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.
