The teacher appears in Cartoon History as "The Professor," an Einsteinian little fellow with a twitchy mustache and a croaky voice who rides through the proceedings encased in his own spaceship -- a sort of
plump TV set with wings that floats in from odd angles and scoots away when you click on it. As the professorial narration advances, each frame of the comic strip comes to animated, vocal life. It takes seven "volumes," each running nearly an hour if you play it start to finish, for The Cartoon History to advance from the universe's origins to the reign of Alexander. Gonick fills his stories with pungent details -- like the Egyptians' use of hippopotamus lard as a hair pomade. His people tend to be oafs; they may be conceited, thick-headed or clever, but oafishness seems to be the defining human trait. His approach throughout is to expose rather than hide controversies and disagreements among scientists and historians.
He makes the occasional not-so-subtle political jab.
And he's not shy of expressing the occasional wry opinion.
Of course, half-a-dozen hours of linear comic-book history is fun, but what value is there to reading it on a computer? Why not just buy the book?
The designers of Cartoon History find only a half-satisfactory answer to the question. The history books provide a few random-access tools -- bookmarks and subject indexes and the like -- but they hardly improve on those a conventional book offers. There's also a passel of games loosely connected with some of the history lessons: you get to rebuild the Acropolis, fight the Minotaur in its maze, and explore a Great Pyramid. Gonick's perverse whimsy carries over into the puzzles -- in the pyramid, for instance, you're challenged to de-brain a mummy through its nose.
Still, it's a bit disingenuous to describe these CDs as "interactive adventures," as their cover art does. The games are essentially add-ons, side-shows to the linear comic books. But then, you'd hardly want to set up the puzzles and games as barriers for readers to get past before gaining access to the cartoon material, either. Though The Cartoon History is barely interactive, it's more absorbing than most CD-ROMs that are more interactive, thanks to its rambunctiousness and genuine ambition.
Mostly, the folks behind The Cartoon History have accepted that what they're creating is a multimedia-embellished comic book -- and there's nothing wrong with that. Dialogue balloons appear on the panels as characters move and speak; cellos churn on the m the mock-epic movie-music soundtrack. A fact is reported; a pun is made. A theory is expounded; a gag is unleashed. And history, like a windup toy designed by a vaudevillian genius, comes to animated life.
The video animations played smoothly, but the sound occasionally "dropped out," sometimes dropping a word or two from the Professor's narration.
If you start reading the cartoon history books with your screen resolution set to 800 x 600 instead of the standard 640 x 480, as I did, the picture window the pages appear in will float disconcertingly out-of-sync with the frame it appears inside. You may want to reset your monitor to 640 x 480, which may mean switching Windows video drivers, which is often a pain.
See Glitch Watch for information about the computer systems used for Kludge reviews.
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