This second book in the Adventuregame Comics series - although "series" isn't the right word; "format" or "style" is closer - is The Beyond, and it's an afterlife fantasy. That means the "pre-credit" sequence is a catalog of choices that all lead to the death of our main character, Mario Rivera.
Because you can't have an afterlife fantasy while you're still alive, can you?
Beyond follows the format and structure of the first book, Leviathan - see my post for all the details; this is pretty different from a normal middle-grade GN - and distantly follows Shiga's decade-old Meanwhile..., which is a larger-format, more ambitious version of the same thing.
So it's all Choose-Your-Adventure style, with numbers on each page and an intricate web of comics panels connected by pipes - not always in the order you would expect; you need to read the comics panels carefully and follow the pipes - so that the reader can make decisions for Mario and lead him to the next stage of his adventure.
As I said about Leviathan, prose books in this style tend to be bushes: they lead out from a single starting point to a whole lot of dead ends, most of which see the main character die. Shiga's books instead are like the paths in a formal garden or a hedge maze: they loop around and cross each other multiple times, but there's only a small number of exits, and the trick is to find your way to all of them.
The other important thing about Shiga, besides the playfulness and delight in overcomplication, is that he's a mathematician. So there's going to be math - and, more centrally, his stories are mathy in their style and presentation, with a chilly formalism always lurking deep in the narrative.
Here, the afterlife is individual to each person, as Mario learns from his guide, Xochitl. There are doors controlled by books, each of which has a specific number on its spine. Mario can enter each of the books in turn - there are four shown in this story - and, eventually, do more complicated things.
Luckily, there are other people in most of the books, so it's not entirely Mario running through empty rooms - though it starts that way. A reader might wonder, if this is the afterlife and it's specific to each person, who are those other people? Are they "real," or maybe figments of his imagination, or aspects of his personality, or whatever? And, if so, isn't that deeply solipsistic? Well, a lot of Shiga tends to the solipsistic - it's part of being mathy.
But Mario still does need to run through those worlds, find out the permutations - I'm saying "Mario," but I mean "the reader," playing that part - and find his way to the various endings. There are, I think, two good ones and one not-so-nice. Though, again, Mario is dead anyway, so the usual thread-ending of a book like this is off the table.
This is fun, and obviously these books are like nothing else - I've said this before, but Shiga's books are all very Shiga, and very little like anyone else - but I found this one a bit more tedious and less exciting than Leviathan, and certainly not the triumph Meanwhile... was. It might be returning to the same well for a third time, it might be the elevated levels of solipsism, but I just liked this one and didn't love it like I did the earlier ones. Temper your own expectations appropriately.
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