By Jessica Norah Bowles-Martinez
Leisuretown.com is made by Tristan Farnon and presents his comic,
made of three dimensional computer generated images, in the format
of a screen fitting page-by-page. While nothing revolutionary was
done in the presentation, I found the topics and the pictures themselves
to be very interesting and not what I had seen before in print comics.
The comic follows its Weiner dog character from unemployed bum to
QA engineer until the world falls apart. The hatred and contempt the
character has for everyone sounds remarkably close to how I've felt
at times and, more recently, what I've heard from some of my friends.
I've not read comics beyond what is in the newspaper before so I am
admittedly ignorant of what non-mainstream comics are like, but the
text just seemed so specific to a certain group, those involved in
software and technical jobs and the references and attacks so pointed
that I felt that it was perhaps too narrow and with too many taboo
topics to get far in print. A few especially bad (in the conservative
sense) comics were when they were talking about why women aren't computer
scientists and when they made repeated references to work place shootings.
These are issues that many people are sensitive about and the author
uses it as material for amusing but offensive subplots.
What is sort of surprising, is the detail to which Farnon went to
create his characters and their world in computer graphics yet, despite
his obvious computer skills, he did not create a way to exploit some
of the features of being online. Instead we are given a static comic
that could be in any other comic book, if it weren't for its topics
and specific audience. The way it is now, it could just be seen as
a risqué printed comic, for it does not lose anything if I
had a good printer and printed out each page.
Leisuretown is mentioned in Reinventing Comics as one of the first
online comic strips. I didn't see a date mentioned but it is possible
that when the comic was made neither the technology nor the bandwidth
would allow for making use of what is possible now for online comics.
It could be pretty interesting if there was a way to pan around the
three-dimensional pictures that make up the comic, the art seems to
lend itself to that sort of thing, or if perhaps there was a way to
choose some of the narrative changes. With all the time and technical
skill it seemed a shame that creativity was not applied to the overall
presentation of the comic. While none of these possibilities are taken
advantage of, I found myself reading all 90 of the comics and entertained,
not because it brought something new or interactive, but because it
was funny.