| Thursday, October 13, 2005 |
17:04 - We're through the looking glass here, people
|
(top)  |
Following on to my reactions to Liberality For All, I suppose it should have stood to reason that there would already be plenty of alt-history angles on the War on Terror, many of them far better executed. One of them, Spiders by Patrick Farley (brought to my attention by Christopher J.), is just such a beast.
It's an immaculately drawn, expertly laid-out web comic that takes advantage of the online medium in ways that put most CSS geeks to abject shame. It's an exploration of the Afghanistan war under circumstances where Gore had won and a number of technological advances, far more sci-fi than what we actually did have, were available to the US military. It's a psychological thriller in a lot of ways, bringing up issues that have only a tenuous bearing on the real world; yet exploring them in intricate detail, to a level where they might have unexpected relevance once such technology actually does become available (even if circumstances are never such that it would be deployed the way depicted). But above all, it's character-driven and very realistic. That's the key.
It has everything that LFA is decidedly lacking, notably subtlety. Yes, it does seem sympathetic at times to the left-wing position, but you could also see it as being sympathetic to the jihadis, or to the hawks here in the real world who understand how impossible the situation the story describes really is. All those positions have rational representatives in the story, and all the positions have critiques in the story too. This is the kind of thing that—like contemporary adult-oriented graphic-novels like Preacher—a reader can make be about anything he wants it to be about.
To me, that's the mark of a really successful piece of storytelling. And it's so complex and so lavish, so character-driven, that I'd put this up with some of the best stuff I've ever seen under big-name labels.
Given some of the author's other stuff hosted at the same site (such as The Jain's Death), I'm sure he does have leftish leanings; but he's skillful enough that I don't mind or care. What's especially interesting is watching his artistic progression, particularly from this early, infantile piece; as the art gets better and more complex, so does the maturity of the thinking behind it—or at least, it becomes better hidden behind a real, live story.
Another example of this kind of progression, which I've pointed out once before, is Kid Radd. It looks like simple fluff at first, but it just grows and grows until it's every bit as impressive as Spiders or any other such project. And it's a complete storyline, too, so it really pays to follow it all the way through.
That's one thing that's going to be really fun about everyone's whole life being documented on the Internet: we can all watch artists develop in the process of creating each piece of work; and like the "dark star" personality-cult described in Spiders, we all get to be both passive and active players in the ongoing narrative of an artist's career.
(Oh, and I suppose it should go without saying that all these people seem to be Mac geeks: the LFA team, Farley... just look how many Macs show up in the art.)
|
|
Brian Tiemann
