3 out of 5

An ambitious, if clunky, choose-your-own-adventure style comic, Matt Emmons ‘Trial + Error’ is an especially well-presented mini-GN about an “E.L.M.”, a “newborn creature” that resembles a small Yeti-like thing; our lead ELM wakes up in a decrepit laboratory, and Matt gives us multiple prompts on the page to determine where we’d like the ELM to go next – to check out the hallway, or peek at a computer, etc.

CYoA comics are tough. Jason Shiga has done them well by turning the whole experience into a puzzle, but when trying to craft a story-first version, I find the length between the choices really matters. This is why the books work: you often get at least a page or two (excepting the abrupt endings) to get your bearings on the scene and the upcoming choice. In comics, especially with limited pages, that might get compressed down to choices-by-panel, which is a very disruptive way to read, and somewhat hard to keep track of if you’re trying to read through the various endings. ‘Trial + Error’ is obviously named to support the reread approach, and being a creator-owned GN, presumably Matt could (allowing for costs) decide how long the story would go for, but several pages end up being funnels of several choices – we wind up in a room with multiple paths – and in order to keep it organized, Matt loops a lot of paths back to these funnels. It’s a logical compromise, but I found myself unable to get immersed in any given path, with the story only really opening up when i discovered paths that were ultimately a bit more linear (like once you know to ignore the funnels). Finding the “right” way through a CYoA is part of the experience, it just felt slightly like a battle this time. And very superficially, while I really dug the idea of having some inserts as ways to break up the visuals, with these acting as sub-pages (e.g. page 18A), the insert’s printed side would always face the left-side page, whereas it might actually be an addendum to the right-side page, again just creating the slightest bit of reader churn.

Trial + Error fiddles with Emmons forever obsessions with collisions of nature and technology, and the destructiveness of that but the hope that can also emerge. Our lil’ EMS is a cute POV guide, and I appreciate that the “bad” endings don’t spare the bad, and Matt remembers to have some classic CYoA “whoops, you’re dead” style humor. But this format is very hard to pull off in comic form, and T + E doesn’t quite crack the formula.