Back to Front

A story told in reverse order, from end to beginning, revealing effects first, and working towards a climax which reveals cause and motive. Difficult to do, but very effective when done well. An interesting thing to ask yourself when you see this is whether or not the story would have been interesting forwards.

May be used as a framing device to portray a Non-Linear Character or one suffering from Merlin Sickness. This allows the audience to connect cause and effect without knowing any more about prior events than the character.

Also see How We Got Here, where the last scene comes first and everything else is in order; Anachronic Order, where scenes are presented out of any chronological order at all, aka Non Linear Storytelling. This is similarly implemented with In Medias Res, where the middle of story precedes the start. Compare Unstuck in Time.

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Examples

Animation Western

• In The Venture Brothers episode "Blood of the Father, Heart of Steel", all of the Brock scenes are shown front to back, but are intercut with the scenes at the Venture compound that run back to front. The point in time is monitored unusually; rather than following time, it follows the resale value of an original copy of Marvel Comics # 1, which gets progressively more abused as the Venture household doesn't realize its value.
• At one point, in Tom Ray's Tom and Jerry cartoon "Shutter Bugged Cat" (from Chuck Jones' SIB-Tower 12 studio), Tom plays footage from "Heavenly Puss" backwards. Not a bad idea for a Clip Show.
• Sealab 2021, the "Shrabster" episode. It also parodied the Superfriends narrator, who would describe the temporal relationships of the scenes with glib prepositions. "Meanwhile!"
  Quinn: Yeah, I really liked this episode, especially when it was on Seinfeld.
• The titular ruminant of the Popeye cartoon "The Hungry Goat" tells the projectionist to run the film back to the title card so he can examine it.
• The Phineas and Ferb episode "Remains of the Platypus" opens at a wild party being held by Dr. Doofenshmirtz, where various weird things are going on and Doof has somehow brainwashed Perry into becoming his servant. The episode works backwards scene by scene to explain How We Got Here, and even includes a few nods to Memento.
• Lampshaded in an episode of Home Movies, when the kids make a movie in reverse because Brendon insists it's the hip thing to do.
• In the Family Guy episode "Yug Ylimaf" Brian messing with Stewie's time machine's odometer causes the entire world to run backwards, and only they know it's happening. Brian has to figure out how to stop it once Stewie gets unborn (aka shoved up his mother's uterus).
• While the main part of the movie in normal order, the flashbacks to Jason Todd's tenure as Robin in Batman: Under the Red Hood are in reverse order, beginning with him as a moody, rebellious teen sidekick and the final scene of the movie showing the first day the exuberant boy first donned the costume.

Original Web

• The Let's Play of Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Special Edition had each segment of its Metropolis Zone video played in reverse order, starting with the character-unlock screen and finishing with the otherwise-episode-starting prayer.
• An absolutely brilliant "review" of the film Memento. The writer describes how he came to watch the film, but in reverse order — just like the film itself. (The review is in Hebrew, see translation here).
• Just like the movie it riffs on, the Honest Trailer for Memento is told in reverse chronological order (with the exception of the comment reading, which is done at the end like always). (But you can also watch the chronological version)
• In Hitherby Dragons, the legend Hard And Cold. Margaret wakes up in a prison yard after being stabbed with a shiv, gets put in prison awaiting trial for three years, then gets told that she's going to kill a man.
  The future's the same as the past. It's all written down in the book of the world. The only reason we think any different is that our memory only works one way—aligned against entropy with the ordering of the world. But that's an illusion. It's not the truth. The truth is, it's all just there, future and past, lifeworld and deadworld, hard and cold.
• The Twitter Song on Cracked.

Comics Web

• Unwinder's Tall Comics: "The Accident".
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal does this frequently.
• Kevin & Kell once did a Memento parody. Starts (or ends) here.
• This strip of Irregular Webcomic!.
• Gunnerkrigg Court does this in Chapter 40, the Stone, a telling of Jones' backstory.
• Check, Please!: 3.26 — "Cup V". The chapter starts with the events of the following noon with Eric's mom calling his phone and follows backwards (following morning, 11PM of the day, 10:26PM) until 10:25PM, the moment in which Bitty and Jack kissed on the ice in national television.
• Casey and Andy does a variant here.
• Biter Comics: Here's a nice little backwards story about a man getting a corpse hurled at him.

Games Video

• In To the Moon, Eva and Neil (and consequently the player) see Johnny's life in reverse.
• Thanks For Playing (A.K.A. The Last Hope of Dr. Zeit) is a whole game of this, complete with the gameplay going backwards.
• The entire The Tale of ALLTYNEX trilogy is told in reverse.
• Spoiler Alert is a short comedic platformer that has to be played backwards, by un-defeating enemies and un-picking collectibles.
• How you usually experience the chapters in Return Of The Obra Dinn. You have to find out what happened aboard the titular ship, and the primary way to do that is to see the moment a crew member died. In this memory there often will be another corpse who died earlier, and you can see the moment that person died, tracing back the chain of deaths from the last to the first. Chapters V and IV in particular are experienced entirely in reverse, with the (chronologically) first death of V connecting to the last death of IV in one long session of memory probing.
• Retro/Grade is a rhythm game framed as a 2d shmup played backwards: the player plays through the levels in reverse, dodges backwards enemy fire and "unfires" his shots, all which are in beat with the music.
• The main story of Planetarium is relatively straightforward, but some of its subplots are told in this style: the Major Puzzle's answer can be deciphered only by entering the parts of it in backwards numerical order, and the contents of the love letter are revealed to be made up of the first letter of each different animal that was on a mission in each part starting with the Iguana in part XI and ending with the Weasel in part I.
• The first three chapters of The Outbound Ghost are presented chronologically, but Chapter 4 focuses on the amnesiac Adrian, who's forced to relive his Core Memories starting from the most recent and ending with what he was doing before the game's opening scene. During the process, he even compares it to watching a movie with all of the scenes in reverse order.
• In OFF, the Room tells a story in reverse order, from chapter 5 to chapter 0.
• NEO: The World Ends with You: Week 3, Day 3 starts at the end, with a Brainwashed and Crazy Fret standing over Kanon's body and wiping out the rest of the Twisters. Rindo, suffering from amnesia, has to jump back in time through the day to figure out what happened.
• Mushroom Engine is a fan-game where you can play Mario backwards.
• The campaigns of Left 4 Dead 2 were first shown during pre-release previews in the reverse order in which they take place chronologically, with the exception of "Hard Rain". "The Parish" was the first campaign to showcase the game, demonstrating that it would primarily take place in the southern states of the USA (specifically New Orleans), and is where the game ends chronologically. "Swamp Fever" and "Dark Carnival" would be revealed next, both of them taking place before "The Parish", and "Dead Center" and "Hard Rain" would be shown just before the game's release (Dead Center is the first campaign while Hard Rain takes place between Swamp Fever and The Parish). The post-release campaign "The Passing" takes place between Dead Center and Dark Carnival.
• Despite being called the "Grand Theft Auto III Era", the actual sequence of the GTA games in the sixth generation is (release year in parentheses): Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories (2006) > Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002) > Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) > Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories (2005) > Grand Theft Auto Advance (2004) > Grand Theft Auto III (2001).
• Braid begins with "World 2". World 1 is actually the final world, and only accessible after you complete the other worlds. In World 1 the flow of time apart from the main character is inverted. The final level is actually the beginning of the game chronologically, and its revelation allows one to make sense of the rest of the story, not to mention that the second half tells the story of the first half backwards, and shows the true intent of the main character and the princess: She was actually running away from Tim.
• Although Battlefield 3's single-player campaign is told in the form of flashbacks during the interrogation (just like Call of Duty: Black Ops) of Staff Sergeant Blackburn, the interrogation itself is set before the final level, "The Great Destroyer." Likewise, Dima's playable levels are in reverse chronological order; the penultimate level "Kaffarov" is played mostly as Dima (the last portion has the player as Blackburn being confronted by Dima) and is set after, while the first level where you play as Dima is set between "Kaffarov" and the interrogation / "The Great Destroyer." Coincidentally, just like Ace Combat: Assault Horizon, the first level "Semper Fidelis" is a partial (dream sequence) version of the final level "The Great Destroyer".

Theatre

• In the 1931 Kaufman & Hart play Merrily We Roll Along, each scene takes place in an earlier year than the previous one, opening in 1934 and ending in 1916. Merrily We Roll Along was loosely adapted into a musical by Stephen Sondheim and and George Furth in 1981, with a Setting Update; voices from the Greek Chorus count the years of The '70s and The '60s going backwards during the scene changes.
• The musical The Last Five Years chronicles the doomed courtship/marriage of Jamie and Cathy, employing this trope selectively: her songs and side of the story go backward in time, while his go forward. They only sing two duets in the entire show. The first is at their wedding when their timelines meet, and at the end, where Cathy is saying goodbye at the end of their first date while Jamie says goodbye for good.
• The one act play Extra Pulp plays with this. It starts at the end of the story, with the next scenes progressing backwards in time until the last scene picks up where the first one left off.
• The Harold Pinter play (and film version) Betrayal chronicles a broken marriage in reverse, over a period of several years.

Music

• The video for Coldplay's "The Scientist" (from the album A Rush of Blood to the Head) runs backwards; it took Chris Martin a while to learn the lyrics backwards so they would sync up when the film was reversed. Quoting the website, "Everytime I see Simon Pegg he teases me about it, so now I [Chris] can't watch it. He wonders why someone after a car crash would go into town and have a nap. He can f*** off."
• Played with in Depeche Mode's video for "Wrong" It starts with a car rolling backwards through a city street, the driver apparently having fallen asleep inside. As it proceeds, the driver sits up and looks around drowsily at the point where he would have collapsed behind the wheel. But as the video goes on we realize that the video isn't playing backwards, the car is rolling in reverse. The man behind the wheel isn't the driver — he's a victim who had been bound, gagged, placed in a mask (disguising the gag) and probably drugged before being placed in a car with all the controls removed, and he spends the video trying to free himself. It manages to be way creepier than what the viewer first thought.
• The video for Enigma's "Return to Innocence" features scenes from a man's life, in reverse, accompanied by a unicorn running backwards. The man starts the video as a dying elderly farmer, and ends it as a baby being baptized. It also started out in black-and-white, which turns to color as the music begins.
• Mutemath's video "Typical" is a oner filmed in reverse.
• As is Peter, Björn and John's "Second Chance".
• Jack Johnson's "Sitting, Waiting, Wishing" is as well.
• Italian novelty rapping act MC Cavallo's "Me li presti 2 kili di culo" is yet another example.
• And Ricky Martin's "Private Emotion", displaying him and his love interest first coated in ice, then the ice melting back to water, which returns to the sprinkler heads, so that the fire ignited by their passion reappears before un-igniting. It's quite something.
• "Severlá", a song and video from Chilean show 31 Minutos, is completely filmed and sung in reverse. Severlá is "al revés" ("backwards") in Spanish, backwards.
• The bulk of the video for "Sacrilege" by Yeah Yeah Yeahs is a series of short clips in reverse temporal order.
• The music video for "Goodbye to You" by Michelle Branch is about Branch at the beach watching the fish go away, then her releasing the fish at the beach, then her driving toward the beach, etc. Believe it or not, the video's story is actually played in reverse; Branch has said that the format is supposed to be similar to the film Memento.
• The video for alt-J's "Breezeblocks" depicts a violent domestic confrontation with the action occurring backwards. At the end the physical destruction to objects like bottles and furniture has been undone, but the emotional damage is clearly not.
• The video for Arttu Wiskari's "Tuntematon potilas" is from the POV of an elder implied to be suffering from Alzheimer's. The video starts of with a couple cops looking at him with sympathetic faces. As the video goes on, it becomes evident that the guy had taken a pack of sugar from the local store and forgot to pay.
• Peterpan's "Ada Apa Denganmu" is about wondering what makes the singer's lover angry, so its music video (intro and outro aside) goes backwards from Ariel trying to calm down his girlfriend to the arguing that started the whole thing.
• The video for "Kolshik" by Leningrad runs backwards, starting with spectators running from a burning circus full of dead performers and ending with the innocuous event that started the whole chain of disasters; a little girl in the audience blowing bubbles.
• El-P's song "For My Upstairs Neighbor (Mums the Word)" begins with his being combative and unhelpful during a police interview, stating that he knows nothing about a recent crime, nor anything about the people involved. The second verse rewinds the clock to that morning, as he reveals that not only was he aware of the murder committed in his building, he had inspired it by telling his battered neighbor that he'd cover for her if she killed her abuser.
• Robbie Williams' Greatest Hits Album In And Out Of Consciousness starts off with two original singles, then the singles from his (at the time) most recent album Reality Killed The Video Star, then works it way backwards through his discography until it finishes with "Everything Changes", a Take That! single from before Robbie launched his solo career.
• Pet Shop Boys' "One Thing Leads to Another" starts with a man's death and goes back through the tragic series of events that caused his fatal car crash; it all starts when the man's girlfriend leaves him and he falls into alcoholism and deep depression.
• Nine Inch Nails' "Deep" shows us the narrative in reverse order, although each scene plays forwards.
• Nightwish's Dark Passion Play from the album with the same name begins with a boy whispering "The End" and ends with the boy whispering "The Beginning".
• "Rewind" by Nas. It starts with a man getting shot, and ends with him getting a message.
• "Little Motel" by Modest Mouse. Good god... It starts off as if a mother is tucking her child into bed, but as the reverse story reveals everything, it is revealed that the child is dead.
• The French song Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise (best known in its Russian version, to the extent of the title becoming a proverb there). A woman calls to ask how things are going at home. Well, everything is fine, except for your horse dying... because the stables burned down... because the entire house did... because your husband learned he was broke and shot himself, knocking down a candle when he fell dead. Otherwise, everything is fine.
• The David Bowie Greatest Hits Album Nothing Has Changed (2014) presents its songs in reverse order of release, starting with the then-new song "Sue (Or In a Season of Crime)" and working its way back to "Liza Jane", his first single from 1964 (back when he was known as Davie Jones).
• The events of "All Along the Watchtower" start with the approach of the riders in the 3rd verse, followed by The Thief's reaction to that in the second verse, and end with The Joker's reply in the first verse.

TV Action-Live

• The X-Files: The central character of the episode "Redrum" is aware of this. He wakes up in prison, not understanding how he got there. He goes to sleep that night, and wakes up the next morning to discover that he is going to trial, for the crime he was incarcerated for "yesterday".
• Whose Line Is It Anyway? has a game called "Backwards Scene," where the actors would improvise a scene backwards.
• thirtysomething used the device to good effect to dramatize a character's pregnancy.
• The Star Trek: Voyager episode "Before and After" has Kes living her life backwards. It even foreshadows episodes in the next season (specifically "Year of Hell"), though events proceeded differently since Kes had left the ship by then.
• The Smallville episode "Abyss" has Chloe losing all of her memories except Davis Bloome due to a computer virus in her mind, where they flashed back all here memories in reverse order.
• In the Sliders episode "As Time Goes By", one of the worlds has time going (kind of) backwards for the sliders. Quinn abuses this to prevent a murder, which causes a hole to appear in the sky.
• The Investigation Discovery series Redrum (referring to The Shining and possibly to The X-Files episode "Redrum") starts out with the murder in question.
• The backwards episode of Seinfeld entitled "The Betrayal". The episode's title is a Shout-Out to the play Betrayal, as is the fact that one of the characters mentioned in the episode is named Pinter. This even extended to the closing logos (or opening logos in this case). The episode ends on two flashbacks, one on how the whole mess began (with an appearance by George's very much alive ex-fiancée Susan Ross), and one on how Jerry met Kramer, with a Mythology Gag of Jerry accidentally calling him "Kessler", which was his name in the pilot, and Jerry uttering the unfortunate phrase "What's mine is yours."
• The Secret Life of Us has this in "The End is the Beginning", which jumps back one day at a time.
• The whole plot of Rellik occurs like this, making it the only show that takes place over its entire runtime backwards.
• A variation on the theme was Red Dwarf's "Backwards", in which the characters encounter a world where time moves backwards. A mysterious ache in Lister's ribcage and back, which appears when he first lands on the planet, is explained when a backwards Bar Brawl — or more accurately a barroom tidy — breaks out. Cat hides in the bushes near the end, for the sort of purpose cats do that for. Quite what happens isn't shown but it clearly isn't something he enjoys very much.
• The Outer Limits (1995): The episode "Zig Zag" starts In Medias Res in the middle of an armed standoff between a group of cyber-terrorists threatening to blow up a MegaCorp and the police, then goes backwards chronologically to explain how they got in this situation before jumping back to the present for the climax.
• An episode of Malcolm in the Middle showed an escalating prank war between Reese and Malcolm in reverse, each time showing the provocation for the last scene, and ending with the predictably inoffensive spark that ignited the whole thing.
• The Inside No. 9 episode "Once Removed" is narrated in reverse chronology, in instalments of ten minutes from end to beginning.
• ER:
  • A backwards-running episode "began" with a defenestration from a hospital window. Subsequent scenes showing earlier and earlier events revealed the reason for the suicidal character's desperation.
  • An episode began with two staff members being rushed to the hospital following a car accident. As it turns out, this is the culmination of an incredibly bad day for one of them. The scenes showing earlier events explain how things got to this point.
• Doctor Who: River Song's arc up until "Let's Kill Hitler" was this, since due to time travel her meetings with the Doctor aren't in the right order, and of the three times we've seen her they've been steadily earlier in her own timeline. Since then, it's become Anachronic Order.
• The CSI: NY episode "Nothing for Something" opens with footage of the victim-to-be getting together with a guy from a bar, with the footage run in reverse. It actually doesn't look that odd until the spooning couple start putting their clothes on in bed.
• CSI: An episode started at the end of the shift and kept showing one case being worked, then jumping backward to the case just prior to it, showing how incidental characters in the later case were affected by the prior one, and at the end tying all the cases together in various ways.
• The episode of China Beach with Ricky Lake's character getting pregnant and having an abortion.

Literature

• Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me has Miranda telling the story starting in early April 1979 of what happened during the events of October 1978 through February or March 1979, the climactic event that the story led up to. The past events were told in past tense while the present events, which last through April, are told in the present tense.
• This happens twice in-universe in The Wheel of Time. Both times, it's because the character is being tested by the strange ter'angreal in Rhuidean. The first time, it's Rand in Book 4, who sees the Aiel people's past. The first vision he sees is just a few hundred years before the present day; the last vision is the start of the War of Power in the Age of Legends. The second time, it's Aviendha in Book 13, who sees the future of the Aiel. The first vision she sees is scavengers hundreds of years in the future; the last vision is her daughter. Both times, this leads to shocking revelations for both the character and the reader.
• One of Louis Sachar's Wayside School books has a chapter whose sentences are in reverse order. To bring it full circle, when read back-to-front (the only way it makes sense) the story ends with the main character being told to read the story backwards.
• In Guy Haley's Warhammer 40,000 novel Baneblade, roughly half the chapters tell the current war story chronologically while the other half are flashbacks from the protagonist's past, going each further back in time.
• Iain Banks' Use of Weapons has a superficial story in the present told forwards, but a deeper backstory that is told backward.
• Just about everything in Martin Amis' Holocaust novel Time's Arrow happens in reverse.
• Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus involves a group of (future) scientists who study the past using machines that can look directly into it; one of the scientists was noted for always watching stories backwards, from a person's death to his birth.
• Sarah Waters' The Night Watch is in three sections, starting in 1947, then moving back in time to 1944, and finishing in 1941 as most of the characters meet.
• Marilyn Singer's Mirror, Mirror and Follow, Follow books are collections of "reverso" poems based on fairytales that read one way with its lines in a normal order, then its lines' orders are reversed with some punctuation changed in a way that completely changes the meaning of the poem. For example, the poem based on "The Tortoise and the Hare'' first reads as the prideful thoughts of the hare denigrating the tortoise:

  That ridiculous loser!
  I am not
  a slowpoke.
  Though I may be
  the smallest bit distracted,
  I can't be
  beat.
  I've got rabbit feet to
  take me to the finish line.

  • But then we get the "reverso" version of this poem, which instead reads as the tortoise's thoughts while beating the prideful hare:
    Take me to the finish line!
    I've got rabbit feet to
    beat.
    I can't be
    the smallest bit distracted.
    Though I may be
    a slowpoke,
    I am not
    that ridiculous loser.
• An in-universe example from Making Money; Moist admits to the Patrician that putting mongooses in the post boxes was a bit much. Why were there mongooses in the post boxes? Well, to control the snakes. Why were the snakes there? Because of the toads. Why were the toads there? To keep the snails under control. Why were the snails there? Well, the Post Office had introduced cabbage-flavoured stamps...
• Julia Alvarez' How the García Girls Lost Their Accents opens with the titular sisters' adult lives in the United States and ends with their childhood in the Dominican Republic, from which the family was forced to flee due to their opposition to Rafael Trujillo's dictatorship.
• The children's book The Day Jimmy's Boa Ate the Wash opens with a little girl named Meggie telling her mother about a class trip to the farm, and how things didn't get interesting until the cow started crying... because the farmer knocked a hay bale onto it... because he was distracted by the sight of his pigs climbing onto the school bus to eat the kids' lunches... and so on. There were three sequels, Jimmy's Boa Bounces Back, Jimmy's Boa and the Big Splash Birthday Bash, and Jimmy's Boa and the Bungee Jump Slam Dunk that featured the same girl telling similar backwards stories about a string of Disaster Dominoes started by Jimmy and his pet snake.

Action-Live — Films

• The short film Previously is played entirely in reverse.
• The 2016 Japanese movie My Tomorrow Your Yesterday has half its story told this way. It Makes Sense in Context.
• The film Memento, which spawned a number of parodies/homages/ripoffs.
  • The Back to Front scenes (in color) alternate with shorter front-to-back scenes (in black and white), until they meet mid-timeline at the climax.
  • It's lampshaded as well: the protagonist Leonard at one point has a flashback to his wife reading a book which she had read so many times the cover had fallen off. He mocks her for this, observing that "I always thought the pleasure in a book was wanting to know what happened next." This, in a movie for half of which the viewer knows what is coming next but not what preceded it.
  • The DVD contains an Easter Egg which lets you watch the movie in chronological order.
• Ju-Rei, a no-budget Ju-on ripoff, is split into eleven "chapters" shown in reverse order.
• The French film Irréversible. Hard to notice, though, when you're choking on your own vomit (partially thanks to the Infrasound on the first half of the movie)...
• In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind the story is told backwards through the Lacuna memory erasing machine, since it erases the newer memories first and the old ones last.
• A video artist took The Andromeda Strain and cut it so every shot appears in reverse order. The resulting piece was entitled Strain Andromeda The.
• 5 x 2 begins with the end of a marriage and ends with the beginning of the relationship. Reportedly, another edition that uses normal chronology is called 2 x 5.

Works Fan

• The Harry Potter fanfic Snapshots in Serendipity. Part 1, "Recto", has a series of scenes from Hermione's perspective showing how she and Luna went from strangers to friends; Part 2, "Verso", retells all the same scenes in reverse order from Luna's perspective. Which makes a kind of sense, given she's a character known to read things upside-down.
• In Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!, the sidestory, "The Times They Are A-Changin'" begins with Peacemaker assassinating All Might to install Melissa as the Symbol of Peace and ends with Melissa being caught in the accident that turned her into Atom Shield.
• The EQUESTRIA GIRLS fanfic A Gem of a Day involved the Mane 7 going on three parallel adventures shown in reverse. It's revealed that the reason the events were shown in reverse was the side effect of a magical experiment of Twilight's.

Strips Comic

• In one Pearls Before Swine strip, Rat complains about that day's strip being printed in reverse order. The punchline is in the first panel, the setup in the last.
• There was a Krazy Kat strip that started with Ignatz in jail, proceeded through Officer Pupp dragging him there, arresting him, Pupp hearing the brick impact, Ignatz throwing the brick at Krazy, and ending with a brick.

Books Comic

• Zannablù and the Smartness Serum starts right at the climax, with the protagonist barricated inside his house while people from different factions are trying to get in and get hold of said serum. The story is unveiled in a series of flashbacks, each probing a little further in the past, as Zannablù tells How We Got Here to his friend Crazy Pig. Parodied when Zannablù overdoes it and starts recounting his birth.
• Star Trek Annual #3, which traces Montgomery Scott's relationship with his ex-wife in reverse order, from his notification of her death to their first meeting as children.
• Issue #71 of Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) did the entire issue like this, with the letters page coming first, then the backup story, and then the main story. Incidentally, this was the issue where they provided an explanation for Sonic's makeover for Sonic Adventure.
• There was a Simpsons comics story that did just this, opening with the family driving over a bridge, flashing back through the kids' exploration of the Kwik-E-Mart to investigate an urban legend, and closing with a flashback to decades earlier, which confirms the myth was true. The bottom right corner of the last panel of the last page read, "The Beginning".
• The Serenity comic "A Shepherd's Tale" uses the back to front device like peeling an onion, moving progressively back through Book's life to reveal his long-awaited origins.
• The Grayson tie-in to The New 52: Futures End opens with Dick being hanged by Helena, then each page is captioned "Earlier". As the story goes on, the gaps between the pages get longer, first explaining the immediate reason this is happening, then the situation that led up to it, and then stretching back through his careers as Nightwing and Robin to the moment of his parents' death, for an implied explanation of what really happened.
• Midnighter #7 tells the story backwards: each page is followed by the preceding page, as a way of replicating Midnighter's Combat Clairvoyance. After all, he knows what you're going to do before you do.
• The twelve issue miniseries, Marvel: The Lost Generation, gave snippets of the history of the First Line (a team of superheroes retconned into the Marvel Universe), with each issue taking place earlier in time. The first issue showed the final fate of the team, while the last issued showed how the it formed. The series is unique, however, in that it was written to be read either way; by proper numerical order (starting with issue #1 and ending with #12) or published order (#12 to #1). You end up getting the whole story no matter what "direction" you chose to take it in, but the concept is fairly novel.
• Roger Zelazny's short story Divine Madness chronicles a man being forced to relive in reverse his mourning for his dead love.
• An issue of The 3 Geeks tells a story this way.

Arts Visual

• Sistine Chapel: When walking in the entrance, a viewer will first see Michelangelo Buonarroti's fresco of Noah getting wasted after the Flood and last see God separate light from darkness during creation week. Put another way, a worshipper at the chapel will walk in seeing a man humiliated and progressively come closer to the grandiose power of the Creator.

Manga & Anime

• Tōka Gettan keeps this up over the course of a full 26-episode anime series, airing the episodes in reverse order.
• La Maison en Petits Cubes: Sort of. The cartoon as a whole is not told this way. But as the old man dons scuba gear and descends into older and older levels of his home, the flashbacks that tell his life are staged in reverse order, starting with the old man feeding his dying wife, and ending with a flashback where they meet as children.
• Osamu Tezuka's seminal manga Hi no Tori (Phoenix), which was also adapted into an anime series, starts at the dawn of humanity, then skips to the end of the world in the second chapter, then back to early history, and skips back and forth from there, with half told Back to Front, and half proceeding slowly forwards from the beginning. Regrettably, Tezuka died before getting to the chapter in present-day Japan that would have tied everything together.
• The first Durarara!! OVA is told this way opening with a mysterious UFO sighting, then flashing back an hour or so at a time to eventually reveal that the "UFO" was just a bunch of punks covered in glow-in-the-dark paint who got punched really hard.

Advertising

• The Mini advert "backwards" plays... well, backwards, starting with the line "Man eats hat. The end. It's a MINI adventure" and runs from, or rather to, there.
• This cigarette ad by David Lynch plays in reverse. Forwards or backwards, it doesn't make any more sense.
• The trailer that made Dead Island famous.

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