveals that he’s little more than a useful puppet for Ae’garis and Suahrnir’s scheming. Ae’garis, frustrated at being accused of treachery (he maintains innocence) wants to see D’ni destroyed out of revenge. He’s a frustrating character because we’re never given any real insight into his personality: he’s just grade-A bottled evil, and his desire for revenge exceeds all reason. He has the potential to be a really interesting character, but the book never tells us enough about him to make him one. (The closest it comes to implying anything about his background is the fact that he carries a picture of a young woman in his journal, presumably a lover/mother/sister/daughter/etc. who is no longer part of his life. While the detail does sort of humanize him to a minute degree, it doesn’t come close to explaining why he’s so evil.) Even stranger is the fact that Suahrnir’s role in the Fall is often uncredited: we regularly hear (in other installments of the series) about the evils of Veovis and Ae’garis, but it’s Suahrnir who really enables the whole thing through his wide-reaching access to D’ni’s police and penal systems. It’s Suahrnir who gains access to critical areas of D’ni, Suahrnir who steals the Linking Books they need, and Suahrnir who arranges to spring Veovis from his Prison Age. His role in the whole thing is unparalleled; neither Veovis nor Ae’garis have the means to carry out widescale destruction without his help. It’s unfortunate, therefore, that his character is developed even less than Ae’garis’s, and his motives in all this are never explained whatsoever. This book is meant to explain the backstory of the Fall, but since Ae’garis and Suahrnir’s motives aren’t explored, our understanding of how it came about is not significantly expanded.

The Fall itself is brought about suddenly and efficiently. After Veovis is convicted of murder (which is apparently extremely rare in D’ni society), he is sentenced to death to prevent him from escaping his Prison Age to wreak further mayhem. Anna, however, intervenes on his behalf and he is instead sentenced to exile in a Prison Age made specially for him, one which is supposed to be secure. Ae’garis and Suahrnir manage to spring him anyway, and the three of them begin making plans for their final attack. They spread disease spores into D’ni’s sophisticated air system, saturating the Cavern with them and thereby wiping out most of the population within hours. They then spend the ensuing weeks linking corpses into every Age they can find in order to spread the disease as far as possible. Aitrus eventually succumbs to the disease and dies, but Anna and young Gehn escape to the surface to begin their lives anew. It’s a sweeping tragedy on an epic scale, inflicted by the few against the many. It’s a story which by all rights should be gripping and emotional, but instead it falls somewhat flat. The writing itself is the element at fault. Between the lack of strong characters and unevocative description, the book barely manages to rise above dry exposition. Much like real-life history, there are both engaging and boring ways to write about it, and The Book of Ti’ana has a tendency to land somewhere in the middle.

The Book of Atrus and The Book of Ti’ana together provide most of the backstory of the series, but the two books are not equally readable. While I would argue that The Book of Atrus succeeds in being a good novel taken by itself (that is, outside of the context of the series), The Book of Ti’ana does not. As we’ve established, it suffers from clunky pacing, extraneous subplots, and (most serious of all) vague, undefined characters. Few have any discernible motivations. Aitrus has a stated desire to set foot on the surface, but for the most part it doesn’t drive his actions (and the book places little significance on the moment that he attains it). The Book of Atrus’s success is in no small part due to the clear motivations of its primary characters, Atrus, Gehn, Katran, and Anna. Atrus wants to learn, and wants to return to Anna. Gehn wants to resurrect D’ni and become lord of the universe while doing so. Katran wants to leave Riven and distance herself from Gehn. Anna wants to ensure that Atrus is safe. Note especially the ways in which the characters’ motivations intermingle with the desires of the other characters, which leads to a lot of interesting dynamics. Also important is the fact that the characters’ motivations drive all their actions: Gehn, for example, has practically no interest in Atrus until the point when Atrus might be useful in his quest for godhood. Once Atrus instead proves to be a hindrance, Gehn tries to kill him. As the characters in The Book of Ti’ana don’t generally have strong motivations, the authors are unable to drive the plot this way. This is highly unfortunate, because that’s what makes a novel engaging to read.

Despite these issues, though, most Myst fans enjoy this book. This is because one’s enjoyment of a backstory-based work is proportional to one’s engagement in the “frontstory.” A similar situation exists in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth universe: its most familiar installments are The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, both “frontstory” type works with traditional storytelling techniques, but there’s also The Silmarillion. The Silmarillion is not for everyone; it’s a massive epic of backstory spanning numerous generations and conquests, and its style is often dry and forbidding. Casual fans, in general, can’t even begin to read it. Diehard fans, on the other hand, can read it straight through and enjoy it. Works of backstory cannot necessarily be universally appreciated: whether or not we enjoy them is partly determined by how interested we are in the information we’re learning from them. Naturally there’s still some expectation of quality (The Book of D’ni demonstrates that it’s possible to write backstory that even fans won’t appreciate), but fans will forgive minor narrative issues as long as they’re learning something about your fictional universe.

Up until this point we’ve seen D’ni as little more than a backdrop: a dead, faraway locale that we never really understand in much depth. With the Book of Ti’ana, Uru, and Myst V, D’ni itself becomes the primary character, and the themes of the D’ni-centric arc, pride and rebirth, are both introduced here. Where Atrus tends to paint a very favorable view of the D’ni and their accomplishments, the D’ni-centric arc will lead us in a very different direction, a muckraking expedition into the heart of D’ni’s sins, one which seems determined to force us to accept a tarnished image of a society we’ve been encouraged to admire. It’s a strange decision on the part of the creators, one which can be difficult to grapple with as players/readers, a subject we’ll discuss in more depth in the upcoming Uru reviews.

For now, let’s focus on these themes as they are introduced in this book. As stated above, the primary themes are pride and rebirth, and can be extended into two dichotomies of pride vs. humility and rebirth vs. sacrifice. Pride, specifically hubris, is generally depicted as the primary contributing factor of D’ni’s downfall. The concept of hubris, defined here as “presumption to challenge the gods,” is played very deliberately throughout the book. The most explicit example of this can be found in a passage near the beginning, in which Aitrus, admiring the consistent success of the massive tunneling operation, muses that D’ni is “godlike” in its defiance [pg. 42 in hardcover edition]. The book, and the series in general, never wavers on this point: the consequences of challenging the gods are dire. This extends to those who presume to be gods themselves, a valid concern to a race in possession of a technology which enables godlike powers. The D’ni, in fact, consider this presumption to be “the ultimate heresy” [pg. 312], a line which even Veovis is unwilling to cross. From Gehn and from Terahnee we can see the consequences of this conceit, but D’ni’s fall comes as the result of a more subtle form of hubris, the kind Aitrus observes in the tunnel. The D’ni are so proud of their society that they are unwilling to admit any outsiders at all, and Veovis is so proud that he would sooner see D’ni destroyed than allow it to be contaminated. Pay particular attention to the chapters immediately following Anna’s arrival, in which most of the D’ni expect her to be little more than an animal, assuming themselves to be the undeniable paragon of creation—as clear an example of hubris as one could want. D’ni’s fall, though inflicted by three individuals working alone, comes as a sort of divine retribution, the ultimate consequence of its deep-seated pride. Here the second dichotomy comes into play: the citizens of D’ni die to atone for the sins of the collective society, while Anna and her son escape alive to “begin again” on the surface. This idea also recurs throughout the series; every great calamity ends with something rising from the ashes to begin a new era. The theme of sacrifice vs. rebirth is particularly critical to D’ni itself; the long-running controversy regarding whether to rebuild the City is largely driven by conflicting opinions regarding whether it represents a necessary sacrifice or an innocent victim. D’ni, for all its success, was a highly flawed society, and The Book of Ti’ana is in many ways the first installment of a sweeping exposé. The first level of corruption has been brought to light, and as the series progresses we will see just how deep it goes.

Overall, The Book of Ti’ana is best described as a work which sets the stage for later installments. While it’s enjoyable to those who are engaged enough in the material, it doesn’t hold up that well on its own. It’s a book with a clear goal (explain how D’ni fell), and for the most part it reaches its goal in a fairly businesslike and efficient way. This is, I think, where the book was sold short. There is nothing wrong with this story; in fact, it has the potential to be an incredible epic. Instead, though, it comes down on the wrong side of the old “show-don’t-tell” technique, favoring a dry, remote style rather than taking the effort to really put us inside the characters’ heads. One of the most effective passages, to me, is that which describes the young Gehn’s experiences in the Guild house. Here we get a real sense of his feelings, his acute solitude and his fear of his fellow apprentices. In this brief moment, the reader can feel Gehn, can in a sense be Gehn, and is thus drawn into the story in a way which rarely occurs elsewhere in the book. The Book of Ti’ana is not a failure by any means, but a few more moments like this could have made it something great.

Other thoughts:

• If you thought the feminist reading of Riven was depressing, well, this one is the real doozy. As usual, D’ni is depicted as a male-dominated society which rarely allows women any status. At the beginning of the book we have a pretty typical Pandora’s Box scenario. In this case the metaphorical box is opened by men, but the chaotic element they unleash is, naturally, a woman. Had a male surface-dweller entered D’ni, the effect would have been negligible because even if a woman wanted to marry him, she wouldn’t have the political clout to fight for it. (This assumes that there were no gay Guildsmen, but that’s an issue for another time.) Anna upsets the status quo because her sex itself poses significant problems to its conception of order, as she is unwilling to submit to the status they’ve assigned to women. As the book goes on, she continues to be depicted as the only woman with any real influence, but of course practically every suggestion she makes drives D’ni closer to its downfall, culminating with her disastrous suggestion to pardon Veovis. To summarize the setup as bluntly as possible: The boys-only club was getting along just fine until a girl broke in, and then it was totally destroyed.
• To accomplish their evil plots, the villains use a lot of linking-book trickery, such as linking straight to the panel of another linking book (allowing an instantaneous link into another Age). Most of these schemes are directly contradicted in Uru, which shows that the Guild of Maintainers’ facilities on Gahreesen contained dozens of safeguards designed to prevent exactly this kind of crime. Therefore much of this book is probably now non-canonical.
• In The Book of Atrus, we see Gehn’s skewed idea of the point of the Korfah V’jah ceremony, which he believes to be an initiation into godhood performed immediately after the completion of a first Age. Here we learn that the Korfah V’jah was actually a rare honor bestowed upon particularly good Writers, sort of the D’ni equivalent of a Nobel Prize. It’s a pretty typical, and telling, misinterpretation on Gehn’s part.
• The D’ni are pretty lucky that the Cavern happened to be underneath land, given that most of Earth’s surface is covered by water. Strangely enough, this potential disaster is given no discussion at all, even though pouring the entire ocean into the Cavern would be much more calamitous than trouble with the natives.

Next time: Uru: Ages Beyond Myst.

Screenshot from Uru is property of Cyan Worlds.

Sequels are a notoriously difficult thing to pull off, and Riven is an example of an unequivocal success. It took Myst’s design and built upon it rather than simply aping it, creating a completely fresh take on the existing concept. Beyond the continued storyline and identical control scheme, there is practically no resemblance between the two. It isn’t so much Myst II as it is Myst 2.0– a second release which corrects the shortcomings of an earlier version. Riven is a masterpiece, an example of what can happen when creators consider their past mistakes, aim high, and ignore the risks.

Riven’s intro picks up where Myst’s great anticlimax left off. In Atrus’s previous appearance, he spoke of another foe and mentioned that Katran was being held prisoner in an unnamed age. (For the sake of consistency, I will be referring to Catherine as Katran at all times.) Following a delightfully artistic new Cyan logo, we again see Atrus sitting at his desk. Rand Miller’s acting here hits a degree of subtlety that I don’t think he ever quite reached again: Atrus’s relief at seeing the Stranger again is clearly visible, but there’s also a palpable undercurrent of worry in his voice. There are innumerable ways that Atrus’s plan could backfire, and Rand’s performance conveys his feelings perfectly.

The seriously flawed linking panel is further cause for alarm: we know from Myst what those panels are supposed to look like, and the flickering, noisy image imbues a subtle dread in the player. As it fills the screen and is replaced by the Riven logo, we are primed. We  don’t know what we’re about to see, but we sense that it’s going to be a wild ride.

Likewise, our first experience in Riven itself is a carefully-orchestrated glimpse into the chaos of the Age. The immediate appearance of cage bars is far removed from the inviting vistas we’ve become accustomed to in Atrus’s ages, and speaks volumes not only about Gehn’s suspicious nature but also the degree to which he’s prepared for any contingencies. Before we can give much thought to escaping, however, we meet another character: Cho, Gehn’s minion. He stammers incoherently, relieves us of the trap book needed to capture Gehn, and then suddenly clutches his neck and collapses. After a lengthy pause he’s dragged away and we catch a brief glimpse of a man in bizarre camouflage, who silently lets allows us out of the cage before slipping away. The whole thing is over so quickly we hardly know how to react, and it summarizes Riven’s unstable status quo quite neatly.

It’s also important to recall that in the previous game, we practically never saw human beings in the flesh. This absence of living humans often imparted a feeling of invulnerability to the player; a sense that even in the most disturbing environments nothing can happen to you. When we’re physically accosted by a person within seconds of arriving on Riven, that assumption is immediately dismissed. The familiar feeling of safety from the original game is replaced with a sort of hanging dread: there are people on Riven, some of them are hostile, and they could be anywhere.

So, while we’re on the subject of hostile people, let’s stop and talk about Gehn for a bit. Moreso than any other game in the series, Riven is about one specific character. Riven is Gehn’s age, Gehn’s prison, Gehn’s burden. It is his life, his creation, and his toy box. In the Myst review I talked about how Sirrus and Achenar’s characters are revealed by their effect on the Ages, but Riven takes this principle even farther, because Gehn does more than just leave his fingerprints on Riven: he tears it apart from the top down, rebuilding it according to his whims. The very landscape, therefore, becomes his symbol, and the relationship between Gehn and Riven is the most complex part of the game’s story.

The Golden Dome is perhaps Riven’s most visible landmark; a massive, shining thing that’s visible from nearly everywhere. Since most of the inhabitants of Riven aren’t allowed to go anywhere near the thing, most who see it will understand it only as a symbol of Gehn’s power and inscrutability. The player, however, eventually learns the Dome’s true purpose: to serve as a housing for Gehn’s generator system. The generator consists of two components: a big piston-like thing perhaps eight feet tall, and a boiler about the size of a Volkswagon. The entire assembly is perhaps a hundredth the size of the Dome, if that. So there’s absolutely no practical reason for the Dome exist at all; it is simply a facade Gehn throws up to impress his subjects. Gehn is a pharaoh–both a god and a king, and thus has needs beyond those of gods or kings. The Dome is his pyramid, a structured commissioned by a human king but representative of superhuman godhood. Since Gehn has been effectively stripped of all his godlike powers at this point, the Dome’s arresting existence serves as a physical reminder of his omnipotence. It is perhaps the most striking symbol of Gehn’s relationship to Riven.

Another very important symbol of this relationship is the wooden number-learning game we find in Riven’s small schoolroom. The game is designed to teach a rudimentary understanding of the D’ni numeral system: each time the game is activated, a D’ni numeral appears in a window, and one of two hapless figurines are lowered closer to the jaws of a wahrk-inflicted death, the degrees of their descent describing the number. The “wahrk gallows,” we come to understand, are Gehn’s preferred method of execution. Victims are lowered, head-down, into water-filled pens where they are eaten alive by Riven’s alpha predator, the Great Wahrk. The Rivenese reverence for the Wahrk is clear: they view it with a mixture of admiration and fear, and we’re given the impression that it was their primary god before Gehn’s arrival. Gehn’s appropriation of the Wahrk is typical of his pragmatic and callous approach to everything; the people view the Wahrk as important, so Gehn simply styles himself as being the Wahrk’s master and uses its dramatic power to instill fear in his subjects. That this imagery works its way into a humble teaching tool is telling. Gehn never passes up any opportunity to remind the people of his primary axioms: I am Gehn. I am your creator and ruler. You are nothing to me.

Moving beyond Gehn for a bit (to the degree that we can considering that he’s everywhere), let’s talk about the islands. The game starts and ends on Temple Island, right in the shadow of the Golden Dome (although most people probably don’t notice it right away since the game’s navigation system discourages looking upward). Temple Island’s primary features are its titular temple, the Golden Dome, the Gateroom, and (of course) the Star Fissure, which is covered over and not really recognizable as such until the end of the game. The Gateroom is primarily a puzzle, but it’s also a sort of mini-temple, adorned with some of Gehn’s symbols and a series of stained-glass images describing Gehn’s “defeat” of Atrus, subsequent rule, and (apparently) his ultimate ascent to Heaven. The Gateroom is off-limits to anyone outside of Gehn’s elite, but he never hesitates to preach to the converted. The main temple is likewise exclusive to his own staff, but he still sets up a complex hologram projector allowing him to appear as a larger-than-life phantasm when he wants to. Temple Island’s primary function is to assert Gehn’s superiority, which is ironic considering it is also the site of his original defeat.

From Temple Island we travel to Jungle Island, the one part of Riven where the natives are still allowed to go. Jungle Island is by far the largest of the game’s islands, and is the setting of much of the game’s story. The Rivenese village is impressive, but we learn quickly how fearful the people have grown under Gehn’s rule, watching as they sound the alarm and scurry away every time we arrive. We also see the fingerprints of the Moiety here, their trail of wooden eyes leading the way to their secret Age. The Rivenese wildlife is also most in evidence here, and we become familiar with the local flora and fauna to a degree not seen in the later games. Exile’s Edanna has more-numerous distinct species perhaps, but they’re all so whimsical that they tend to push suspension of disbelief a bit too far. Riven’s wildlife, by contrast, is both a background and a puzzle element: while we learn about the beetles and sunners, we also come to recognize things like the fruit-bearing “mushrooms” and the little red flowers that grow beside the volcanic chasms. (In one particularly inspired detail, these flowers also appear as offerings in Gehn’s temple, the great risk required to obtain them symbolic of the giver’s devotion.) We also get a taste for the villager’s reverence for the landscape compared to Gehn’s cavalier industrialization: the villagers are so close to their environment that animals were a natural subject for the Moiety’s combination lock, but to Gehn the entire jungle just represents so much raw material to be thrown in his grinder. Jungle Island is perhaps the game’s strongest arena; the place where the interests of Gehn, the villagers, the Moiety, and the Age itself play against each other in the most visible ways.

The other two islands, Survey and Crater, are the lesser part of the game’s four main locations. They aren’t less beautiful or less interesting than Temple or Jungle, they’re just so strictly assigned to Gehn’s research that we don’t see much of the conflict relationship between Gehn and the other characters. Still, they’re home to some of the game’s most striking imagery: the copper-saturated lake, the golden elevator, the giant stone spikes, the Wahrk viewing chamber–and, naturally, the Wahrk itself. The primary gameplay function of these islands is to provide information needed to solve the game’s two uber-puzzles, the Moiety Cave and the “Waffle Iron.” The way this information is doled out is really quite ingenious, as all of the information sources are designed to have in-universe functionality as well. The map room, from a gameplay perspective, exists only to show the player where the Firemarble Domes are, but from an in-universe perspective it’s also part of Gehn’s survey equipment, used to track the gradual drift of Riven’s islands. These two islands exemplify the designers’ attention to detail, taking necessary gameplay clues and presenting them within something inherently interesting.

However, this leads me to the elephant (or, perhaps, the Wahrk) in the room: Riven’s two uber-puzzles are just too hard. Both are based upon principles of gathering and applying information, but neither clearly specify what kind of information they need. This is particularly true of the Waffle Iron: to get the combination right requires the player to learn two different symbols for each island (the pixel outline and the dome eye symbol), a color associated with each island (one of which is broken), and the location of each firemarble dome…and none of this is ever stated outright. The player is just expected to guess that the Waffle Iron is looking for the dome positions, and the color-coding system still requires significant trial and error beyond that. The entire puzzle is dependent on so many different factors that it’s easy to get it wrong even when you know the principle of the solution–a principle which, I reiterate, is never stated outright. The Moiety Cave is somewhat better conceived–the concept of the eye sequence is not difficult to follow, and it’s easy to match the animals to their vocalizations and corresponding petroglyphs. There’s still the matter of the missing piece, though…the Fish eye can only be seen out-of-context on Gehn’s desk. The only “clues” associating it to fish are its location in the middle of the lake and the fact that it appears in the middle of a fish-shaped shadow when viewed from a certain angle… and it’s barely visible in either case. While these puzzles do make sense in-universe, they take things a bit too far to be actually feasible as gameplay. Some people have decoded them without help, I’m sure, but for most players they’re a trip straight to the cheat guide, and whenever that happens it means something has gone wrong with the game design.

On the subject of game design, there’s a major but subtle difference between Myst and Riven. In Myst, we begin with no knowledge of the story and we must uncover it piece by piece. Riven, by contrast, starts us off with pretty much the entire story spelled out: Gehn thought he was a god, so Atrus trapped him on Riven, and then Katran got trapped there later. Anyone who hasn’t read The Book of Atrus will, naturally, be a little behind on this, but the game quickly brings them up to speed with the journals. This approach means that instead of learning a story by witnessing its aftermath, we instead witness the aftermath of a story we already know. The effect this has on the player’s interpretation of the content is worth considering. I don’t know that Myst’s approach would have worked as well in sprawling environments like Riven; there’s just too much to take in without some idea of the context. Delivering the backstory ahead of time gives the player a head start to understanding the environment.

For all the strengths of Riven’s backstory, though, its “frontstory” is practically nonexistant. Given that Riven is an inhabited, and therefore active, environment, one might expect there to be a fair amount going on in the game’s “present day.” Instead the entire environment seems to exist largely in stasis. No one is operating Gehn’s paper factory, the schoolroom is abandoned, and we never witness any event of consequence. There are a few minor details which imply activity, such as Gehn’s gun and pipe disappearing from his laboratory, the fleeing scribe, and the infamous “girl in the jungle,” but for the most part nothing seems to be happening. The only current event we hear about is Gehn’s work on the “sanctuary for the villagers.” Later, in Myst III and IV, we will see a more conscious effort made to involve the player in an unfolding storyline, but Riven, for all its successes, falls short in this department. That said, this shortcoming is eclipsed by the virtuosity with which the game presents the story assets it has. Players are unlikely to notice that there’s no real storyline, as they’re too engrossed in the trappings of the backstory.

In the previous essay, I promised we’d be looking at Katran in more depth, so here we go: Katran is one of the most intriguing characters of the series. After leaving Riven at the end of The Book of Atrus she submitted herself to what amounted to voluntary exile, leaving her homeland forever to seek a new life of adventure and exploration. In doing so she also condemned her people to become the permanent subjects of a tyrant in the interest of protecting strangers from becoming his victims. Meanwhile, her own life brought its own complications. An accident lead her to develop a phobia for Linking, thus effectively ending her own Writing and explorations, making her little better than a prisoner on Myst Island. When she finally makes her way back to her own people (as the result of being hoaxed by her own sons), she discovers that even among them she’s now an exile, having been remade into a messiah figure. Katran is perennially of two worlds, and being so split surely leads to a deeply complex state of mind. We get some sense of this from her Riven journal, but for the most part Katran’s character seems distanced from us. This is, I suspect, because Myst’s storytelling relies upon the examination of peoples’ personal spaces, and we never actually see any of Katran’s personal spaces. The closest we come is her (shared) bedroom in Myst IV, which has practically no decoration worth a second thought. Tomanha’s botany lab is implied to be one of her haunts, too, but again, there’s not much there that could describe any character trait beyond an interest in plants. Neglecting Katran, a character who is in many ways far more interesting than Atrus, is one of the greatest tragedies of the entire series. Her journals in Riven and Myst IV are about as close as we ever come to learning about her, but it’s too little too late. Her in-the-flesh appearance in Riven is fairly strong; Sheila Goold portrays her as enigmatic and even a little threatening, which in my opinion is a much better interpretation than the overly-jolly mother we see her as in Myst III. But even so, we can’t escape the fact that Katran is effectively in a Rapunzel situation on Riven, literally pacing around a small cell waiting for someone to save her. Even in a game set in her own homeland, Katran ends up getting sold short.

The character stealing the whole show, of course, is Gehn. We’ve discussed his relationship to the land already, but we still need to take a look at the man himself. Gehn is a similarly complex character to Katran, but unlike Katran, his complexity is fairly visible. The question which recurs throughout the game is whether Gehn has “changed” or whether he’s still “the man he once was.” This begs the question, naturally: who was Gehn before? He’s fairly one-dimensional as seen in The Book of Atrus: a power-crazed maniac and dyed-in-the-wool pragmatist who sees his own son as little more than a means to an end. He believes that he’s a god despite all evidence to the contrary and expects constant submission from the peoples he visits. His ultimate goal is to resurrect the D’ni civilization and rule the universe. Is his depiction in Riven any different? All these traits are on display, yes, but we begin to see more shades of Gehn’s character as well, particularly in his long monologue upon first visiting his private age, in which he expresses a multitude of regrets and explicitly claims to have changed. Furthermore, he has actually accepted some degree of responsibility for the Rivenese, albeit of a callous “white man’s burden” variety, working sincerely and dutifully on a new Age for them to escape to. While much of his humility is insincere, even false humility is a new thing for Gehn as we previously understood him. The way Gehn’s appearance is handled is fascinating: we build up a mental image of him, and of his personality, based on what we’ve read, heard, and seen, but meeting him face-to-face reveals him as a real person, not just the evil caricature we imagined.  This is further reinforced by his private journal, particularly the barely-legible passage in which he mourns the death of his wife. Indeed, Gehn’s complexity as a character is so pronounced that I often feel downright dirty carrying him around in a book after he’s captured, and more than a little annoyed at Atrus that he’d find such a fate acceptable.

Strangely enough, following only the “intended” (ie, winning) narrative of the game gives a somewhat narrower view of Gehn than we can see otherwise. Riven is a rare case in which the “bad endings” actually contribute significantly to one’s understanding of the characters. In any of the other games, the bad endings have no more depth than “whoops! shouldn’t have trusted the villain!” but Riven’s are somewhat different, in part because we’re never actually asked to trust Gehn. The bad endings are all reached by various misunderstandings of instructions, whether they involve calling Atrus at the wrong time, misusing the Trap Book, or disregarding Gehn’s warning not to try his patience. The Big Choice is here depends on our understanding of the Trap Book concept, assuming that the we’ve read Atrus’s journal and understand that when Gehn uses the book we’ll be released again. We’re never given the opportunity to choose between Gehn’s word and a “good guy’s” word, so there is no “sorry, you chose Gehn” ending. Instead, the bad endings reveal nuances of Gehn’s character that we don’t get to see otherwise, and establish that while he has changed, he has also stayed the same. We do get some sense of this when we see him pack his gun before using the Trap Book, but seeing him disown and kill Atrus in the worst of all the bad endings shows just how deep his hatred still runs. And yet, to me, the most chilling ending of them all is the one in which he kills the player out of impatience, calmly explaining, “You see? I have changed. There was a time when I might have let you live.” If you never have, I encourage you to check out all the bad endings. While they aren’t, in a continuity sense, “true,” watching them against the lies of Gehn’s monologue tells more about his character than anything else in the game.

So we capture Gehn and release Katran (who then proceeds to start breaking everything), thus initiating the endgame. The pacing here is quite adept; it takes a long time to get to this point, but the game doesn’t drag its feet to the ending. Katran’s destructiveness, while it doesn’t exactly make sense in context, does serve to force the player to the only place still worth going: the telescope on Temple Island. The solution to the telescope puzzle is spelled out pretty clearly in Katran’s journal, so it’s a simple matter to break the glass and invoke the outtro movie. While Myst had a non-ending, Riven’s ending is superb, showing us the both payoff of our actions and the foreshadowed destruction of Riven. Still, watching Riven start to collapse around us is pretty alarming, especially given that Katran isn’t there yet. Seeing them reunite at what seems to be the last second is a relief, and Katran’s hesitant link-away is a touching moment.

The one sour note of the whole thing is that the Fissure doesn’t really seem quite as safe as Atrus believes it is. While the characters maintain that it has a breathable atmosphere, it must be thin at best given the intense vacuum effect we witness when it opens. Atrus seems to think it’s safe just because it delivered his Myst book safely, but a book can withstand significantly more beating than a human body. Using the Fissure is a leap of faith at best, but since the decision isn’t even ours to make, it’s more of a “fall of faith.” The game does its best to reassure us about the Fissure’s safety, but if I was really there (and these games always encourage you to imagine you are) I’d be pretty upset about this arrangement.

Atrus’s closing monologue, as we watch Riven drift away, echoes the opening of Myst and ends the game on a soft, pensive note. The appearance of the credits, accompanied by one of Robyn Miller’s catchier themes, brings a note of finality to the story. Really, the entire series could have ended here. It’s as strong an ending as you could want.

Riven isn’t perfect. It has some shortcomings, and I’m certainly not about to argue that it’s somehow universally accessible. It’s more like an “art-house film,” filled with complexities for those who want to look for it, but requiring more patience to fully unlock than most people are willing to invest. The surface of the game is rich on its own, but an even greater degree of depth is opened to anyone willing to look at it in detail. That is its greatest strength, and that is what makes Riven come alive more than any other installment of the series.

Notes

• While Gehn’s fingerprints are prominent in-universe, Richard Vander Wende’s influence is the most visible from a production perspective. While he didn’t create the game single-handedly, his work on the story and atmosphere is so pervasive that the whole thing seems to have been lifted straight out of his imagination. I don’t know the circumstances of his separation from the series, but had he stayed on, the series would likely have been very different. On the other hand, it might have just made the later games more like Riven, and while that would hardly be a bad thing, it would have made Riven itself less unique.
• As pointed out in one game walkthrough on YouTube, Atrus and Katran can both somehow see that Gehn is inside the Trap Book, even though we can’t see anything. Luckily Gehn can’t seem to tell if the book is occupied, either, or the whole thing would have been for naught.
• There’s a crucial weakness to the Fire Marble Domes’ design: two people working in tandem could easily break into a dome. One would sit in front of the combination lock and the other would press the button on the scope, causing the dome to close. Whoops!
• The Moiety’s portable linking-book-enhancer highlights an amusing difference between Gehn and Katran’s characters. Katran improvises the device into her new world, as is her style, but once Gehn finds out about it he assumes that it was something she read about somewhere, as would be his style.
• Where did Cyan Find Sheila Goold (Katran) and John Keston (Gehn)? Goold still has hardly any credits to her name fifteen years later, and Keston’s only IMDB entry is for Riven. They’re both capable actors. Who are they? Where did they come from? Where are they going?
• Despite having written over 4,000 words, there are still an endless number of things I didn’t even touch on, particularly the significance of the number 5. It’s fun to watch it recur in the game, as it tends to pop up in the weirdest places–including, of course, the game’s five discs. Gehn says that 5 was important not just to him but to the D’ni–but strangely enough it doesn’t seem to appear at all in Uru.
• Gehn’s personal effects, namely the imager and the photographs of Aitrus and Keta, seem a little odd when you consider that he must have already brought them to Riven when he was stranded there. The photographs are small enough, but does he really bring that bulky imager everywhere? Also telling: he doesn’t have a photograph of Anna.
• I played Riven on my Linux machine this time, using Wine. Everything worked perfectly except the combination lock on Prison Island. That was pretty annoying.
• Am I the only one who can’t stop clicking on the sink in Gehn’s bedroom? I find that endlessly entertaining.
• The one thing that really dates this game is the resolution, particularly in the live-action sequences, in which peoples’ faces are often too blurry to even make out. I’d pay good money for an HD release instead of the recent cell phone version. (I know this would take tons and tons of re-rendering, but maybe it could be worked out somehow… computers are much faster than they were in 1997.)
• The graphics themselves, I should note, are still quite lovely. If the game were made today there would be more polygon definition in the rock face, but for the most part Riven trumps even Myst IV in realism. It’s mostly those famous Santa Fe textures, I think.

Next time: Myst: The Book of D’ni

Screenshots property of Cyan Worlds.

Myst: The Book of Atrus was published in 1995, well into the heyday of the original Myst but still two years before the release of Riven. It appears to set two basic goals for itself: to expand the backstory of the original game and set the stage for the new one. The book is credited to Rand and Robyn Miller, Myst’s foremost creators, with coauthor credit to David Wingrove, an SF writer previously known for Chung Kuo, a sprawling epic about a future in which Imperial China rules the world. (In true diehard-fan fashion, I attempted to read the first of these volumes, with no success.) As a work of literature, the novel is probably slightly better than your average science fiction novel, at least stylistically. As a part of the Myst canon, this novel (and the other two) form a sort of backstory-bible, one which became so integral to the series that the games eventually came to depend on it.

I must begin by saying a few words about the prose and style of the book. I don’t know who’s ultimately responsible, Wingrove or the Millers, but some of the writing tends toward a strange kind of triteness. The characters often speak (both aloud and inwardly) with an awkward properness that sounds not unlike an American’s conception of a stereotypical British person: “‘I hoped the trapdoor would be open, but it looks like we shall have to force our way in.’” (Gehn, pg. 116). Internal monolgues tend to be even worse, combining the same robotic phrasing with bizarrely exaggerated emphases: “A girl. It was a girl. … What in Kerath’s name was she doing? Then, with a little jolt, he understood. Washing! She was washing! That little mound beside her was a pile of sodden clothes!” (p. 145) Unless Atrus has some hitherto-unmentioned fascination with laundry, there’s no way those three exclamation points are justified. There’s also a lot of description, which is not necessarily bad, but it’s of a particularly lifeless variety that basically lists the objects that are present and nothing more. Granted, vibrant description is very hard to write, but in a series revolving around books of vibrant description, I’d have liked to see more of an effort made. Still, the vast majority of people reading these books are probably not stylistic nitpickers like myself, and admittedly it’s still better written than most novelizations I’ve seen.

That out of the way, let’s move on to the story content. The Book of Atrus opens with characters we’ve never seen before, Gehn and Anna. Gehn’s wife (here unnamed) has just died in childbirth and he’s distraught. He spurns his newborn son, storms in the direction of a volcano, and disappears. It’s as good an opening as any. It introduces us to Gehn and his callous, dispassionate manner. We don’t really learn anything about Anna at first, or even who these people are, but the Prologue is only a few pages long, so it doesn’t matter. The book won’t keep us in suspense for long.

The next chapter opens by talking about what “the boy” is doing. On Page 6 we finally learn his name is Atrus, thus tying together the connection between the book and the games. Atrus has an inquiring and observant mind. Through the course of the first few chapters, we see him continually conducting both experimental and observational science, which is consistent with the Atrus we know from before (sans elevator construction). Anna, his grandmother, becomes one of the most highly-developed characters never to appear in the games, and Atrus’s insatiable curiosity and irrepressible ethics are both qualities she nurtures specifically. Their life together is the primary concern of the first several chapters, which tend to get a bit draggy at times, since no real plot has been introduced yet.

The setting of the first few chapters is The Cleft, a large crevasse at the foot of a barely-active volcano which conceals the only entrance to D’ni. In the novels, it’s located somewhere in the Middle East, but it was retconned to New Mexico in Uru (possibly as a nod to the prominent role of Santa Fe, NM in Cyan’s games?). The Cleft plays a prominent role in both The Book of Atrus and The Book of Ti’ana, which made it one of the most highly-anticipated locations to appear in the games, second only to the D’ni city itself. In this novel, it serves as a symbol for Atrus’s forcibly-stolen past, one that he dwells on constantly. (His backwards-looking fixation on The Cleft is somewhat strange considering that his future lies in constant exploration, but I suppose the extenuating circumstances allow him some homesickness.) To Gehn, the Cleft represents a dead end, a hollow substitute for D’ni’s greatness. In the context of the Myst epic, The Cleft subtly echoes the form and function of The Fissure (particularly in a scene early in the book in which the flooded Cleft reflects the starry sky). Ultimately the Cleft represents a sort of humility, the concept which D’ni was also supposed to represent. The theme of humility will recur throughout the series, as we will see in later essays.

At the end of the first act of the book, Gehn emerges from the volcano and takes a barely-willing Atrus to D’ni with him. The underground city of D’ni, as I have already mentioned, is the most significant location in the series, despite its only marginal appearances in the Atrus-centered games (Myst through Myst IV). This is due to its overwhelming importance to the backstory. The D’ni civilization pioneered the Linking technology we see throughout the games, and the epic and sudden failure of their “best-laid plans” looms threateningly in the background through the rest of the series. And yet neither the D’ni city nor the D’ni people are the primary subjects of this book. While we get a sense of the grandeur of the fallen City, most of the book does not take place there, and the nature of the fall is not discussed.

Much of the tension in the book is between Atrus and Gehn’s differing philosophies, which begin to surface here and will be echoed throughout the series. Gehn sees the D’ni society as a great edifice whose death was undeserved, and believes his duty is to remake it into a sort of underground Mount Olympus where he and his descendants can rule as gods. Atrus sees D’ni’s fall as lamentable but ultimately a thing of the past, and is primarily interested in exploration in a fashion more like tourism than conquest. Gehn also believes that the act of Writing is an act of outright creation, while Atrus subscribes to the canonical opinion that Writing simply creates a link to a preexisting world. (It’s worth noting that Gehn’s beliefs force acceptance of the Omphalos Hypothesis, a Creationist posit which holds that God creates a past history into a newly-created world.) Even their writing styles are at odds with each other, Gehn cutting and pasting from existing works while Atrus starts from scratch and works organically. Their outlooks are entirely at odds with each other, and their cooperation is thus doomed to failure immediately.

Rather than giving a blow-by-blow rehashing of the plot, which would be boring and unnecessary, let’s skip ahead to the appearance of Riven. Gehn’s “Fifth Age” would be the primary setting of the next game, but it’s also foreshadowed extensively here. Still, there’s little in the way of recognizable landmarks between the book and the game. There’s some discussion of Riven’s iconic sheer cliffs, unique water, and of the giant tree (which appears in the game only as a stump), but for the most part there aren’t any specific locations from the book that reappear in the game, which prevents much opportunity for the foreshadowed-visit effect I mentioned in the previous review.

While on Riven, Atrus meets Katran, a young Rivenese woman and Writing prodigy. There is thankfully no overhashed love story between them; they simply appear to enjoy each other’s company and we are left to assume that their physical relationship blossomed later. Katran (or “Catherine,” as Atrus insists on calling her) is an intriguing character, and one to which the series doesn’t really give enough attention. She has a strong personality, and yet is regularly forced into a passive role in the story (more on this in the Riven review). In this book one of her strongest traits is her writing style, which is to disregard all presupposed rules and build Ages which seem to defy the laws of existence. (We won’t get to actually visit one of these Ages until Myst IV, and unfortunately the expectations built up for them will be largely wasted.) Little is learned about Katran here, though, and much of what we’ve heard of her won’t be explored until Myst IV (a game in which she doesn’t even appear in person), and then only in passing. We’ll look at her in greater depth later, but sadly she will always remain the most neglected character in the whole epic.

The conclusion of the book is what ties it most strongly to the games. Katran presents Atrus with the Age of Myst (AKA Myst Island), creating a direct connection between the book and the game for the first time. While Atrus and Gehn fight through a climactic final confrontation, the Age of Riven begins falling into the state of decay which it will display throughout the next game, huge chasms opening as the island begins to break apart. And, most notably, a bit of Katran’s trademark whimsical experimentation creates the Fissure. Atrus traps Gehn on Riven (setting the stage for the next game) as he jumps into the Fissure, tying the book into Myst’s opening video as he loses his Linking Book into the starry expanse. The Book of Atrus concludes by echoing the words from that opening as Atrus pens them for the first time, a neat and clever framing device that completes the circle between the book and the games.

All in all, The Book of Atrus works well. Its ideas build upon those of the games and it helps explain many aspects of the backstory. Much of the content of both this book and the others is never overtly discussed in the games, a fact which means the games are often missing pieces of context for players who’ve not read these “manuals.” Whether this use of print books as dumping grounds for backstory was a good idea I’m not sure–I think to a degree it encouraged laziness in in-game storytelling, but on the other hand, there’s something to be said for allowing the written word, still the most versatile storytelling tool of all, to fill in parts of the story the games could not cover on their own. Taken on its own, this book is no classic of Western literature, but as a part of a larger epic it does an admirable job.

Other thoughts

• Much as I complained about the style of this book, I was struck by how much it influenced some of my own early work, particularly in Remnants, a novel I wrote as a teenager. Much of the descriptive style is the same, particularly the tendency to expound upon about the characters’ surroundings. (One of my friends told me that my novel had too many chapters that began “with birds singing or birds not singing.”)
• The line “Why, it was like staring through a window!” (p. 90) pained me the first time I read it and my annoyance with it has not lessened with time.
• Why does the cat get killed? This part has always bothered me because it doesn’t seem to serve any useful purpose to the story. Anna feeds us some line about how Flame’s death somehow moves Atrus “into the adult world [and] away from her,” but through most of the book we see Atrus constantly dwelling on Anna, not moving beyond her. And since the cat is never mentioned again, her death appears to have no lasting effect on Atrus whatsoever. My suggestion: scratch the cat (pun intended).
• Gehn claims that it’s not possible to Link to the surface, ignoring not only the obvious fact that an intermediate Age could be used but also the fact that such an Age already exists. (Nexus, seen in Uru.) We can explain this contradiction, of course, by the fact that Gehn would make up any excuse to avoid going topside.

Next time: Riven: The Sequel to Myst.

Some background: The first things I produced related to Realm were two pages of color vector-graphics comics. I made these the day after I first had the idea to do a humorous fantasy comic. Already then the title was Realm (the one factor which has never varied), but nothing else was remotely similar. As you can imagine, there was no planning whatsoever. I had the idea in the evening and I was vectoring (do you have a better verb?) the comics first thing the next morning. There were no developed characters, plot, setting, or anything that you might expect in any kind of quality production. As such, it only lasted for two pages, which is pretty pathetic when you remember that some of the comics I drew as a young teenager, such as The Terrible Troubles of Unlucky Freddy and Robin Hood 2002, got several times that. And Unlucky Freddy even got to go to space! What a gyp, huh, original Realm characters?

I rushed into the original Realm for a number of reasons: 1) that was how I started all my projects at the time, and 2) I wanted to start a webcomic. Sunrise was still a year away (only a year? jeez) and the idea of a fantasy serial I could plug various storylines into appealed to me. I was also reading a lot of old Bloom County comics at the time and I thought that I might be able to make it topical somehow. In retrospect, that was a terrible idea and I’m lucky that I didn’t try that.

So once the first attempt proved to be a disaster, I decided I had better plan ahead a little bit this time. It was then that I developed the first version of these thrilling characters:

D and Harding. Zilch too. Harding was described with phrases like “Always looks like an idiot but doesn’t realize it” and “He thinks he is heroic . . . but he is not.” Beyond that his character was not developed. D was described as “evil, scheming,” “only trusts herself,” “takes advantage of everyone.” Beyond that her character was not developed. Zilch was described as follows: “Wants to be knighted more than anything. However, his cowardice, incompetence, and occasional recklessness prevent him from doing anything noteworthy.” Huh. Is that a motivation I see there? It just may be.

So what do you think happened next? Well, you can probably guess. I vectored two pages of Realm starring D and Harding (Zilch was introduced on page 2) and then stopped. Incidentally, they were practically identical to the original pages with the exception of the revised characters, so it should be no surprise that it worked no better the second time around.

For a while I stopped working on Realm completely, partly because I was working on Sunrise. The idea stuck with me, though, and little by little it began to develop. In 2009 I finally started to go about working on it the right way, with lots of rough sketches and story outlines. I didn’t start drawing again until I was confident that I had the whole storyline established. This was in stark contrast to before, when I was just trying to “wing it” with no storyline at all.

You know what happened from there. I drew the first issue, posted it online, and then this year I posted the second issue, the one with D and Harding in it. As you probably recall, I stated then that I wasn’t going to post any more Realm until I had the entire storyline worked out.

Well, writing is really hard, you can guess what’s been happening since then. I’ve been working on developing the storyline, as promised, but it hit two snags named D and Harding. (Did any of you predict this during my long introduction?) These “characters,” carried over from the earlier DOA attempt, were so vaguely defined that I was having a really hard time writing for them. Their introduction in Issue 2/Chapter 1 was dull and uninteresting (the only highlight being the delightfully insane Captain LaRusse) and highlighted the inherent problem of these characters: namely, that they were not characters at all. They had no motivations, personality quirks, flaws, definition… pretty much devoid of anything that qualifies as “character.” This made them almost impossible to write for, especially in a context of humor. Zilch, however, was still working fine, as he was the only one who actually had definition. He, by contrast, is very easy to write for and is usually pretty funny. So, to cut it short, D and Harding are history.

So yesterday I began approaching these characters the way I should have the first time. I attempted to create characters who were similar enough to D and Harding that they can replace them while minimizing the amount of revision needed. This was challenging, in part because they must also be developed enough that they will, y’know, actually work. I’ve been studying the excellent webcomic Spacetrawler very carefully, because it is doing with science fiction what I am with fantasy. (Both are humorous stories about characters from Earth tasked with solving the problems of other worlds.) Spacetrawler’s human characters each possess specific traits which define their actions. Pierrot wants to see equal rights extended to every species in the galaxy. Dmitri sees interstellar space as an opportunity to seek out new forms of pleasure. Dustin takes every opportunity to extend his own power and influence. It works quite well, and I’m learning a lot. (I’m also laughing a lot, because, as I’ve established, Spacetrawler works quite well. Full disclosure: I got sidetracked for nearly half an hour reading past pages while writing this essay.) So, in the above image you can see my early attempts at revising these characters. None have names yet (except the one on the far right, Sheila, but she’s actually slightly older, dating back to my embarrassing Bechdel test analysis a while ago).  I won’t go into their personalities right now, but suffice to say I won’t be writing any more until I’m certain that they are ready to handle it.

So, in conclusion, Realm has been an interesting experience. It’s taken a long time to reach the point that it’s at now, and there’s still a lot to be done. While things like this feel like setbacks, since it takes a lot of time to replace a character with another, at the same time they’re actually just an extension of the writing process. Realm has evolved a lot, and it will continue to evolve until I can finally declare it finished.

Will there be more online soon? I can definitively answer no. I shouldn’t have put it online to the extent I already have, and what you’ve already seen will undoubtedly change significantly in my revision process. In the meantime, watch this space. There will be more about Realm as it develops.

Freewheel is the story of Jaimie, who we see at the beginning riding in a boxcar, until her brother snaps her out of what seems to have been a daydream. We see that she has been working on drawing some sort of hideous knight-demon-monster-thing, which her brother describes as “beautiful.” How many pages into this comic are we again? That’s right, two pages, and we already have established the following bits of information:

1. This comic will involve riding on freight trains
2. The principal character is named Jamie and she has a brother named Jack.
3. Jamie is a dreamer
4. Jamie has a brother who she gets along well with
5. Jamie has a taste for the macabre

Yes. This is how character construction should be. Crucial bits of information should be established as quickly as possible. The more we can see into a character’s personality, the more quickly we can be engaged in her story. I’ve lost track of how many comics I’ve seen where I still can’t keep track of the characters’ names and personalities by the hundredth page. Please, please follow Baillie’s example here. It doesn’t matter how exciting your opening is; if we don’t know your characters, we will not care. And look, Baillie still got to start with somebody riding on a freight train–you can have it both ways if you play it right.

So let’s jump a few more pages ahead. We find out that Jamie and Jack are in the care a of cruel foster parent. Then we’re back to the train and Jamie reveals that Jack is missing. Now I know what some of you are going to ask: John, why are you praising these rapid developments that you criticized so harshly in your reMIND review? Well, here is why: When establishing plot, time is of the essence. You do not want to force your readers to slog through dozens of pages before letting them in on what’s going to happen. And, in fact, the opening of reMIND works perfectly well in this regard. We learn the principal characters’ names and the plot hook (Victuals’s disappearance) right away, giving us reason to keep reading. However, there is a difference between rapidly establishing plot and rapidly resolving plot, and therein lies the difference between reMIND and Freewheel. The latter sets up all its major plot points right away, then returns to a more reasonable pace when actually pursuing them.

So, while we’re on the subject, the plot of Freewheel is as follows: Jamie and Jack’s parents disappeared from their lives under fairly mysterious circumstances, and thus they’ve been in foster care for some time prior to the beginning of the story. However, after Jack too disappears, Jamie embarks on a road trip to find him. At first she’s all alone, but she soon falls into the care of a secret hobo underworld filled with surreal twists and turns. Its backstory and realization is quite well-developed too, reminding me of Tom Siddel’s– aw, phooey. I promised myself this review would be my first not to refer to Gunnerkrigg Court.

Anyway, let’s say a few words about stories set in worlds filled with mysterious secrets. Earlier I drew a comparison to Hans Rickheit, because he works in a very similar vein. In his new webcomic Ectopiary (which I was planning to review this month, before El Santo beat me to it, the sly devil), a small girl goes to live in a fairly ordinary-looking (if somewhat creepy) old house. As most of the trappings are fairly realistic, some of the bizarre and downright gruesome things that happen later are much more powerful than they would be otherwise. By layering weirdness in between layers of normalcy, a story can lull us into a false sense of security, and those things that depart from reality appear in stark and disturbing contrast.

Freewheel uses this technique to great effect. At first the story seems realistic, and then whimsical. Its more twisted side doesn’t really appear until Jamie is sent into a mysterious cave. Despite numerous warnings about the cave’s dangers,  seeing the wall suddenly attempt to absorb Jamie’s arm is still one of the most jarring moments of the comic. It’s that instant when your brain suddenly realizes that there is something really, really bad in this world, something deeply evil hiding beneath the more carefree skin. This twist is what really hooked me on this comic, and luckily it has plenty more in store. Jamie’s adventures begin to feel like a modern re-imagining of Alice in Wonderland, filled with bizarre creatures and wacky characters. But no matter how carefree the plot may feel at times, you always remember that The Darkness is lurking somewhere, and that is what keeps you clicking through the pages.

Before we move on to say a few words about the art, I must make an admission, dear readers. When I reached the newest page of this comic I was very irate. I may have even furiously clicked the dead Next link a few times in case it might magically work again. Sometimes reading webcomics feels like starting a book only to discover that half the pages are missing.

So, on to the artwork. As I said before, it’s very nice. Baillie’s drawings are not always perfect, but they’re attractive and certainly above average for webcomics. Baille mostly shades by hand, and she uses the effect well, her crosshatching both moving with the form and creating beautiful textures on the surface of the picture plane. The one gripe I have is that the webcomic is at too low a resolution (500px wide) to do justice to the linework. I may have to buy the printed editions just so I can see it properly…so perhaps this is actually a very shrewd marketing decision on the part of Ms. Baillie. Well played.

I mentioned earlier that Freewheel plays with formal elements. Baillie doesn’t confine herself to a strict system of panels and dialogue like many cartoonists (such as myself, unfortunately) tend to do. She frequently has pages which are nearly diagrammatic (above), or in the form of elaborate montages. Even when she uses more traditional panel layouts she’s not afraid to break them up with unusual shapes or sizes. There aren’t enough webcomics artists who are comfortable treating each page as an art object in and of itself.

Now a word about the typography. Baillie is obviously hand-lettering all these pages, and as you’ve probably guessed, that makes me very happy. I’ve seen a lot of computer lettering, and while some of it is adequate, I’ve seen very little (if any) of it that I would describe as great. We don’t see hand-drawn type very often any more, and comics, as a largely hand-drawn medium, are an ideal place for it. Sure, computer lettering is much easier, but at what cost? Would this page have the same power if it was lettered digitally?

In summation, Freewheel is really good. It’s not perfect, but its problems are negligible. The story has plenty of mystery and intrigue. The characters are fun and unique. The art is elegant and the page layouts are refreshingly original. My main complaint pertains to that Next button, which preferably should go all the way to a page that says THE END in nice hand-drawn letters.

Overall impression: Positive
(I am discontinuing the number-based rating system. I found it difficult to evaluate things that way and I have a strong suspicion that I would have ended up rating everything as above average.)

reMIND was recently reviewed by The Webcomic Overlook, and normally I wouldn’t want to nip so closely at the heels of the peerless & fearless El Santo (the man has read the complete archives of both Jack and Ctrl+Alt+Del), but the pacing of reMIND so bothered me that I simply had to write about it. Since El Santo’s already done a pretty thorough examination of the plot, I won’t spend much time on it. If you want the a more complete critical picture of the comic, just be sure to read his review too.

Now, given that the comic has already been skillfully reviewed, and that I have serious issues with the pacing, you may be wondering why I’m bothering with this. Here is why, dear reader: because the art in reMIND is absolutely phenomenal. Remember last month, when I told Namesake to use a limited palette? Brubaker has the limited palette thing nailed, right down to using different palettes to indicate different locations. His character designs are whimsical and attractive. His perspective-drawing is spot-on. Even his page compositions are superb. I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Suffice to say, there is nothing wrong with the art. Maybe some facial expressions could be exaggerated a bit more, but that’s the only thing I can think of to say on that front. The art is just that good. (Consistent, too… no first-chapter disease here.)

The world-building, similarly, is quite nice. I’m genuinely interested in the plot, characters, and the details of the reMIND universe, and it seems like it could be a really interesting story. Herein is the problem with the pacing, though: reMIND always feels as if it’s in a desperate hurry to get to the next part of the story. Things are progressing so fast that I have to wonder how long this story can even manage to be, given that it has a predetermined ending that we seem to be rushing toward at a breakneck speed.

For example: The first character we meet is a young woman named Sonja, who tells us that her cat, Victuals (don’t ask me, ask Brubaker) disappeared one day. Brubaker spends a fair amount of time on this, so I naturally expected that Victuals’s absence would be a fairly significant part of the first chapter, maybe more. No. Victuals reappears three pages later, two of which make up a total elapsed narrative time of maybe thirty seconds. Now, Victuals has to disappear, for story reasons– but if he’s only going to be absent for three pages, why not start the story after he returns? His disappearance gives every appearance of being the beginning of a subplot, so to have it resolved so quickly is jarring to say the least.

To give Brubaker his due, he does at least sometimes try to pare out details sparingly. He gives insights into Victuals’s past* only subtly at first, revealing enough to encourage curiosity but not enough to destroy the mystery. This doesn’t last very long, though, as Chapter 2 begins a detailed explanation of the backstory. This begins on Spread 18 (effectively page 18). For comparison, Gunnerkrigg Court’s eigtheenth page falls at a point where several primary characters haven’t even been introduced yet and very, very little of the world has even been revealed yet, much less explained. reMIND, meanwhile, is already preparing to pull the cover off its entire backstory. Couldn’t this have waited until Chapter 3 at least? Sure, I’m intrigued by all the setup, but if the explanation starts too soon, that feeling of intrigue is just going to be destroyed. Imagine a magician who explains how each of his tricks worked immediately after performing them. The same principle is at work here.

* Technically speaking it is not Victuals’s past that is being described, but the past of the lizard-man whose brain has been transplanted into Victuals’s body, but as I stated earlier, the plot is not the focus of this review.

Going through and picking on every instance of rushed pacing would just be mean, so I won’t do that, but the pacing really is the only problem with this comic as far as I can see. I really wanted to like reMIND, with its fabulous artwork and unique world-building, but its tendency to treat every scene as an obstacle to be rushed through killed it for me. When there’s a mysterious object under a tarp, maybe I don’t want to find out what it is in the very next chapter. When Victuals dives to return to his home, maybe I don’t want him to arrive there safe and sound just two pages later. Maybe I want him to have to fight a shark on the way.

Final Rating: 7.5 out of 10. If not for the pacing problems this comic would probably rate a 10. Do take a look at it, if only to see the beautiful artwork.

Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how much I enjoyed this funny dog character.

As I may or may not have mentioned once before, the origins of Sunrise lie with a short run of comics I did for a Vacation Bible School in summer 2007.   It was called The Zeppelin Brothers and Their Cousin Clara, and followed the titular characters as they flew around the world in their nameless airship, reinforcing the daily scripture lessons. (Depicted: Wednesday.)

For some reason this comic maintained a certain intrigue for me, or at least the idea of a comic set on an airship did. Late that year, around December or so, I began work on a new comic. My central idea was to take the formatting of Star Trek and set it in the past (ironic since the original Star Trek concept was a frontier show set in the future), and place the characters on an airship.

In preparation for writing this essay I went through my old Sunrise design documents. I can’t actually remember what the first thing I did for Sunrise was, but these are at least fairly close. This is the sheet where I wrote down the basic core concept of the series (in addition to some concepts for the captain’s uniform), and on the back was a list of brief character sketches:

As you can see, the whole concept was still based around the premise of the ship being so incredibly controversial that no one wanted to work on it. That idea faded away pretty quickly. It was hard to come up with something controversial enough and Astor’s antagonism became a better reason for the undesirable crew. (Admittedly the undesirable crew aspect has faded away a lot at this point, too.)

While we’re on the subject of the characters, let’s look at that early character sheet. We have “Captain” (Robinson), “Financer” (Kindler), “Pilot/Helmsman” (Neil), “Airship Designer” (Blanchard), and “Poet” (Lila). Wait, Lila was supposed to be a poet? I didn’t even remember that. And she was the most intelligent of the cast? Huh, usually she just seems to be the most easily-angered. It’s tough having an unappreciated superhuman intellect I guess. I find it odd that Lila at the time seemed more important than, say, a chief engineer, but I was really just stumbling around in the dark at that point. In any case, you can see here the character designs that would still be pretty prevalent throughout Issue 1 (after which they took on a different flavor than that implied here).

Regarding Issue 1 I don’t have all that much to say, as I have no real recollection of how it was conceived. I wrote down a paragraph of exposition detailing its events and just winged it from there.

Let’s take a look at the original art:

(Compare to inked version)

At the time I started work on Sunrise I hadn’t yet taken any figure drawing classes, and boy does it ever show. Jeez but these people are weird-looking. Other aspects of the craft were also wanting, for example the fact that I wasn’t using any rulers, which sometimes  caused problems when drawing the panel boundaries in later.

Let’s just ignore the deficiencies of the early art for now. I’ve complained about that a million times before. Instead let’s take a quick look at the history of the artwork in Sunrise:

• Issue 1: Digital inking with crosshatching, some simulated with tiling patterns and some really laboriously drawn by hand. Digital crosshatching was a really stupid idea, so I abandoned it at the end of the issue.
• Issue 2: Originally shaded with gray tones, but I thought these looked too futuristic for my historical premise, so I replaced them with halftone patterns after that style solidified. (I can’t easily fix Issue 1 because of bad work methods I used at the time.)
• Issue 3: The first issue to use the halftone patterns. They were kind of messy at first but got nice later on.

After Issue 3 the art stayed pretty much the  same for a while. Due to my fascination with Jeff Smith’s complete lack of shading, I tried to reduce the amount of grays until there were none left in Issue 7 (which was also the first issue I attempted to ink non-digitally, although that only lasted a few pages). As it turned out I’m not Jeff Smith and the unshaded pages look pretty flat. ( Der-Shing Helmer convinced me to go back to shading after I asked her for criticism.)

This brings us back to Issue 8, which is the first issue which I’ve inked and lettered in real life. I’ve been using some really terrible paper (cardstock from Staples) for no better reason than because it’s cheaper than bristol board.  Despite that foolishness, the art is overall better than previous digitally-inked issues, and for the first time I can look back without cringing (most of the time).

As far as writing goes, I think it’s gotten stronger too, with the exception of the dismal Issue 7. The even-numbered issues have typically been better than the odd-numbered ones so far (just like the Star Trek movies!). A quick run-down:

• Issue 1 was the “pilot,” basically. A lot of rustiness is to be expected. The characters all behave kind of stiffly and the script doesn’t know what to do with itself. It’s really a lot like the first episode of a TV show, with confused actors muddling their way through a weak story.
• Issue 2 sees the comic coming more  into its own, with a relatively intriguing story and better “performances” from the characters.
• Issue 3 is somewhat weaker, with odd pacing and Lila Astor, who always ruins everything. No issue can be based on Neil and Lila and still be successful, because they are the weakest characters in the entire cast. Neil is just an archetypal adventuresome young man and Lila is just a grouchy person who plays a cello sometimes.
• Issue 4 is still a favorite of mine. It’s told in two parts, the first of which is the mystery about the drifting airship and the second of which is about the dilemma of the spies. The ending is perhaps a bit rushed, but I think altogether the whole thing worked out pretty well.
• Issue 5 has two plots, one of which is about the movie and one of which is about the exploding things. While they do meet in the middle, the point at which they meet is also the point at which the explosive plot ends, so the integration is not really very good.
• Issue 6, or “the music theory issue” as I tend to think of it, is fairly strong, about equal to Issue 4. Its main weakness is the plot point  “Neil Needs Confidence in His Musicianship,” which was completely unnecessary. The issue probably would have been stronger without it. I do like the way Ashbroch’s plan for posthumous mischief is portrayed though, especially as Haeckel introduces an unpredictable element which Ashbroch surely would have appreciated.
• I’ve already talked about Issue 7 and why it was a disaster.
• So that brings us back to Issue 8. I think this is the strongest issue so far, with well-developed guest characters and a well-paced plot that runs far longer than any previous issue has.

Sunrise is, first and foremost, a learning experience for me. Attempting to list everything I’ve learned from it would be futile, but let’s see if I can’t hit at least a few good points:

• Use drafting tools. It will save you lots of trouble in the end.
• Inking digitally is probably not worth it. I’ve saved lots of time since I went back to traditional inking, and it actually looks better. Don’t bother trying to do digital inking unless you have a Cintiq or something, and even then it’s probably a mistake.
• Letter by hand too. It looks better.
• Plan out the story as much as you can before starting to draw. For Issue 8, I have a full written script, a page-by-page breakdown, and thumbnail drawings of each page, complete with full dialogue. I also rewrote parts of the script even after the issue had started to run.
• Don’t move ahead with a story you’re uncomfortable with. This mistake was central to the problems of Issue 7.
• Try to find a style that looks good and is within your skill range. Don’t try to do something more complicated than you’re capable of.
• Remember to keep the drawings interesting for yourself and your readers. Don’t just draw talking heads over and over again.
• Don’t give up. This is a problem-solving process, and all  snags are just problems with solutions. Find them.

That’s all for now, everyone. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading Sunrise these past few years, and look forward to seeing you around for future issues and whatever new things may come.

friendlily. (adverb) to act in a friendly manner. Just all-around awkward, and one that can really only be fixed by not using it at all.

In descending order, #1 being the worst:

5. Like – In either of its uses, be they I like this or So I, like, went to this, like, etc. etc. The former usage listed here is not really wrong in any sense, but I take issue with how commonly-used it is considering its shallowness. These feelings were, of course, grilled into me by four years of art professors, but regardless of my reasons, I now have a low tolerance for like. Now, of course, Facebook is exacerbating the problem by  sticking those stupid Like buttons all over the internet, encouraging us to think in meaningless binary terms of Like and Dislike. Don’t cooperate. Use more specific terms and say how you really feel about something whenever possible. When the word like is what works best, do at least elaborate on what you mean by it, because it doesn’t mean much by itself. (This is my disclaimer, I guess, since I’m currently working on a multi-part essay entitled “Why I Like Star Trek.”) ¶ The second usage listed there needs no explanation, I think. Stop doing that. Please. Just stop.

4. Boyfriend / girlfriend – Who introduced these horrible constructions into the English language? Vague, infantilizing, and cumbersome, this duo of outmoded terms has been used to describe any number of different kinds of relationships. I suggest we scrap both and replace them with about six different words (preferably gender-neutral) that will do the same thing in better ways.

3. Trafficking – Not a bad word really. Perfectly useful in many contexts. That said, can we please either reform how it’s spelled or restrict it to spoken language only? I know it wouldn’t read correctly without that K in the middle, but it looks wrong!

2. Gorgeous / Scrumptious (tied for 2nd place) – These are just plain ugly words, both of them used to describe things that are ostensibly good. They sound like they ought to describe vile space aliens rather than beautiful/delicious things.

1. Gubernatorial – Undoubtedly the ugliest word I have the misfortune of knowing. Egad. I can’t even begin to say what this word sounds like it should mean; it’s such an unholy combination of sounds that all I can think whenever I see it is ick. Let’s change this, please, and pretend it never existed.

Now, in an attempt to make this post slightly less negative, here are three words which I enjoy:

1. Idiom – Makes me laugh every time. “Stupid idioms!”

2. Bludgeon – Something about the sound of this word is very amusing to me.  blʌdʒən. Naturally it’s somewhat of a guilty pleasure considering its meaning. Ouch.

3. Defenestrate – Another guilty pleasure. I know defenestration is bad, but come on, we have an actual word which means “to throw out of a window!” What’s not to like? Heck, I’d jump at a chance to be defenestrated, assuming proper safety precautions, just so that I could use the word.

The test is as follows: A work must have (1) two or more female characters (2) who talk to each other (3) about something besides a man. Sounds simple enough! Let’s see how I fare.

Sunrise. (1) Yes. (2) Yes. (3) Yes. Verdict: Pass! There are a few examples, mostly from Issue 4, but some from other issues as well. Still, it couldn’t hurt to try harder, as I do notice that these examples are few and far between.

Realm (1) No. Verdict: Fail. Back to the drawing board for Realm. Luckily, I haven’t plotted out the entire book yet so there’s still plenty of time to revise.

Zirconius. (1) No. Verdict: Fail. This is not an entirely fair application of the test though, as the Zarks are basically genderless. Still, they are referred to with male pronouns so I suppose this still counts as a violation.

Let’s look at some recent short stories (not available online, unfortunately).

“Imagine the Violin.” (1) No. Verdict: Fail. Only one female character, and she’s going insane. Sigh.

“Constance.” (1) Yes. (2) Yes. (3) Yes. Verdict: Pass! A story about two women who talk to each other, and only briefly about a man! As clear a pass as anyone could want.

“Real Space Experience.” (1) Yes. (2) No. Verdict: Fail. Quite a few female characters, but they never speak to each other. Granted, there isn’t a whole lot of dialogue in the story, but it’s still a violation.

Let’s look at a few other things.

Barnacle Bert in “Hands Up, Jellyfish!” Oh, no. You can’t be serious. Ah well, here goes: (1) No. Verdict: Fail. But– but–two of the jellyfish are female, and they’re talking! I think! No, wait, if they are talking they’re probably talking about Bert. Argh. Well, at least the anglerfish is female.

The Violinist. (1) No. Verdict: Fail. Having a female protagonist is not enough to pass the test.

Remnants. Some of you may recall this novel from a few years ago, which was available online for a while. Let’s see how it fares: (1) Yes. (2) Yes. (3) Yes. Verdict: Pass! Finally. Flawed as this book may be, my brief foray into it just now yielded three Bechdel-Test-worthy conversations. Yena, the female protagonist, talks to Mrs. Tamila (a grouchy customer), Rimel (an utter imbecile), and Morica (the villain). All loathsome characters, unfortunately.

Just to round out the number to an even ten, we’ll look at “Lander,” my astronaut story that probably a few of you have seen. (1) No. Verdict: Fail. Sigh.

So, to summarize:

Works examined: 10

Works passing Bechdel Test: 3

Score: 3/10

Ouch.