The beautiful thing about the 8-bit era of video games is that these worlds were so limited, so abstract by necessity and design, that as children we could project anything we wanted onto them. There was only the barest notion of stories in games like Mega Man or The Legend of Zelda. They challenged you to expand your imagination, and the way you thought about seemingly simple puzzles and maps. Every blip and beep was a symbolic representation of something more complex and infinite. As technology has advanced, games have spent decades trying to make themselves more cinematic, more beholden to the familiar and prescribed language of film. But video games are, unlike films, to be participated in, defined in part by the player, to insert themselves into the narrative. The more they have tried to become prescriptive, interactive films the less special they have become as experiences.

In this way, games and comics have something in common. Comics are an incomplete art, disconnected images symbolizing movement and time through static lines. The reader must pull together these disparate elements to form their meaning.


Is it any wonder that young people of a certain age clung to these mediums so resolutely? These were portals into worlds where children had control, where they defined the story between the images, between the flickers of the CRT screens. The 3 color Mega Man, with his merest hints of form, was a simulacrum of humanity–both as a literal video game character and as a textual robot.

Tony McMillen’s surreal, expressionist comic Attaboy, publishing this June through Mad Cave after being released independently several years ago, taps into the obsession and complex meaning-making of both video games and comics. The book examines the way these things can worm into our young minds and become an obsession. Presented as a fan-made instruction manual for a game no one else remembers, Attaboy is rendered with the frantic sketchiness of a child’s drawings in the margins of a notebook or on scrap paper. There is a frenetic incompleteness that gives this tale an emotional urgency. It is littered with references to McMillen’s influences, including Jack Kirby, Keiji Inafune, and even the horrible box art of the original US release of Mega Man.

Attaboy is about video games, and specifically inspired by Mega Man and Legend of Zelda. But it is also obviously so much more. It is about growing up, dealing with the impossible griefs and pains and confusion of realizing the world is complex and scary and uncontrollable and unforgiving.

The worlds and characters of Attaboy the video game live on, trapped in cycles of death and rebirth experiencing the same things over and over, unable to move beyond the confines of their program or design, even as we move on with our lives as we all must. We use them as escape and yet there is none for them. You can’t help but wonder—is our escape or growth illusory? Or will we be trapped in the same cycles forever as well? There is a catharsis at the end of this story, a recognition of growth and a sense of peace as the narrator leaves the game that everyone else has forgotten behind. But there is a sense that a part of him continues, as embodied by the mysterious character Skrapper, to reexamine and relive all of the hurt and pain he has been trying to escape.

The art plays by no conventional storytelling rules, offering the barest hint of panel borders and structure. It is a collage of geometric shapes and pixels bound together through the expressionist linework that is loose and at times difficult to even parse. But that density and confusion adds to the emotional urgency of the narrative. It is meant to be disorienting, as the narrator, a young boy, or perhaps someone grown now reflecting on childhood, tries to separate fantasy from reality.



There is a question that McMillen wants the readers to be asking – “Is this game real?” Not real for us so much as real in the world of the narrative. This constant metatextual play between reality and game and story makes the answer ultimately unimportant. The construction and multilayered artifice of the imagery defy reality by its existence. It is real because it exists in these images and in this story. The emotions, whether autobiographical or complete fiction, represent universal feelings of estrangement and grief.

Roland Barthes defines a narrative as a juxtaposition of a series of signs to create meaning. McMillen’s style is intentionally rough and amateurish. The choice makes us aware of the artist and the aesthetic choices he is making. We are meant to identify with the emotion and experience of losing ourselves in the escapism provided by video games.



This is a challenging comic, not because its themes or subject matter is difficult, but because it is so experimental and unconventional. There is a level of open mindedness needed to allow the conceit of the story and the way the art serves those thematic ideas. But once you’ve bought in, this is a tale that will transport you fully into its forgotten depths.

Attaboy is a very different graphic novel, and I mean that in a complimentary way. The storyline is best suited for the upper high school to adult market, not because of anything salacious, but because of the life experience needed to truly appreciate it.

The story is situated around the memory of a game that others barely remember, or remember in a more pensive matter. The story is an allegory about self-exploration and family, but to say more would reveal spoilers. The artwork alternates from colorful in an early video game graphic manner to bright and neon (without pandering to typical 80s aesthetics). It’s beautiful and meaningful, so much so that I made sure that my child about to launch into college read it as well, so that he could absorb the message too. I recommend this for high school and public library collections.

Thank you NetGalley and Mad Cave Studios for this ARC.

Netgalley review

Star Rating: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Art was neat and storyline was trippy. Overall not a bad read. You know the drill though. Read it and decide for yourself!

I take no pleasure in giving a book a low rating but I can only review it from my own personal perspective and enjoyment of the book and this one just wasn't for me.

I found the art style to be vibrant and stunning, which was ultimately why I picked up this book in the first place. Reading through though, I found it quite hard to decipher what was happening in many of the panels due to the rough/sketch like nature of the drawings. When the graphic novel relied on visual story telling, those parts of the story were often lost on me.

In terms of the story, I felt like there was barely a story there. I know there was probably a much more deeper and metaphorical story to take away from this little book, but it went right over my head. I felt like most of the book is just the narrator recounting the levels in a simple platformer game he remembered, with a bit of something deeper at the end.

Thank you NetGalley and Mad Cave Studios for sending this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

This is SO SO SO exquisitely good. If this was a real video game, wow, it would be incredible. I'm grateful for the artwork alone though, because I feel like this artstyle and the way this was written really pull the emotional engine of this game along.