"He’s the best guy who’s ever lived, apparently."
June 8, 2016 10:17 AM Subscribe
The Globe and Mail's Mark Medley has written a a choose-your-own-adventure profile of Ryan North, of Dinosaur Comics/Unbeatable Squirrel Girl/getting stuck in a hole fame. See if you can get through the interview without dying!
That was wonderful, although I did die twice. Once by Ryan North's hand!
posted by figurant at 10:44 AM on June 8, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by figurant at 10:44 AM on June 8, 2016 [2 favorites]
I got stuck in a hole. Of course.
posted by Johnny Assay at 10:46 AM on June 8, 2016 [7 favorites]
posted by Johnny Assay at 10:46 AM on June 8, 2016 [7 favorites]
Finding out that Ryan North is not as much older than me as I would've guessed is freaking me out w/r/t life accomplishments
posted by clockzero at 10:46 AM on June 8, 2016
posted by clockzero at 10:46 AM on June 8, 2016
The article is not QUITE as good with the "choose-your-own" format as Ryan himself (my preordered copy of Romeo and/or Juliet arrived Monday, the day before its official release, and I have only consumed about 1/10 of the 400+ pages... hard to tell when you CAN'T read it linearly), but it helps if you have over 100 webcomickers, comicbookers and animators adding illustrations to your words. But really, North has totally mastered the skill of composing long, complex paragraphs that digress all over the place and end up making you L.O.L. far better than I ever did, and I have been trying for a couple decades longer. So I am in awe... and in rank jealousy.
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:56 AM on June 8, 2016
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:56 AM on June 8, 2016
Among other projects, North maintains a Tumblr page (Noam Chompsky’s Early Language Acquisition) on which he posts photos and fan art of his dog and chronicles his continuing adventures training his canine pal.
Isn't it just 'art'? Or is it because people are fans of his dog? This is confusing.
posted by quaking fajita at 11:00 AM on June 8, 2016 [1 favorite]
Isn't it just 'art'? Or is it because people are fans of his dog? This is confusing.
posted by quaking fajita at 11:00 AM on June 8, 2016 [1 favorite]
Assuming I counted right, there are 45 different pages in the interview and 6 endings.
Also, there are more than 3 characters in Dinosaur Comics, but some of them like the raccoons and cephalopods are forever off panel.
And I didn't know he was writing Squirrel Girl when I bought it, but when I found out, it made the secret tiny text at the bottom of each page make a little more sense.
posted by mattamatic at 11:04 AM on June 8, 2016
Also, there are more than 3 characters in Dinosaur Comics, but some of them like the raccoons and cephalopods are forever off panel.
And I didn't know he was writing Squirrel Girl when I bought it, but when I found out, it made the secret tiny text at the bottom of each page make a little more sense.
posted by mattamatic at 11:04 AM on June 8, 2016
how do i get out of this hole
posted by poffin boffin at 11:05 AM on June 8, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by poffin boffin at 11:05 AM on June 8, 2016 [2 favorites]
I think it's possible that Ryan North might be our generation's true answer/successor to Douglas Adams. I'd wager that North's Shakespeare CYOA books each have at least as much content as any of Adams' interactive fiction games, and there's a similarly Adamsesque analytical-comic sensibility at work in both Dinosaur Comics and Squirrel Girl. The only thing that North has yet to conquer is radio and television.
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:12 AM on June 8, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:12 AM on June 8, 2016 [2 favorites]
Finding out that Ryan North is not as much older than me as I would've guessed is freaking me out w/r/t life accomplishments
"It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years."
--Tom Lehrer
posted by tobascodagama at 11:14 AM on June 8, 2016 [15 favorites]
"It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years."
--Tom Lehrer
posted by tobascodagama at 11:14 AM on June 8, 2016 [15 favorites]
The fact that this post is directly above one titled "there was just one guy who was better than him" represents an apex of MetaFilter.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 11:41 AM on June 8, 2016 [5 favorites]
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 11:41 AM on June 8, 2016 [5 favorites]
I SWEAR that was unintentional.
posted by Metroid Baby at 11:55 AM on June 8, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by Metroid Baby at 11:55 AM on June 8, 2016 [2 favorites]
I didn't die at all!
I feel like I'm doing something wrong.
posted by kyrademon at 12:32 PM on June 8, 2016 [1 favorite]
I feel like I'm doing something wrong.
posted by kyrademon at 12:32 PM on June 8, 2016 [1 favorite]
I totally saw getting stuck in a hole coming and avoided it. I ended up finding out that Ryan North is the nicest guy in the world at the Toronto Comics Arts Festival. Which is frankly way less fun than getting stuck in a hole.
posted by jacquilynne at 1:20 PM on June 8, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by jacquilynne at 1:20 PM on June 8, 2016 [1 favorite]
Ditto, plus it's not exactly new information.
posted by comealongpole at 1:35 PM on June 8, 2016
posted by comealongpole at 1:35 PM on June 8, 2016
If he's so damned nice, why is he letting me die in this hole?
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:43 PM on June 8, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:43 PM on June 8, 2016 [4 favorites]
I TOOK CHOMPSKY FOR A WALK i am very endeared by chompsky
posted by capricorn at 1:57 PM on June 8, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by capricorn at 1:57 PM on June 8, 2016 [4 favorites]
Going by the "older" link at the bottom of this page, it would appear there was just one guy who was better than Ryan North.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 2:00 PM on June 8, 2016
posted by Ursula Hitler at 2:00 PM on June 8, 2016
I tried to keep him from destroying Shakespeare. I tried.
posted by Pallas Athena at 4:19 PM on June 8, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Pallas Athena at 4:19 PM on June 8, 2016 [1 favorite]
It's so cold down here. If only I had a nice dog to hold onto to help keep me warm.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 4:53 PM on June 8, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 4:53 PM on June 8, 2016 [1 favorite]
Ryan North doesn't have the dark side of Douglas Adams, the good-natured misanthropy, the depression, the severe writer's block. Which is good for him as a person, and doesn't seem to hurt him as a writer, either. In fact, I wouldn't hesitate to nominate Ryan North to be ruler of the Universe.
posted by rikschell at 6:20 PM on June 8, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by rikschell at 6:20 PM on June 8, 2016 [2 favorites]
Ryan North's page-by-page breakdown of the Back to the Future novelization is hands down the funniest thing I read last year.
posted by Flannery Culp at 7:38 PM on June 8, 2016
posted by Flannery Culp at 7:38 PM on June 8, 2016
No dark side? He just stabbed me! (OK, so it was pretty rude of me to not want to talk about anything other than his current book, but still)
posted by ckape at 12:38 AM on June 9, 2016
posted by ckape at 12:38 AM on June 9, 2016
Fun, yet oddly jarring the way it plays with story and journalism.
“It’s almost unnerving,” Steve Murray, a Toronto writer and illustrator who publishes under the name Chip Zdarsky, told you earlier.
posted by quinndexter at 2:24 AM on June 9, 2016
“It’s almost unnerving,” Steve Murray, a Toronto writer and illustrator who publishes under the name Chip Zdarsky, told you earlier.
posted by quinndexter at 2:24 AM on June 9, 2016
I like Ryan North! He seems like a good dude, and is constantly spinning off new creative projects.
That said, I think he needs to take a break from Dinosaur Comics. I feel like it's dropped off in quality lately.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:48 AM on June 9, 2016
That said, I think he needs to take a break from Dinosaur Comics. I feel like it's dropped off in quality lately.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:48 AM on June 9, 2016
The bit in To Be or Not To Be where North re-writes one of Hamlet's soliloquies as a rap with every line ending in the same rhyme is the most impressive and entertaining stunt-poem-within-a-book since Stanislaw Lem's translator Michael Kandel gave us "a poem about a haircut! But lofty, nobel, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter 's'!"
posted by straight at 10:08 AM on June 9, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by straight at 10:08 AM on June 9, 2016 [1 favorite]
Ryan North is also responsible for The Midas Flesh an eight-issue cosmic sci-fi comic series about an attempt to weaponize the corpse of King Midas. (It co-stars dinosaur astronaut because of course it does.) And he's involved in a hilarious BOOKWAR with David Malki in which they attribute the worst books they can imagine to each other.
(Short, shameful confession: I keep confusing Ryan North and David Rees because they both have such an eclectic collection of projects that have so variously amused and entertained me.)
posted by straight at 10:22 AM on June 9, 2016
(Short, shameful confession: I keep confusing Ryan North and David Rees because they both have such an eclectic collection of projects that have so variously amused and entertained me.)
posted by straight at 10:22 AM on June 9, 2016
I read this article and decided to pick up my (autographed! hardcover!) copy of To Be Or Not To Be for the first time in a while, and thought I'd read the acknowledgements. And that was how I discovered that MetaFilter is like, literally* the first acknowledgement in To Be Or Not To Be, namely the Ask about disposing of a body. Maybe I am the very last mefite to learn this but I was delighted.
* "like, literally" because the book is all the way upstairs so I don't want to actually check if it's the first or maybe the second but DEFINITELY NEAR THE TOP GUYS
posted by town of cats at 12:23 PM on June 9, 2016 [1 favorite]
* "like, literally" because the book is all the way upstairs so I don't want to actually check if it's the first or maybe the second but DEFINITELY NEAR THE TOP GUYS
posted by town of cats at 12:23 PM on June 9, 2016 [1 favorite]
Shortly after I narrowly avoided Ryan North's hole, a giant gaping hole opened up in the middle of Ottawa, near where I was at the time. Coincidence?
posted by jacquilynne at 6:21 PM on June 9, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by jacquilynne at 6:21 PM on June 9, 2016 [1 favorite]
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posted by Kitteh at 10:43 AM on June 8, 2016 [4 favorites]