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Some phenomenal work is being done in new media centered on the Web. Latest thing I've encountered in this area is a comic strip titled "The Spiders," by Patrick Farley, available for free online at electric sheep comix.

I had previously seen the first couple episodes of Farley's new strip "Barracuda: The Scotty Zaccharine Story." It's slick and polished, with a potentially interesting storyline set in dot-com-implosion-era San Francisco, but there hasn't been enough of it yet for me to be sure whether I like it.

But I stopped by the site tonight and idly clicked a link to another of Farley's comics, "The Spiders." (Note that only 3 parts of the 4-part series have thus far been posted.) It's a fascinating piece of science fiction, using a combination of comic strip, tiny but eye-catching bits of Flash animation, and faux web pages to tell a story set in an alternate world in which President Gore has launched a different kind of war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. I won't spoil any of the surprises here, but I will mention that there's one interactive moment that took my breath away. And that one of the episodes features a multiple-simultaneous-track narrative with more going on at once than I've seen in a comic since the late lamented Starstruck. And that though I don't like the art as much as in "Barracuda," the storytelling is really nicely done, with interesting worldbuilding, reasonably complex characters, and nicely understated means of conveying backstory.

(I should mention that Farley's list of keywords for the story includes the phrase "religiously offensive." I admit that I don't know enough about Islam to know whether it's offensive or not, but the impression that I got was that it was fairly respectful of Islam per se, just not of the Taliban. But I may be wrong.)

When I was done, I clicked the Paypal link and sent Farley some money. Looking forward to episode 4.