Ryan North

This is a choose-your-own-adventure-style comic book set in the world of Star Trek: Lower Decks, where you play as Ensign Beckett Mariner. Writer Ryan North is the perfect man for this project, as both a longtime comics writer who knows how to work within constraining forms and wrote a choose-your-own-adventure version of Hamlet.

t's very cleverly done, much more cleverly than it needs to be, to be honest. I'm going to spoil the whole thing here, so if that bothers you, don't read the rest of show more this review.

The book begins with you waking up; you can elect to bother Tendi and Rutherford in Engineering, Boimler who's off-duty, or your mom on the bridge. Depending on what you do, different bad things happen: a Borg attack, a tribble infestation, and so on. I ended up in the various paths around the Borg attack initially, and quickly came to realize they all ended with everyone dying... except that if you had only known the Cerritos's prefix code, you could have (for some reason) saved the ship. Eventually I went down one path where there were a pair of voices talking after you died about obtaining the prefix code, and about how you only ever went for a very limited range of choices.

Eventually, I exhausted all the paths, but skimming through it, I could see there was a lot of the book I hadn't gained access to yet. I started just flipping through, and eventually I found a page where instead of being able to pick between coffee and raktajino for breakfast (which is how the book begins), you were also able to pick tea. With a little bit of detective work, I was able to figure out how you ought to be able to get there" the mysterious voices say at one point that they can't introduce new choices but it is possible to add existing choices. If you add together the coffee page number with the raktajino page number, you get to the tea page—and that unlocks a whole new network of choices.

What you start to figure out is this is all a holodeck simulation, explaining why different bad things happen if you make different choices. There's Star Trek explanations for the whole structure and format of the book, justifying the form in terms of the content. It's very cleverly done! You as the reader also begin to participate in book, talking to Mariner about what she's doing and why. You have to help Mariner figure out a way out of this situation, which begins to turn even more grim than you might have imagined. There's another bit where you have to do math to make a jump from one part of the book to another, this one cleverly done, where on one bad ending, Mariner gives you half of a math problem, and you have to play out another bad ending to get the other half of the math problem, so that you can put both those things together and finally get to a path that allows you to play out a good ending.

So yeah, it's put together incredibly well (see my diagram of it here), using Star Trek tropes to explain a lot of choose-your-own-adventure tropes, and pushing the form into interesting, unusual directions. The ending is even kind of moving, as you save the Cerritos, but the crew of the ship don't really understand what actually happened. I do have one very pedantic complaint: for a book where page numbers are essential, they are printed annoyingly small! It's harder than it needs to be to flip through this book, and you need to flip through it a lot. show less

When her teacher asks her what she wants to be when she grows up, Sal gives the obvious answer: a T. Rex! She discusses the benefits of such a state of being - getting to roar all the time, eat whatever you like, and so on - but when her strenuous efforts actually turn her into a dinosaur, she discovers that there are downsides as well. Chief amongst them are the hurt feelings of her friends and family. Fortunately, she finds a way to be a human/dinosaur hybrid, knowing how and when to stand show more up for herself, but also careful not to consume the humans around her. She even shares the secret with her soccer teammates. But will she share it with her annoying elder brother...?

In the normal course of events, How to Be a T. Rex is not a book I would pick up. Mike Lowery's artwork doesn't particularly speak to me, at first glance, and the premise of Ryan North's story isn't one I find especially appealing. That said, I'm on a project to read the entire picture-book section at work, something that has proven very useful, in highlighting my own selection bias in these matters. I've greatly broadened my knowledge of the form, and discovered some amusing books that I would otherwise have missed. This is one of them! I enjoyed the story here quite a bit, and appreciated the balance that Ryan North worked into his story, between Sal's desire for greater freedom to do what she wants, and her knowledge that it is important to respect others and be considerate of their needs and wants. The artwork, although still not to my taste, is well-suited to the humorous text, and communicates what it needs to. All in all, a solidly engaging and amusing picture-book, one I would recommend to young dinosaur-lovers in particular. show less

Have you ever wanted to give Romeo and Juliet a happy ending? To force them to have more mature attitudes about love? Or maybe just watch them fighting some ninjas? Well, then, good news! Now you can make all those crazy lovers' decisions for them!

This is a sort of follow up to Ryan North's Choose-You-Own-Adventure -- sorry, Chooseable-Path Adventure -- To Be or Not to Be. I will say that I think I liked that one a little bit more, probably in part because it was more of a novelty and I show more spent a lot of the time being happily astonished that it worked at all, and partly because I adore Hamlet but have never felt remotely the same about Romeo and Juliet. This one is also slightly less well-produced. It does have fun illustrations for each ending, but not the amazing full-color ones To Be or Not to Be did, and it also doesn't give each choice its own separate page, which made my usual habit of marking all the choices with post-it notes so I could go back to them later a lot messier.

But never mind all that, because even if I did like the first one slightly better, this one was still pretty delightful, with its amusing little digs at the characters' ideas about romance, and its sprinkling of silly pop-culture references, its moments of meta and unexpected dips into completely different genres. You also get three other bonus Shakespeare plays hidden inside! show less

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol 1: Squirrel Power written by Ryan North and illustrated by Erica Henderson. It is the first trade paperback collection of Squirrel Girl comics, containing issues #1–4 and also the first issue she ever appeared in from 1990.

OK. Squirrel Girl is my new favourite. Sorry Carol/Chewie and Kamala, you are now number two. (For the record, Spider-Woman and She-Hulk are number three. For now.) This comic is awesome. I had read issue #1 before, but while it stands as show more a nice introduction, the real meat of this story arc happens in the other three issues. Issue #1 does introduce Doreen, her surroundings, her squirrels and her room mate, though, so don't like, y'know, skip it or anything silly like that.

The main arc of this volume is Squirrel Girl saves earth from Galactus (I don't think it's a spoiler that Earth doesn't get destroyed, especially not this close to Earth/reality actually being destroyed in Secret Wars). She has a limited amount of time before Galactus reaches earth and by golly do other things just keep getting in her way. Hilariously. And OMG the Squirrel Girl and squirrel armour/space suits were the absolute best. Especially Tippy's version. *flails and dies of cutedorable*

Ahem.

(I wrote the rest of this review, other than this paragraph, before reading the 1990 issue.) The retro issue, which I suppose isn't that terribly retro since it's from the 90s, was a better read than I expected. It had the old art style and, even ignoring the weird 80s make-up, Squirrel Girl didn't look as nice as she does now. (Notably, her tail was less fluffy and her uniform was a bit meh.) BUT! It did cover the backstory with Iron Man that she kept alluding through in the modern story arc, so that was pretty cool. The actual story was enjoyable and almost as funny as the modern story, so whoo, not a dud. Squirrel Girl is awesome no matter what! This kind of makes me want to go back and read other old Squirrel Girl-having issues... at some point when I've subscribed to Marvel Universe again.

This comic/volume was hilarious and super fun to read. Unless you hate fun or adorableness (or squirrels, I suppose), this is the comic you should be reading. I cannot wait for the next volume, which luckily is only three months away, whoo. I am very tempted to go buy the floppies/digital floppies so that I can have MOAR NOW, but we have made a pact to only buy trades so I will be strong and wait. (I want a squirrel-ear headband. I would probably only wear it at cons, but still.) Also the trade included the letters columns, which I wasn't expecting but which kind of makes sense, in retrospect, given issue #4. So if you like letters, you still get them in the trade. Bonus! You also DO get the hidden text along the bottom which I'd heard somewhere we wouldn't so YAY because it is awesome.

Read Squirrel Girl!

5 / 5 stars

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