Welcome back to We Want Comics, a column exploring various intellectual properties—whether they’re movies, TV shows, novels, or video games—that we would like to see adapted into comic books. Usually these intellectual properties were originally developed without comics in mind at all, but this time I want to take a dive into a property that has comics baked into the concept: Night School Studio’s Oxenfree.
While Oxenfree is a video game, its design pulls from comic books. The characters, designed by Heather Gross, look like they’ve stepped out of the sort of comic you’d expect from a publisher like BOOM! Studios, and the branching dialogue mechanic relies on speech bubbles as a way to communicate the mechanic to the player. In terms of visuals, you don’t need to imagine what an Oxenfree comic would look like; you can see it in the game already.
Before we go any further, there will be spoilers for the game if you haven’t played it, so, you know… go play it and then swing back here afterward.
As a comic Oxenfree could totally work as a play by play of the original game and that’d be fine, but that’d really miss the potential there. Oxenfree is a story the ends where it begins, time skipping back to a moment just before the opening scene. After the first play through, the player unlocks a game plus version, in which Alex is dimly aware that she’s in a loop. However, the game doesn’t do much with this idea. Sure, you can see different variations of the ending and see different character dynamics in the cast, and even unlock a special ending, but the game is still firmly on rails for the most part. Game plus is a little treat, but the game can’t blow a substantial chunk of its budgeted time and money on a second play through, so it’s restrained in its overall impact.
A comic opens up the door for exploring the looping narrative in new and interesting ways that diverge massively from the first run through. In the game, the player is Alex and she’s teamed up with Ren, Nona, Clarissa, and her step-brother Jonas as they explore Edwards Island. Depending on the player’s choices, it’s possible to change time so that Alex’s brother Michael doesn’t die. In a comic, this could add Michael to primary cast, but remove Jonas for the second run through. And perhaps in a third run through both Michael and Jonas could be present. This isn’t a Groundhog Day–style loop with a clean reset; the outcome of the previous loop changes the start state of the next loop.
Not to mention the game is singularly focused on Alex’s point of view, but as a comic the story could function with multiple leads. What happens if its Clarissa’s choices that determine the next loop? And a character like Nona, who’s the least developed character in the game, could get fleshed out in new and interesting ways through the eyes of Clarissa or even as the central character of a loop. Perhaps we could even find out who her grandfather is and how he’s connected to the island.
Story aside, there are some stylistic issues that would need to be dealt with. The Oxenfree game is very dialogue driven with an emphasis on mood over action. It isn’t the sort of story you could package in twenty-two-page installments with a cliffhanger at the end without harming the pacing or truncating set pieces like the conversation around the fire on Beacon Beach. This is a series that’d probably work best as a series of graphic novels.
Additionally, significant portions of the game revolve around reading letters and listening to radio broadcasts, which works great in the game because the letters are a side quest that rewards the player with extra story nuggets and the radio broadcasts use sound to create mood; those radio broadcasts were frequently the creepiest parts of the game. But how do you adapt that to a comic and retain that punch? There’s only so much that lettering can do to evoke weird vocalizations and voice shifting from human to something else.
Continued belowThese challenges aren’t insurmountable though. It’s even part of the appeal of this “what if” scenario. It’s a storytelling problem that a strong creative team could twist to their advantage to craft a whole new experience.
Speaking of the creative team, the original game has a very singular voice, and the comics team would have to be invested in that voice to bring it to life. But a comic adaptation of Oxenfree can’t just be mimicking the game’s voice either. It needs to build on it and explore it, and in order to do that effectively, it’d be good to have the comics team collaborate with the game’s original creators—Adam Hines and Sean Krankel, and artist Heather Gross—in at least an advisory capacity. Given how dialogue driven the game is, it’d be nice to see Hines as co-writer on the comic.
As for who the comic team would be, that’s a tough question. They’d have to have an interest in telling teen stories, especially coming of age tales, but they’d also have to have an interest in the spooky atmosphere of Oxenfree and be invested in comics that linger on conversation and body language. The likes of Faith Erin Hicks or Kate Leth on writing duties would be a good fit.
The artist would be a little trickier, since it can’t be someone aping Heather Gross’s style, but it does need someone that shares her sensibilities. It would also have to be an artist in this for the long haul. Oxenfree isn’t the sort of story that could be easily crammed into a two-hundred-page graphic novel, and a big part of the story’s impact relies on familiarity. Switching artists reduces the impact of seeing the same moment play out a different way, because the art change already makes it different. For the same reason, this would need to be an artist that’s good with environments. Virtually the whole story is set on Edwards Island, and a key part of telling the story effectively is to orient the reader in the physical space. Max Sarin could be up for the task. While her work in “Giant Days” is quite cartoony, she’s capable of other moods and she’s excellent with character work (plus her art would look great with Gross’s color palettes). Yuko Ota’d be a good fit too, especially looking at her work in “Barbarous.”
But there is one artist that would be absolutely perfect for the task: Lorena Alvarez. She’s been nominated for a Best Writer/Artist Eisner this year for her work on “Nightlights,” a book that shows her capable of dealing with all of Oxenfree’s story needs, especially the creepy stuff.
MSassyK would be amazing on colors, and Aditya Bidikar would be excellent on lettering. These two work well together and they seem to have a genuine interest in story problem solving. If anyone can make the radio segments work, it’s these two.
And obviously, the speech bubbles shouldn’t have outlines and the font should be the exact same one used in the game, because anything else would be madness.
