I saw more various spellings of the word “octopus” this weekend than I might have otherwise thought possible. The votes were neck and neck for a while in the beginning, but then ‘octopus’ started to pull into the lead.

Final count:
24,342 Octopus votes
21,027 Magnet votes

Overall it was really fun and I think it went well. You guys really slammed my email on Saturday, and the votes continued to trickle in through Sunday after voting closed. I think there were approximately 2,000 votes that weren’t counted due to not following instructions or sending the votes in after midnight. For a future story we may try to write up a voting application to put on the comic page, but this seems to work well enough for now. Votes were auto-filtered into separate folders, and after checking for duplicates, I just looked at the number of unread messages in those folders.

Just for the sake of disclosure, there was no option for this comic that would kill Ethan. I don’t want to off the main character in the first choice. But from here on out, the gloves are off. Not every choice will include a risk of death, but it’s a definite possibility from now on. So keep an eye out for the next choice comic this week.

When the story is done, I’ll post the choice tree I wrote up, so you can at least see what would have happened if different choices had been made. I know a lot of you would like a true “Choose your own adventure” story, and it’s something I’m considering for comic book form for the future.