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Choosing To Be An Interplanetary Spy

Published Sun, 24 Apr 2016 11:00:30 -0500

A. Fleming Seay writes for Bleeding Cool

You might remember them. Those wheeled, sheet metal book shelves painted in primary colors that housed the collected and annually acquirable treasures of the elementary school book fair. The entire gambit of grade-schooler interests and reading levels collected, branded, and priced at less than $5 apiece. An aluminum grid where a puppy themed coloring book might sit proudly next to last year's offering from Judy Blum, a space calendar, and a Spiderman themed pop-up book bearing strong messages about the importance of brushing your teeth. A mobile retail fixture where a literal truckload of safe, milquetoast selections might hide a few gems waiting to be unearthed by the careful seeker. Snappy Put-Downs & Funny Insults was one of those gems, a book packed with so much fodder for school yard trash talk that one wonders about the deliciously dark sense of humor the curator who selected it for inclusion in the fair must have had.

Never before had a more potent collection of illustrated barbs on body odor, weight, poverty and parentage been offered so directly to a group so ready to put them to use. My school's administration ordered it pulled from the shelves. They were unsuccessful, but only because there were no copies left to pull. Every available one had long since been purchased and was being put to use in dropping the civility level on campus to zero, but I digress.

One morning in the early 1980s, it was from one of these shelving units that I pulled Robot World and Space Olympics, volumes three and four of the Be An Interplanetary Spy series. These were gems too, but for another reason entirely. These fully illustrated space operas were a wonderful combination of video games and graphic novels that made you look like you were reading, but feel like you were sticking it to the man. Gamebooks were nothing new at the time, but they were popular. The Choose You Own Adventure and Pick A Path to Adventure brands were top sellers. They offered exciting, quasi-interactive narratives in a wide collection of settings ranging from the dungeons of high fantasy to the streets of the average American neighborhood.

These books offered a form of agency, allowing the reader to choose how the story would progress rather than having it dictated to them. You probably had your own favorite flavor. What set Be An Interplanetary Spy apart from the rest of the genre at the time was that illustrations were not rewards on a variable schedule of reinforcement for reading several pages of text. They also weren't checkpoints bringing your imagined vision of the subject matter into alignment with that of the creator. Instead, every page of the Be An Interplanetary Spy books was packed with the vivid vision of the authors and artists (comic book legends like Marc Hempel, Mark Wheatley, Steve Fastner and Rich Larson) rendered in efficient prose and beautiful line art that seemed at once pulled from comic book pages and video game screens. As the series progressed from volume to volume you gained levels and encountered recurring characters on a wild ride that made failure fun. If you only made the right choice, you were missing half the show. Death, capture or infinite time in dimensional limbo were delivered with surreal and entertaining shock value, sometimes several pages after you thought you were out of the woods. Having a clean run from cover to cover was never the goal. So popular were the endings that selected images from the series still get posted to reddit and imgur and have tumblrs devoted to collecting them.

I feel like these books influenced my appreciation for comics, graphic novels, and role playing games in a major way. I loved these books, I miss them, and I want to bring them back in a form that will be engaging to the modern grade-school reader as well as the nostalgic parent, a form that I can someday share with my kids. The goal is not to reinvent or reboot the series, but simply to modernize the look and experience a bit by taking advantage of the enhanced visuals and interactivity offered by a more dynamic format. Simply, to honor the source material, not reimagine it.

It all started for me more than thirty years ago with the discovery of a set of gems hidden on a rolling metal bookshelf. All these years later, I'd like to provide a similar experience to the young treasure hunters of the modern app store. If you would like to get on board, you can the Be An Interplanetary Spy campaign on Kickstarter right now.

The choice is up to you.

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