You get up in the morning and hear someone knocking at your door. What do you do? You open the door or peep through the key- hole to check who’s knocking or just forget about it and go back to sleep.
But what do you do if you know it’s a man with a gun? That he will shoot you the moment you open the door? That if you stayed on in bed, he was going to break the door and shoot you anyway?
But is there a guy waiting outside to kill you in the first place? “To know that, you have to get killed a few times,” says a grinning Jason Shiga, who was visiting Calcutta. He was talking about his interactive comic book Knock Knock, which he wrote in 2006.
Jason Shiga is not your average cartoonist. Several books that this 34-year-old Asian American, who lives in Oakland, California, has authored are interactive.
Shiga incorporates puzzles and unconventional ways of storytelling in his work. There are some 200 ways to get killed in Knock Knock and just one way to survive and the reader’s job is to find that out.
“It’s difficult to find publishers for interactive books as the cost of their publication is very high,” he said.
Back home in the US, Shiga, however, has always enjoyed a rich comic culture. Comic book conventions take place in every city every month and the biggest among them is the San Diego Comic- Con. The five-day event this year reportedly saw a footfall of 30,000.
Apart from Knock Knock and Meanwhile, two of his other interactive comic books are The Last Supper and Hello World.
Hello World, written in 2006, tells the story of a mother and her two children.
The reader, acting as the mom, gets to choose what to give her kids for lunch before sending them out into the world. Depending upon how the boxes are packed, the children return home either empty handed, or with butter. But they also face the possibility of an explosion at the supermarket, from which the mother can save them.