Directions “Right” – (2003)

Probably the most absurdist Directions installment. I’m pretty sure I smashed together a dream and a joke my father in law once told me. And although the joke is great and the dream is unsettling, the narrative wasn’t the point.

From a formal perspective, if you access all 3 of the interactive elements in the comic, you get a tidy loop of story. The end will send you back to the beginning and the middle bridges two disparate pieces of information. It’s probably my cleanest use of these techniques to assemble a circular narrative.

Some one a long time ago described the Directions series as “a love letter to webcomics”. I think this was the clearest example of that idea.

Note: The interactive elements of the narrative were built in Flash, a popular online animation tool at the time. Most browsers no longer support the playing of these files, but there is a Flash player extension availabe for Chrome that will load them with a couple of clicks. This is the easiest way to see these comics as created.

You can read the comic here.