North had already paid 30 artists to illustrate his 80,000-word book, To Be or Not to Be: That is the Adventure, to be published by Breadpig next spring. But he wanted to get more artists on board for the labyrinthine project and turned to Kickstarter in order to pay them up front for their work.

North, author of the critically acclaimed Dinosaur Comics and the Adventure Time comic book series, hit his $20,000 goal within three and a half hours.

Eleven days in, he’d raised more than $220,000.

How did this happen?

A mix of factors: An original idea; early press about his Kickstarter success; and a link to a charitable cause. Breadpig donates all profits to charities, in this case the Canadian Cancer Society.

As for the book. Why did North, also a computer programmer, decide to create a game within a physical book instead of just making a computer game?

“I’ve spent many a happy day playing games,” he says. But he wanted to “create an object that is unusual.” Besides, “reading is more fun.”

Taking inspiration from Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books he’d read as a kid, including The Cave of Time (Bantam, 1979) by Edward Packard and Space and Beyond by (Bantam, 1980) R. A. Montgomery (20 of whose titles were released last month as ebooks). North got to work work creating a version of Hamlet “like a play within a play”–make that 100 plays within a play–in which the reader chooses which Shakespearean character he or she wants to be, complete with comic avatar.

The CYOA line, launched in 1979, was Bantam’s first publishing endeavor for young people. Facing weak sales, Bantam gave away 100,000 CYOA books to libraries. Between 1979 and 2000, the books sold 250 million copes worldwide, according to the site.

North was also influenced by “the brilliant” author Jason Shiga, whose Meanwhile: Pick Any Path, 3,856 Story Possibilities (Amulet, 2010) is also a choose-your-own-route comic book, crafted from a complex algorithm. Shiga’s maze of possible narratives opens with the reader’s decision whether to select a chocolate or vanilla ice cream cone.

North used the open-source software Twine—which allows writers to compose their narratives graphically with a map, and re-arrange as they go—to keep track of his story lines. Readers can “jump between characters” and can expect to encounter up to 110 possible death scenes, he says.

The software “gives me a visual map of where the stories go and how they interact,” says North. “Twine lets you draw nodes and lines between those nodes. If you put text within each node, you have a map of what happens.”

One of those 100 story lines is Shakespeare’s original. “If you make a choice that Shakespeare made, you see a Yorick skull. So you can read through the play as Shakespeare intended it,” North says.

In the tradition of CYOA books, To Be or Nor to Be is “told in the second person. The narrator is telling you how you’re feeling,” North says. He also took the liberty of adding a pirate scene to the story.

The famously indecisive Hamlet informed his book structure. “I was thinking about the soliloquy ‘To Be or Not to Be.’ Hamlet’s talking to himself and he’s giving himself a choice,” says North, who had wanted to write a story about ghosts before hitting on the ghost-rich Hamlet tale.

Fortunately, “Hamlet is driven by a clear goal: Killing Claudius,” North says. “That is well-suited to a game book like this.”

As for the extra money, it will be plowed back into the book. In addition to featuring much more art, To Be or Not to Be will include a choose-your-own reversible dust jacket on a hardcover edition, plus a prequel, Poor Yorick, set 25 years earlier, in which a broke Yorick takes a job as a court jester.

On Kickstarter, North spelled out his plans for the funds as donations hit certain benchmarks. At $100,000: “What the heck, I will write a sequel book. You guys are crazy.” A choose-your-own-path Macbeth is one option, he says.

North requested that Breadpig give proceeds to the Canadian Cancer Society. “My original charity was going to be something that supported literacy,” he told SLJ. But after his wife was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma last year, he asked that the money go toward cancer research. As the Kickstarter campaign states, “By supporting this book, you’re also supporting research for a cure. That is really cool!”

His wife is responding well to treatment, he says.

The audience for To Be or Not to Be is “the same age that would read Hamlet,’ says North, noting that he really wrote it for himself, and “made sure everyone is keeping their clothes on.”

“I got my brother to proofread this,” North added. “I found out that all his life, he has been reading choose-your-own-adventure stories like regular books, from start to finish.”

Listen to illustrator Andrés Vera Martínez introduce and read from Little White Duck.

Na Liu was born in a suburb of Wuhan, China, in 1973. She became a scientific researcher and physician, and moved to America where she met her husband, the artist Andrés Vera Martínez.

Of her childhood home, Na Liu explains that she was part of a “transitional generation—a generation caught in between one way of life and another, between the old and the new.” Here Martínez and Liu describe their collaboration on Little White Duck: A Childhood in China (Graphic Universe/Lerner, 2012; Gr 6 Up). The book is based on incidents from Liu’s early life that “reveal the drastic shift” from how her parents “grew up to how children of China live today.”

Na, what inspired you to tell the story of your childhood in China?

Na Liu: It was because of Andrés. Whenever he talks to someone, he wants to know all about them. He was curious about my family stories. I don’t think many children know what was going on in China at that time—it wasn’t an open society.

Andrés Vera Martínez: Little White Duck started as a challenge with Jim Hanley’s Universe in New York City: to create a 24-page comic in 24 hours. I’d just completed a book and had some ideas: a lot of childhood stories of my own, some ghost stories. At the time Na was pregnant and I wanted to do something for her and my daughter. She’d told me the story of the little white duck that was sewn onto her jacket  when she was young and that’s the story I decided to illustrate [at Hanley’s]. When I brought it home, Na thought it was wonderful. I developed the 24 pages into 10 pages [to submit to publishers]. Lerner “got it” as short stories, vignettes of memories; other publishers wanted to change it. At that stage, when I showed Little White Duck to Na, she said it wasn’t exactly like that. We had to go detail for detail.

NL: Whenever he drew even a little bit different from what I remembered, I’d say, “No, it doesn’t look like that.”

AVM: It took us two years to complete.

In the introduction, Na says she thinks of her childhood in China as “ordinary.” But to an American child, along with the experiences that they will recognize, such as the love of family and home, there are some unusual details—washing outdoors, catching rats for a school assignment.

AVM: I’d ask Na, “What did you do when you woke up? Where did you brush your teeth?” She’d say, “We went outside. The faucet was up high, I could barely reach it; we’d take a cup out.” We worked together. She described scenes and I tried to make them into a three-dimensional world in my illustrations.

The stories in the book center on a small girl named Da Qin (“Big Piano”). Could you tell us about the image of Da Qin and her sister, Xiao Qin (“Little Piano”) riding a flying golden crane, which opens the book and serves as a recurring motif.

AVM: I wanted [Da Qin] to wake from a dream sequence at the beginning of the book. The Yellow Crane Tower has a special significance in China. I asked Na if she’d been there; she said her mother used to take her in the spring, and she’d have dreams about the giant crane. Three years ago Na and I and our daughter went to visit Na’s hometown. When we visited the tower, we saw the giant mosaic inside [featuring] one of the gods with a long beard and flowing robe sitting on the crane.

What’s the significance of “Qin”—“piano” in your nicknames?

NL: In China, we give authority to the older generation to name children, and my maternal grandmother really liked pianos. She raised me, and she bought me that coat with the little white duck [stitched on it]. My friends weren’t able to afford a coat like that. It was very special.

Often, books that are written by Chinese-born Americans can be critical of Mao. However, in this book, Na’s family—and Na’s mother in particular—benefited from his policies, receiving medical care for polio, which her family would otherwise not have been able to afford.

AVM: In the book Mao has just died, and the girls’ parents have benefited from his leadership. Little White Duck is told from the child’s perspective, with her parents as the backdrop. I [showed Mao’s hero status in China at the time] with images, not words. That’s the beauty of comics. Na steered me to the emotional moment in the [reactions of the people to Mao’s death]. I wanted to capture that with [Da Qin’s] eyes and innocence. It drove me to do better work.

That scene in the book when Da Qin visits her father’s family in a rural village is so moving. The text and images really capture the girl’s desire to protect her coat and her wish to befriend the local children.

NL: I was a very small child. In my memory, there was a sequence of events that touched me on that trip. Through Andrés’s illustrations [it’s clear] that it was a great learning point. I’m impressed that Andrés [was able to visually express] that I didn’t want the other children to touch [the little white duck with their soiled hands], but at the same time I wanted them to feel something special; I knew those moments shouldn’t be [reserved] just for me. The illustrations connect all the dots…they’re very honest. Through these little stories, I realized my parents were teaching me life lessons. I’m raising a daughter now and I want to carry on that tradition…I want my daughter to be a great person!

Little White Duck (Liu)
© 2012 by Martínez

TeachingBook.net resources on this interview »»»

Listen to illustrator Andrés Vera Martínez introduce and read from Little White Duck.