{"id":604,"date":"2002-09-05T22:30:28","date_gmt":"2002-09-06T05:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2002\/09\/05\/604.html"},"modified":"2002-09-05T22:30:28","modified_gmt":"2002-09-06T05:30:28","slug":"science-fiction-interactive-co","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2002\/09\/05\/science-fiction-interactive-co\/","title":{"rendered":"Science fiction interactive comic strip"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>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 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.e-sheep.com\/main.shtml\">electric sheep comix<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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 <cite>Starstruck.<\/cite>  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.<\/p>\n<p>(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.)<\/p>\n<p>When I was done, I clicked the Paypal link and sent Farley some money.  Looking forward to episode 4.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some phenomenal work is being done in new media centered on the Web. Latest thing I&#8217;ve encountered in this area&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}