The penultimate volume of The Adventure Zone graphic novel series has arrived and with it, The Suffering Game brings the heroes so much closer to retrieving all of the Grand Relics. Written by Griffin McElroy, Clint McElroy, Justin McElroy, and Travis McElroy and co-adapted and illustrated by Carey Pietsch, the sixth volume releases on July 16.
The McElroy brothers first started My Brother, My Brother and Me in April 2010 as an advice podcast. It later spawned a separate podcast series called The Adventure Zone podcast in August 2014. The Adventure Zone is a comedy and adventure actual play podcast that’s based upon a few role-playing games including Dungeons and Dragons. The podcast has received overwhelmingly positive feedback and has been downloaded 2.1 million times a month on average.
The podcast was adapted into a graphic novel series with Here There Be Gerblins debuting in July 2018. All five of the previous volumes have become New York Times Bestsellers.
MacMillan Children’s Publishing Group describes The Suffering Game as such:
Our heroes are finally nearing the end of their quest to collect the seven Grand Relics, dangerous magical artifacts which threaten the world as they know it. The penultimate item on their adventuring to-do list is the Animus Bell, which The Director tells them is hidden at the heart of Wonderland, a carnival of torment. Once inside, the boys will have their shot at winning the Bell…but each step forward comes at a horrible cost. And the deeper they go―the closer they get―the higher a price they’ll pay.
And if they can secure the Bell, surely then the worst will be over, right? Surely they’ll go back up to their Moonbase in the sky, and hand the Bell over to The Director, and Bureau life will return to normal while they begin their hunt for the final relic, right? They’re so close to the end, after all, and they’ve gone through so much to get this far. There can’t possibly be any further surprises in store…
Carey described the process of turning an audio into comics rather challenging such as figuring out how to translate certain things that work well in audio into a visual medium. Now that he was on the other side of the comics side as a creator rather than a reader, he had a deeper understanding on how to capture a reader’s attention.
“In general, I try not to overuse the copy-and-pasted panels gag, since as a reader, I tend to skip right over them,” he said. “But I do find that changing little parts of each panel both feels true to how we tend to shuffle around in an awkward moment in real life, and also slows the reader down to take a look at what’s changed.”
Clint was excited about the preview, jokingly saying that he hoped that after thousands of years following the “Napping Plague and the Great War Against the Planet Ork,” archaeologists in 3026 would be able to find extract this exact preview.
“It is a great example of The Adventure Zone in all its trope-twisting glory,” he said. “[Secondly,] it will keep Jim Davis’ intellectual property viable in the next millennium. [And lastly,] it will serve as an inspiration of courage and fortitude to give Humanity the gumption to rise up and overthrow Mork and our Orkian oppressions.”
Check out the preview pages here:
Source: MacMillan Children’s Publishing Group
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