This column normally takes a look at obscure comics. For every every sixth month, instead of taking a look at a comic that nobody talks about, this special edition will take a look at a comic I feel not enough people talk about.
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Life is Strange by Emma Vieceli, Claudia Leonardi and Andrea Izzo 2018 - 2022
Contains Major Spoilers
The year is 2015. It's a good time for fans of adventure games. Thought long dead or relegated to cult status for years, the runaway success of Telltale Games' The Walking Dead had heralded a return to form for the genre, as well as fulfilling the promise of actual episodic gaming that had eluded developers for so long, treating each episode as though it were an episode of a TV show, and the entire product as a season.
Yet despite the success, few were willing to throw their hat into the arena. One contender, however, would walk in with their own comparator to Telltale's monopoly, and that was Dontnod Entertainment's Life is Strange. Far from the grim apocalypses and far off worlds that Telltale had offered, Life of Strange was a slice-of-life mystery. Concerned with a young woman's return to her home town. The plot escalates as she saves a friend's life and discovers that she has the power to re-wind time.
The time travel mechanic was primarily touted as what set Life is Strange apart from Telltale's entries to the genre, but it was the slowly unfolding mystery that kept people around. Drawing elements from Twin Peaks, Donnie Darko and numerous teen dramas, Life is Strange soon picked up a strong following. While it's student vernacular was lightly mocked, the characters in the story quickly drew audiences in, and soon enough, the shipping began.
I don't know whether Dontnod always intended for there to be romantic chemistry between Max Caulfield, the protagonist, and Chloe Price, her abrasive childhood friend, but I certainly expect the developers pivoted to play more into this aspect once they saw how much of the fanbase was made of young gay women. This, however, would prove to be a double-edged sword, as the more the story played up the relationship between the two women, the greater the betrayal it felt once the ending finally hit.
The game concludes with a player choice, rewind to the start of the game and allow Chloe to die in order to reset the timeline, or witness the town and most of the other character in it be destroyed by a time-vortex hurricane. This, alone, was controversial in and of itself, robbing the player of any possibility of a happy ending for Max and Chloe, but the way it was executed would proceed to draw a great deal of ire from the fanbase. Max and Chloe would only acknowledge romantic feeling for each other with a kiss in the ending where Chloe dies, while the ending where she lives felt underwritten and far too brief to feel satisfying.
The term queer-bating is used to describe a situation where a writing team plays up the possibility of a same sex relationship between two character to drum up interest from gay audiences without ever planning on following through. To many, Life is Strange was guilty of such a crime, and debate ranged heavily on the quality of the endings, with many labelling the game problematic, while others wrote the game off as not worth playing at all.
The fury would soon cool however, in part thanks to a well revived prequel in Deck Nine's Before the Storm, that stayed mostly distinct from the plot of the main game and focussed on an unambiguously queer relationship between Chloe and Rachel Amber, the missing soon-to-be-found-murdered girl of the first game. Likewise, metric tonnes of fanart and fan fiction, where creators chose to just come up with their own ending, cushioned the blow.
Still, with news that series was going to continue with an anthology format, focussing on a new story and new characters with every game, it didn't seem as though we'd be seeing Max or an alive Chloe any time in the future.
However, in 2018 there came an announcement that nobody saw coming. Titan Comics would be publishing a comic sequel to the first game, continuing on from the ending where Chloe lives and Arcadia Bay is destroyed.
Expectations were positive, but tempered for a lot of reasons. The outcome of the Sacrifice Arcadia Bay ending was lamented as too grim and underdeveloped, with many worrying that the comic would fail to improve upon this. Likewise, the decision to release such a story while the main games continued with a new cast of characters caused many to wonder if the comic was being released merely to placate people who just wanted more Max and Chloe. On top of it all, while Titan Comics has had a fine pedigree of solid comics, it's video game spin-offs tended to fall on the superfluous side, and rarely ran for more than four issues.
All in all, a cynical shadow hung over the series like the storm clouds over Arcadia Bay. So it was to the surprise of many that the first story arc in the series turned out to not only be very enjoyable, but intriguing and thoughtful too.
The Life is Strange comic begins with Dust, which sees us rejoin Chloe and Max some time after the game's events, having relocated to Seattle and moved on with their lives, eking out a comfortable existence adjacent to small time band The Seven Seas. The comic would generate good will almost immediately by tossing aside any residual ambiguity to Max and Chloe's relationship, depicting them explicitly in a same-sex relationship and almost certainly in love with one another.
Emma Vieceli's writing is strong and clear right from the outset, with a complete understand of who these characters are and what hopes and fears they embody. You can hear the sound of the character's voices in your head as you read. Likewise, Claudia Leonardi's artwork, boosted by Andrea Izzo carefully considered colour palate, is pitch perfect for the series, managing to bring an animated, alive feel to the characters, capturing their impression without slavishly trying to replicate the visuals of the game. This is a comic that understands that it is depicting this world and characters under a different medium, and it slips them right in there seamlessly.
Dust on it's own single-handedly manages to pave over the roughness of the game's controversial ending, depicting Max as having gained a great deal of happiness from saving Chloe's life but a weight of guilt hangs over her failure to save Arcadia Bay, and it's this weight of responsibility that informs Max's arc going forward. Soon enough she finds her time powers returning, but this time with the added complication of slipping into alternate timelines.
We see glimpses of the world from the ending where Chloe dies, as well as other variations of events. It becomes clear that Max once again risks fracturing the time-space continuum and is forced to leave her domestic bliss with Chloe in order to Quantum Leap into other timelines in search of a remedy.
The story ends with Max saying a heartfelt farewell to Chloe. It's bittersweet, having begun this story seeing that the two had managed to find happiness only to have it torn apart again, but the writing communicates clearly that Max is determined to reunite once more, giving us a burning, driving goal in which to keep the story rolling.
Dust serves as a fine epilogue for the game, but, as would soon become apparent, it would serve as an even better prologue for what was to come, as the end of the forth issue reveals that Max's quest has taken her into a timeline where Rachel Amber never died and the events of the first game never happened.
While Dust had assured fans that the Life is Strange comic was in good hands, there was still some trepidation of where the story was going. From the beginning the fanbase had proliferated a great many fanfics where Rachel lives and Chloe and Max get a happy ever after. Was this comic soon to be revealed as little more than an elaborate fan fiction? An excuse to just write fan-pleasing stories where nothing bad ever happened?
Well, no, Vieceli clearly had greater ambitions in mind, and while bringing Rachel back from the dead may seem like an almost shark-jumping direction to take the story, it instead allowed for a greater exploration of the characters and their relationships to one another. The second arc, Waves, would establish the story proper, with Max navigating the alt-timeline and searching for clues as to why her powers had brought her there. Along the way she crosses paths Tristan, a young drifter with the curious ability to wipe himself from peoples memories.
Clearly more was at play here, but Max's main obstacles are not supernatural occurrences but just plain old life getting in the way. As Max finds herself embroiled with Rachel's attempt to found an acting career and alt-Chloe's life as an artist, she clashes with bureaucracy, poverty and crime. There is no antagonist here, and Vieceli reinforces the plot with a bedrock of relatability. Our protagonists find themselves in troubles most young people do today, gay or otherwise.
As the story continued into its next arc, Strings, it started to become clear to me what the comic's greatest strengths are. The willingness to take its time and trust it's audience. I imagine Vieceli and Leonardi must have been under a great deal of pressure when working on the series. It was, after all, a spin-off comic from a niche game from a niche genre. There was probably no guarantee that the series would sell enough copies to complete it's entire run. The temptation must have been there to try and get through everything as quickly possible, fit the maximum amount of plot on every page and race to the end.
The creative team didn't do that, and the plot moves along at what could almost be described as a leisurely pace. Far from getting from A to B as economically as possible, the comic instead spends whole issues just exploring the minutia of the character's lives. Max has flashbacks to her life with Chloe prior to the start of the series, we find out more about the head space alt-timeline Rachel and Chloe have found themselves in, and we explore the rough world that Tristan has sprung from and the toll it has taken on his psyche, another welcome development for a character many were worried would be a two-dimensional insert.
With this dedication to depth and nuance, the comic is free to explore ideas the game itself didn't have time to, but perhaps more interestingly, it also takes the opportunity to comment upon and criticise it's own source material. The most powerful example of this is the scene in which alt-timeline Rachel, currently cast to play Ophelia in an adaption of Hamlet, laments Ophelia's position as little more than a plot device, a character whose most relevance to the story is her death. We can see clearly in this scene, and ones like it, as the comic taking pot-shots at not only the Life is Strange game, but also popular culture's propensity as a whole to treat young female characters as disposable plot devices.
This scene itself serves as the herald for the comic moving into greater than mere spin-off territory. The book would re-launch itself after issue 12 as Partners in Time. The fourth act, Tracks, would escalate the plot into it's greater narrative, as the three girls go on a road trip across America for a joint band/acting tour in an attempt to follow up on the clues and visions behind Max's power fluctuations.
It's in the second part of the comic's overall run that we see it's character studies dig deeper still, as Tristan manages to jump timelines and make contact with Chloe-Prime, while Max herself manages to start getting glimpses at events from each timeline running simultaneously. Like all good time travel stories, the comic explores questions of choice and identity. To what degree can we consider the alt-timeline Rachel and Chloe distinguishable from their prime counterparts? Are they basically the same person, or different enough to make them entirely separate individuals?
Again, the leisurely pace of the plot allow these questions to be debated back and forth, considered, and allowed to really sink in, all the while Leonardi's beautiful artwork is rewarding us with fantastic vistas and beautiful landscapes. There's a texture and a pulse to Life is Strange's world that I can't quite put my finger on, but as with the characters, the comic transposes it perfectly from screen to page.
By the time we reach the stories fifth ark, Coming Home, we're now in the home stretch
(pun intended), and we quicken now from action to action, as it begins to come clear what Max's purpose has become. While the comic sticks to the game's decision to keep the nature of her time powers ambiguous, the comic lays suggestions that Max has had to jump timelines as part of causality's self defence mechanism. A healing system to prevent further damages from happening. As the story expands, Tristan begins to work between the timelines, and Pixie, one of the secondary character from The Seven Seas, comes to greater prominence as a oracle of sorts, while former alpha-bitch Victoria Chase returns for a formal redemption arc.
The final arc, titled, appropriately, Settling Dust, brings everything to a head, with the return of the coastline-obliterating time tornado. On this occasion, however, Max is prepared, and with a greater understanding of her powers, and a few friends with powers of their own, she is able to correct the imbalance, preserve the timelines, repair causality and return home. A fine conclusion, but as it turns out the story was far from done. With the main conflict of the series resolved, the comic would still run for a further two issues to really wrap things up.
Far from content to bring us an action packed finale, a cheering victory and then rolling the credits, Vieceli, Leonardi and Izzo instead choose to give readers what many had felt the games had failed to provide. Closure. Over the course of the final two issues, we follow the lives of the main cast in both timelines, pondering upon the lessons they have learned and the questions they were forced to ask of themselves. In a wonderful little moment, Tristan manages to skip a box of photographs across the timelines, and Chloe-Prime finally gets to see concrete proof of a life where she and Rachel were happy together, closing one of the story's deepest wounds.
A Life is Strange comic that provides closure to the endings of the first game (and to a lesser degree lingering plots from Before the Storm) is a proposition that could easily have devolved into wanton fanservice. Yet, far from feeling like fanfiction with an official logo slapped on it, the Life is Strange comic goes out of it's way to make that closure feel earned.
There's more I could spend time praising about the series. The little cameos and nods to the other games in the series are nice, and linking up the continuity with Chloe's potential reappearance in Life is Strange 2 is a neat touch. I have very few criticisms for the series. It's a shame we didn't see an appearance from Kate Marsh given how important she was to the events of the first game, and I was expecting to see some form of reconciliation between David and Chloe given that such a thing is mentioned as having taken place in Life is Strange 2. These, though, are minor complaints, and barely tarnish the titan of work the entire series is as a whole.
While there is room to take the characters on future journeys, I doubt we'll be seeing Max and Chloe return any time soon, though in many ways, after everything they've been through, they've earned a deserved rest. Word down the wire is that a comic book series following the events of True Colours (which I haven't played yet,) is what will be succeeding this series, so it seems we're not quite done with the world of Life is Strange in the graphic medium just yet.
In conclusion, the Life is Strange comic sets a high watermark for what can be done with the simple and often disposable premise of a video game spin off. With the right creative team, with a strong and determined script, and a willingness to take your time and trust the audience, a story can reach far beyond it's humble and oft-considered lowbrow status. I don't know if we'll ever see a another series outgrow it's origins as strongly as Life is Strange did, but I'd love to see it happen.
Time, I suppose, will surely tell.
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Jack Harvey 2022. Life is Strange is (c) Dontnod/Square Enix/Titan Comics where appropriate. Images used under Fair Use.
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