About Sean Michael Robinson

Sean Michael Robinson loves puppies, kitties, little children, and monstrous library book sales. When not writing about himself in the third person, he stays busy with drawing and playing music and contemplating the fates of the sparrows. He hopes to finish his debut graphic novel Discards sometime in the spring of 2012, or before he is dead.

Ceasing to Be- Improvisation and the 24 Hour Comic Experience

Posted on October 10, 2010 by Sean Michael Robinson

Last Saturday, at one o’clock in the afternoon, fifteen Seattle cartoonists packed into a sunlit room at the Phinney Ridge Community Center for a twenty-four hour annual ritual. Burdened with snacks, lap boards and drawing supplies, everyone seemed a little unsure at first confronting the empty room. But soon the mood changed as tables and chairs were pulled out and adjusted and windows and blinds were open to let in the last few hours of light.

For my part, I had built up quite a bit of excitement before the event. I would be participating in a group organized by local cartoonist Henry Chamberlain, and consisting of several cartoonists and illustrators whose work I was familiar with, including Jennifer Daydreamer, Tom Dougherty, Eroyn Franklin, Marc Palm, and David Lasky, whose story “Minutiae” is the best 24 hour comic I’ve ever read. So it was with much and excitement and a little trepidation that I began.

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The Forked Path- Childhood, Death and the Choose Your Own Adventure

Posted on September 23, 2010 by Sean Michael Robinson

Conception/ Sugarcane Island/The Cave of Time

“What is time?” you ask.

The oracle is silent for a moment, but then answers in a firm voice, “Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.”

“When did time start?” you ask. “And when will it end?”

“Would you like to see?”

You gulp in amazement. “Sure.”

“What then- the beginning, or the end?”

– Edward Packard, Return to the Cave of Time, 1985

He’s told the story many times over the past forty years, and so the words come quickly and easily, spilling out over the gulf between the two of us. In this story it is 1969 and he is the father, and the children are his children, eager for a gripping bedtime narrative. And all Edward Packard has is Pete, washed ashore on a deserted island. And so the father asks the children, “What do you think Pete should do?”

With the power of hindsight we can find some precedents to the Choose Your Own Adventure, forked-path fiction format. But when the concept first hit Edward Packard, it was like a bolt of lightning.

It would have a similar effect on his audience.

But his ultimate audience was not as immediately accessible as his biological children. Packard wrote the manuscript for his first book in the format, Sugarcane Island, in 1969 and 1970, and had an agent shop it around for years. “They all turned it down- they didn’t see the potential.” So he shelved the book, the whole concept. Several years later Packard saw an article about a start-up publisher named Vermont Crossroads Press, co-owned by one Ray (R.A.) Montgomery. Encouraged by the article, Packard contacted Montgomery and ultimately struck a deal with him, and in 1976 Sugarcane Island finally saw print, as the first in what was intended as a series of books entitled “The Adventures of You.” Montgomery followed up Packard’s book with a manuscript of his own, “Journey Under the Sea.”

: Barbara Carter illustration from the Lippincott edition of “Deadwood City”

Packard, frustrated with the lack of marketing muscle behind the releases, shopped around his concept and some new manuscripts and was eventually able to secure himself a deal with the J.B. Lippincott company. But unbeknownst to Packard, Montgomery and his newly acquired agent were working on a deal of their own with a much bigger company- Bantam Books. “Bantam decided that half of the books would be written or subcontracted through me and half of the books through Ray Montgomery,” Packard told me in a phone interview, almost thirty years after the deal finally went down. “Ray and his agent were really the ones who set it up. I was brought in because I’d started the whole thing.”

Youth/You are a Shark/Secret of the Ninja

There are no stars or suns or moons or wisps of light; not a breath of air; no sound; no smell or taste; no up or down or sideways; no motion; no feeling; nothing but silence. Suddenly there’s a point of light so brilliant, it feels like pins driven into your eyeballs! Even before you can blink, the light expands into a million lightning bolts radiating in all directions. Your eyes shut, but the light is still painfully bright. As you move your hands to cover your eyes you scream- but no sound comes.

– Edward Packard, Return to the Cave of Time, 1985

In the summer of 1988 my family moved across Orlando to a new home in a new neighborhood. When I entered third grade a few months later, it was with more than a little anxiety- I didn’t have any friends, didn’t know the school or the neighborhood at all. But I soon found compatriots, including a sandy-haired boy named Chris M., who would end up being my best friend for the rest of elementary school. And Chris had an inheritance.

The books were a gift to him from his older sister’s boyfriend- a box full of Choose Your Own Adventures from a few years earlier. We poured over them, relishing the illustrations, the variety of settings and the sometimes lurid titles and subject matter. But what we loved most was the central, binding concept- the branching paths. The feeling it gave of inhabiting someone else’s skin, of living a new situation and being able to explore it in relative safety.

It was a kind of mania for us. The books were still coming out, and we bought as many as we could get our hands on. When we’d have sleepovers we’d pool our books together into one big collection, in chronological order of course, and talk about the missing books, what they might be like, and brag about how big our joint collection would eventually be when we were roommates in college together. Eventually we found that the earlier books were readily available on the cheap at garage sales and second hand stores of all types, and so our collections continued to grow.

All this emphasis on collection might imply that we didn’t read them- we did- we even had strong opinions about the book’s authors. (Edward Packard’s books, we deemed, were the most “fair”, and internally consistent, and often the most fun as well. Although we often were drawn to the concepts and themes of R.A. Montgomery books, we were put off by the lack of narrative logic and internal consistency, and what we saw as didactic, judgmental and sometimes capricious results from each choice.)

So I loved the reading. But the aspects of collectability were what fueled the mania. Firstly, they were numbered, which meant that after having acquired a handful gaps started to appear. Secondly, the books by various authors were often indirectly related to each other, or sometimes even direct sequels. The small connections from book to book served to heighten my interest in obtaining the other books.

Chris and I were obsessed enough with the format that we produced several Choose Your Own Adventure-format books of our own over the next two school years, including such classics as Escape From School, Math Escapes, More Escape From School, Gut Squisher, Save the Big Dudes, and a revised version of Math Escapes, with added violent behavior.

: Escape from School, by Chris M and Sean Michael Robinson, age 8

Rereading the particular books that obsessed us as children, it’s not hard to see what fascinated us. For more than a decade Edward Packard was one of the most innovative writers working in children’s fiction. He found the perfect formula in his first book, and so he could spend the next several years breaking, manipulating and stretching it.

For Packard the formula wasn’t just the concept of branching path fiction– it was also the emphasis on you, the reader, the traditionally robust role of protagonist making way for the ego of the audience to fill in the gaps. This intention was often undercut by the Bantam illustration concept, which more often than not represented the protagonist as a ten-to-fifteen-year-old white boy. In rare instances this tendency was reversed , such as many of the female-protagonist (or even gender-unidentifiable) fantasy-themed books (Outlaws of Sherwood Forest, Mystery of the Secret Room, and the Enchanted Kingdom, all written by Ellen Kushner and beautifully illustrated by Judith Mitchell).

“Mystery of the Secret Room” written by Ellen Kushner and illustrated by Judith Mitchell

I disagree with Packard as to the importance of the empty vessel– I don’t really believe such a thing is possible, even without illustrations. If the author is doing her job creating an environment and situation for you to explore, a natural result will be a character, even if it’s a character created solely by inference. Additionally, even as a younger reader I was very aware of which “characters” I liked and identified with, and how this changed my interaction with the book. I remember as a young boy finding the stories in which “you” were represented as a female strangely compelling, and finding myself drawn to the images of the female protagonists, studying them, trying to read their intentions and motives.

: The Enchanted Kingdom, written by Ellen Kirshner and illustrated by Judith Mitchell

In the very early books, Packard himself deviates from this empty vessel prescription, and this makes for some of the more varied books in the series. You can sense him playing with the formula. In “Your Code Name is Jonah” you are a C.I.A agent, in “Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?” a detective, two jobs not typically held by ten-year-olds. Perhaps a result of the wider variety of protagonist roles, these early books seemed a lot more off-the-rails and experimental than many of the later ones.

Packard wrote a lot of books, and not all of them are classics. A great deal of them are simply his treatments of standard adventure fare (Deadwood City, Survival at Sea, Sugarcane Island). And then… there are the few books of his that defy categorization. How would you describe “You are a Shark” to someone that’s never read it? It’s at once almost idiotically simple and yet profound and strangely moving- you visit the ruins of a temple in Nepal and enter, despite knowing you shouldn’t. And you find an impossibly old man inside the temple, who stares straight ahead, gazing into space, as you feel a flash of panic, and slide helplessly to the floor.

: “You are a Shark” by Edward Packard, illustrated by Ron Wing

Though your body is alive your spirit has moved on to the body of another being. You move over and over again against your will, from animal to animal, while your body slowly perishes. For my third grade self, this was deeply moving stuff.

Adolescence/You are a Monster/ You are a Superstar

Pain. That’s the worst part of it. You can hear your bones cracking as you grow. Your muscles are growing too. They ache as they stretch to keep up with your bones- especially your arm bones, which are lengthening and thickening the most. Your skin is expanding, trying to cover your widening body surface. Sometimes it’s stretched so thin, you’re afraid it’ll split, but it always seems to cover.

– Edward Packard, You are a Monster, 1988

In those fevered two years of Choose Your Own Adventure obsession, I had no way of knowing that the best creative years for the series were already past. With more than eighty books already out, the past itself seemed infinitely rich, and so if I saw the signs I didn’t understand them. Eight years in the series had settled into a comfortable formula- easily explicable concept, punchy title, early dump of the author’s research in the setup to the story, and a decreasing amount and variety of choices and endings. Packard told me, at least in his case, that this was largely “a trade-off,” but it “wasn’t deliberate. I tended to want to expand the plot more, to try to make it richer, and the more a particular storyline gets involved, the less you want to branch it off.” Page count staying the same, the functional result of this was fewer choices, fewer random deaths, and less of the metaphysical wackiness that defined the books in opposition to other adventure books of the time.

From an aesthetic standpoint, the books also finally made the transition to the eighties, with bright gradient backgrounds and hideous photo-realistic paintings on each cover. Although many of the excellent pen and ink interior illustrators managed to hang on for a while longer, they were gradually replaced by heavily-photo-referenced, toned pencil illustrations that completed the aesthetic transformation.

: a heavily referenced illustration by Stephen Marchesi for the book “You are a Superstar”

As for my interest in the books, and my friendship with Chris, both were long gone. Choose Your Own Adventure survived them both, in publication, if not in spirit.

Even as I moved through middle school I still found places to get my fix of interactive fiction. In sixth gradel I finally acquired a Nintendo, followed a year or two later by an SNES, and I discovered in short order a whole new realm of interactive fiction, namely the Japanese console-based role playing game. I would have become disinterested in the books eventually anyway, as they were aimed at fourth to sixth graders- but having a viable substitute certainly helped accelerate the process. Strange rumblings were happening at school too, every time we visited the computer lab. The school had replaced their Apple IIGS lab with an entire room of Macs, all of which came preloaded with a piece of software called Hypercard that felt strangely familiar to many of the students who used it. We were encouraged to build our own stories- draw a picture, have some text, and have some picture or text element that could be clicked through to advance the story. And from there the cards could branch out into many different directions.

: From “The Manhole,” a Hypercard adventure game from 1989

: from “Electronic Whole Earth Catalog,” an educational Hypercard stack from 1989

I didn’t need to make the direct connection myself- our teacher pointed it out to us the first day we used it. “We’re going to make stories, like Choose Your Own Adventures. You guys can draw and write your own stories, and we’ll make logic trees, little maps, to keep track of the whole thing and make sure you don’t leave any loose ends.” (although Hypercard itself has been long forgotten, many more people seem to remember Myst, once the biggest-selling PC game of all time. Myst was a series of Hypercard stacks.)

: The most successful Hypercard stack of all. Myst, Robyn and Rand Miller, 1993

It took me several months of computer lab time, but by the end of sixth grade, my one and only Hypercard creation, “Revenge of Abraham Lincoln” was complete.

Another year later and I had my first experience with the Internet. Another year after that and the web was on the horizon. Edward Packard, Apple and a vengeful clone of Abraham Lincoln had successfully prepared me to embrace the hypertext environment.

Adulthood/”The Worst Day of Your Life”/”You Are a Millionaire”

You are a decider,” she says. “Because you are from a primitive culture you do not understand that constant pleasure is superior to freedom of choice- though that should be obvious to anyone.”

– Edward Packard, Return to the Cave of Time, 1986

In 1998 Chris and I both graduated high school, the same year that Bantam ceased ordering new books from Packard and Montgomery, effectively ending the CYOA series. Was it part of the natural cycle of the market, or had the need for interactive fiction been satisfied by increasingly complex story-based console role playing games? Or had CYOA been done in by some factor much more mundane, like the continual paper price hikes of the mid to late nineties? I never saw the books at the time, but I’ve read some of the nineties books recently, and there is a feeling of desperation in the air- too many concepts that seem to be chasing trends or rehashing past successes, and a drastic (and aesthetically disastrous) mid-series visual makeover.

Before our graduation Chris and I had a brief reunion, worked on a comic together in our Physics class, and even kicked around the idea of writing some more interactive fiction. Sadly for us, we never got farther than a list of rather promising titles, before we were waylaid by life, girls, and more bitterness towards each other. (for the curious, the prospective titles were- “You are Homeless,” “More Math Escapes” and “You are a Teenage Girl.”)

: Photoshop, format changes and robotic martial artists- it was the end of the road for CYOA

Edward Packard and his former business partner R.A. Montgomery had a falling out of their own, one that has indirectly led to the odd state of the Choose Your Own trademark today. Currently the CYOA trademark is owned by Chooseco, which is in turn owned by one R.A. Montgomery, prolific writer of mediocre children’s fiction. The consequence of this is that the brand itself no longer features any work by the originator of the concept the brand is based on- no Edward Packard books will ever again be issued under the CYOA moniker.

And yet- we live in the future, and in the future nothing is dead forever. And so the trademark-less Edward Packard has teamed up with Simon and Schuster to re-imagine some of his CYOA books as iphone apps, under the new mark U-Ventures. And so time marches on.

As for the books themselves, it’s still possible to pick them up at rummage sales, book stores and ebay for pennies on the dollar, and the first sixty or so in the series, in addition to being the best, also happen to be the easiest to find. If you’ve never read a CYOA and would like to do so, or if, like me, you were obsessed as a child and now find yourself curious again, may I be so bold as to recommend a few titles for you?

Cave of Time (1)- Edward Packard- Not an excellent book, but very interesting to see how expansive the concept was from the very beginning. Long before a certain hot tub made time travel much more convenient, you wander through a cave in which every corridor leads to a different era.
Your Code Name is Jonah (6)- Edward Packard- I seem to have a soft spot for Cold War political thrillers involving secret messages embedded in whale song.
Hyperspace (21)- Edward Packard- Off-the-wall metaphysical gamesmanship meets buckets of pseudoscience, and what emerges is delightful, eccentric gobbledygook.
Supercomputer (39)- Edward Packard- Has the distinction of being one of the goofiest books about technology written in the eighties, in an era not exactly known for its skepticism about technology. Fascinating, fun tangents into world politics and theories of wealth and happiness.
You are a Shark (45)- Edward Packard- Reincarnation and bloodletting in an ancient temple in Napal. See above.
Outlaws of Sherwood Forest (47)- Ellen Kushner. Guess what it’s about? More beautiful illustrations by Judith Mitchell.
Return to the Cave of Time (50)- Edward Packard- A mess of adventure, theory and possibility.
Magic of the Unicorn (51)- Deborah Lerme Goodman- Fun fantasy with nice illustrations by Ron Wing
Enchanted Kingdom (56)- Ellen Kushner- Fun funny faerie adventures with sometimes brutal endings. Beautiful illustrations by Judith Mitchell.
Mystery of the Secret Room (63)- Ellen Kushner. Two boxes and a mess of trouble. More beautiful illustrations by Judith Mitchell.
The Worst Day of Your Life (100)- Edward Packard- An extreme, and extremely raucous, adventure book that also happens to be a meditation on the nature of disaster. A fine return to form for Packard.

The End

The End

“There’s not one perfect path. Usually there’s a whole spectrum of outcomes, of adventures. The idea is to try to mirror life in a way, all the possibilities of life. It isn’t either you get a pot of gold or you die. [There are] all kinds of things in between.”

-Edward Packard, interview, 2010

[special thanks to Edward Packard for his kindness and consideration. illustrators at the end, from top to bottom- 1-3 by Paul Granger, a.k.a. Don Hedin; 4 by Ted Enik; 5 by Anthony Kramer; 6 by Judith Mitchell; 7 by Paul Granger, a.k.a. Don Hedin; 8 by Ron Wing; 9-10 by Judith Mitchell; 11-13 by Paul Granger a.k.a. Don Hedin; 14 by Ted Enik; 15 by Paul Granger a.k.a. Don Hedin; and lastly, 16 by Judith Mitchell.]

What Do I Do With Those Damn Anime Kids?

Posted on August 24, 2010 by Sean Michael Robinson

Keira Lozeau- age 17

My first meeting as a high school teacher was almost five years ago to this date, mid-August, on a hot Washington afternoon. I was a new hire at a school district to the north of Seattle, and I was young at twenty five, still idealistic despite a rough student teacher period.

The room was spacious and beautiful, with large open windows and large group seating. The entire district’s staff of visual art teachers was present, and they were in the midst of a casual discussion as I entered, five minutes late.

“I mean, what do I do with those damn anime kids anyway?” the silver-haired teacher said slowly, shaking her head. The others laughed and sighed in sympathy.

“What do you mean?” I asked, before I realized I was drawing attention to myself, something I had vowed not to do anymore after my last educational employment experience.

Nicole Ham, age 17

Introductions were made, and more chitchat was had about the problem at hand, namely, the Damn Anime Kid. “They just wanna draw the same stuff over and over again. The big eyes, the tiny chins, pointy hair. Whatever.” Others commiserated. “I can’t tell when they’re copying other stuff or when it’s their own characters or what. And even if they say it’s their own characters, all of it looks the same anyway. It’s all virtually identical. So even if it’s technically original, they’re not learning anything anyway.”

At the time I just sat back and took it in, unbelieving. What do you do with those damn anime kids, huh? You mean, the kids that are interested in drawing? The ones that are interested in learning concrete skills that will help them tell stories, with an interest in the human body, in posture and proportion? Gosh, what is an art teacher to do with such challenging students?

As a half-baked cartoonist I had an advantage over my colleagues, and fortunately for me I was not above using this with my students. It was easy to see after even a few weeks of classes that many of the students that were dedicated to various manga, or just drew Yugioh over and over again, were also students that many times had difficult home lives. It isn’t difficult to imagine that a teenager with real problems at home would find refuge in fiction, and fiction inaccessible to their parents or less-dedicated peers would naturally have an even greater cachet.

M.A., age 18

Nikyla McLain- age 16

I found this perception of the of the manga or anime enthusiast as social leper simultaneously the closest to the truth and the least useful of the clichés surrounding these students. This was also the cliché most likely to be common knowledge, as evidenced by one teacher I knew who once explained to me the lineage of the otaku. “No, these kids have been around for a while. They just used to draw super heroes or whatever. Or sports cars. We still have some of those–the kid that just wants to draw the one view of the same race car over and over again. Then there were the dragon kids before that. Of course, we still have some of them too.”

After a few years of working with these students, both as a teacher and as adviser to the school’s Anime and Manga Club, I had the opportunity to give some presentations at state and other regional conferences, and I used it to talk about these students, whom I identified with and had a genuine desire to advocate for. I titled my presentation after that first teacher’s comment regarding these students–What Do I Do With Those Darn Anime Kids? The title was, in addition to being catchy, also ambiguous enough that I had a wide range of teachers attend, ranging from other club advisers that were looking for suggestions on what to do with their programs, to teachers that had a genuine hostility towards these students and their interests. And the ensuing discussions provided me with a broader perspective on secondary art school opinions regarding anime and manga, and more broadly, on sequential art in general.

J.J.- age 17

These opinions seemed to have less to do with the students and their interests than the teacher’s own art backgrounds. For teachers who had their formative art experiences in the art education system, representational art in general and any type of cartooning specifically didn’t address enough what they might consider to be “personal expression,” i.e. the idea of art as therapy or release. For these teachers, of which there are still a great deal, art is what happens without instruction, without stricture, and concerns with form, style or narrative are distractions from the true art experience.

There seemed to be just as many teachers whose formative art experiences took place in a more formal academic art background, and whether that background was based out of the studio or out of the art history classroom, it was very easy for them to dismiss budding cartoonists in their classrooms. After all, any comic is by nature illustration, and therefore not art. (I once walked into an upper-level high school art classroom where a well-meaning and very knowledgeable teacher was leading an oral dissection of the Andrew Wyeth painting “Christina’s World.” “So,” she said to them as I walked into the room, “Is Wyeth an illustrator? Or is he an artist?”) Having survived several years of fine arts training myself, this was not an unfamiliar attitude to me, but I was continually surprised to find it in the secondary school environment, especially considering the broad nature of the students we teachers were supposed to be serving.

: Katelynn Orellana- age 17

Of course, there was a lot for me to be frustrated with too. Much of this was part of learning to readjust my expectations, realizing, for instance, that just because students are interested in reading comics, and say that they’re interested in making comics of their own, doesn’t necessarily mean that they will go through all of the necessary skill building and labor necessary to do so. The first year I was adviser to the club we barely managed to scrape together a publication, and it was a compromise in every way–padded with pin-ups and work with which the artists themselves were not satisfied. From the second year on I concentrated more on skills building and low-risk activities that had a high likelihood of success–the Scott McCloud-adapted “four hour comic” was among the most popular. (Four pages in four hours, with music and pizza and soda, and many kudos for those who crossed the finish line. Sometimes we tried a variation on this, dividing up into teams for the duration, with each team member having a clearly-defined role in the production. These usually turned out a little less crazed, but a little more visually punchy and thus more likely to be included in future publications.)

Five years and several hundred pages of student comics

But it’s not frustration that I remember now, looking back on my five years of working with art students, the club members, or members of the cartooning class I taught my last two years. It’s a feeling of real accomplishment–of having met students at their own level, at their own interests, and helping turn those interests inwards, helping identify and eventually obtain the skills that will bring them an outlet for their own stories, for their own burgeoning creativity. I remember lunches in my classroom, inking tutorials and jam comics. I remember watching four of the club members whipping out a twenty page comic in four days, each one of them taking on a different task. I remember how proud they were giving out copies of their comic anthology at an event at the Seattle Public Library, and the genuine enthusiasm the other cartoonists and comic fans had for their book. I remember when I finally realized how much I had learned from them, from their love and their interest, their tenacity and their promise. I remember when I realized that all the practice helping other people with their drawing had finally affected me as well. When I realized I was no longer an interested amateur, but a cartoonist capable of producing work I could be proud of.

So, what does one do with those damn anime kids? How about recognize that, as students that already have an interest and a passion, they’re several steps ahead of many of their peers. How about meeting them at their level. How about showing them how the skills you can teach them connect to their interests. How about remembering that the impulse to make art is always with us, and that things grow in the places that we cultivate.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Author Archives: Sean Michael Robinson