by Joe Zabel

Patrick Farley thinks big. You could say he's the Cecil B. DeMille of webcomics. Vastness is a trait all his works have in common; vastness of cast, vastness of time, vastness of tragedy and euphoria.

The scope of his work is also vast in its span. He is at once webcomics most scathing satirist, its most acute tragedian, and its most wide-eyed escapist. He is capable of staring down reality until it has kittens. But he's also a dreamer of delirious dreams that make you fear for his sanity.

Themes

Farley's work is obsessed with humankind's future, which he alternately portrays as nightmarish destruction or transcendent enlightenment. It's a mixture of pessimism and optimism, not uncommon in science fiction writers who envision a grim race between the destructive spread of technology and the curative revelations of science. But in Farley's work, science is displaced by intense, psychedelic episodes of pure love and empathy, a potent New Age cocktail of orgasmic death and rebirth.

Indeed, religion plays a pivotal role in the worlds Farley conjures up. He clearly abhors the arrogance and shallowness of fundamentalist Christians, and reserves his darkest, most savage criticism for its adherents. But he is deeply respectful of other faiths such as Jainism, and cognizant of the contradictions between the true Muslim faith and the cult of the Taliban.

Farley's futurism is solidly rooted in contemporary concerns, and his work marshals an impressive density of detail to depict modern culture and politics. This gives his stories immediacy and relevance, even when the characters are ascending into an imaginary heaven. He also embraces a didactic role, explaining the Pagan roots of Christian symbolism, or describing Carl Sagan's theory of childhood fears.

Concerned as he is with large, overarching themes, Farley rarely explores the dynamics of intimate human relations. There are few friendships or love affairs in his work; but he occasionally portrays family ties with delicacy and warmth, as in Overheard at the Rave and Terrors of the Night.

Farley's website name, e-sheep.com, is a reference to Philip K. Dick, author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The artist has in common with Dick a morbid fascination with possible apocalypses, a respectful regard for Eastern religions, a taste for political satire, and an obsession with the possibility of an alternate reality.

Style

Farley's early work has a loose, exaggerated style that would seem most suitable for goofy comedies like Saturnalia and Rush Limbaugh Eats Everything. But when he has shifted to more serious themes, he has adapted his style, seemingly by sheer force of will, to appear more accurately realistic and detailed.

In an early story, The Jain's Death, the artist apparently used heavily-massaged photographs to portray background foliage and a stalking tiger. As his style has evolved, he has used photographs and other collage elements more openly and with great confidence. Most of the backgrounds in The Spiders are photographs (or 3D landscape renderings) that match up well with his drawn characters.

Farley is especially notable for his experiments with 3D art programs, specifically Poser and Bryce. Poser figures have allowed him to portray women of glamourous beauty such as Delta in Delta Thrives. And Bryce has allowed him to capture tangible images of the futuristic, ectoplasmic vistas he often portrays.

His work is often reminiscent of the heady graphics of '80s magazines like Omni, and Heavy Metal artists like Angus McKie. Ironically, in The Guy I Almost Was, the autobiographical character considers a less flashy direction-- "I would ignore all that candy-colored, extruded, chrome-plated psychedelic computer "art" that had long fascinated me." Evidently this reflects the path not taken by Farley, whose enthusiasm for super-saturated color and pulsing blobs of light is quite infectious.

Farley's approach to comics storytelling started out very straightforward; it was almost a naive approach. His early stories communicated primarily within individual pictures, and rarely exploited the juxtaposition of panels; in fact, most of his early stories are presented one panel at a time on individual webpages. But as his storytelling has evolved, Farley has become increasingly innovative, and has made extraordinary use of the web environment which is his medium.

Web Technology

Farley would have been forced to invent the webcomic if it hadn't come along at the same time he did. His intense, adventurous style demands the expanded options of the web, and he's used them with a boldness matched by few other artists.

Early on in his creative development the artist experimented with the expansive layouts the web made possible. He increasingly took advantage of the open borders of webspace, with layouts that stretch outward and downward. He often contrasted these with small images set alone on the page for dramatic effect. In his most recent work, Farley has developed large and complex side-scrolling infinite canvases with interwoven and parallel narrative threads. These mammoth pages are notorious for their load time, but celebrated for their richness and dramatic impact.

Farley began using animation in some of his earliest strips, and has developed a unique and effective approach to it. In one such early experiment for Overheard at the Rave, a starry background rotates behind the young woman, emphasizing the grandeur of the astronomical vista she and her father are taking in. Elsewhere, he's used it to create spectral effects for supernatural events, and static-like textures to suggest cold technology.

Information Overload

Farley's most characteristic animation effect is a sequence in which images or words are rapidly replaced by other images and words, giving the effect of sensory overload. He's used it in a number of different stories and for varying purposes. In The Guy I Almost Was, a television screen is displayed this way to show corporations hawking the future; in Delta Thrives, it's employed to describe a complex cetacean emotion. In The Spiders, he uses it to depict a soldier being filmed simultaneously by hundreds of crawling machines. And most memorably in the same story, Farley uses the effect to create a horrific tableau, the soldier's demonic self-image after killing one of the enemy.

Whether encountered in a benevolent context or a troubling one, the rapid-replace effect reminds us of how our senses can be overwhelmed by our environment, by Future Shock. Indeed, Farley is first and foremost a poet and a prophet of Future Shock.

Voluptuous Writing

What holds Farley's works together, what's remained consistent throughout his many stylistic and tonal changes, is his skill as a wordsmith. He has a flare for long, flowing sentences and evocative word choices. And he knows when to be brief.

Oftentimes the text will dominate over the picture, garnishing a simple illustration with a wealth of inferences. This passage explicates on a detail shot of a typewriter:

"Such simplicity! Such integrity!"

He will often emphasize his writing in his layout-- using a single page for the word "yes" in Saturnalia, or stretching sentences across entire sequences in The Spiders. He's even used layout to explore alternative linguistic structures, like this thought received from a possible future descendant of humans and whales in Delta Thrives: "(this may be) is the only way (most probable way) (your) our species can (will ever) communicate (survive.)"

Early works

From 1995 through 2000, Farley produced eight substantial works that represented a growing sophistication and a highly adventurous creative spirit.

Saturnalia (1995)

Self-described as "very poorly drawn," this early work tells a simple but provocative story. Martha Murray, an elderly church lady, invites a neighbor, Bob Thompson, to join in the church's Christmas celebrations. But then she is astonished to see that Bob has constructed an alarming holiday decoration on the roof of his house-- a giant idol of a horned pagan god with an enormous, erect penis.

Bob explains that he and his family are pagans preparing to celebrate Winter Solstice, the ancient holiday from which Christmas was derived. Mrs. Murray is outraged by what she sees as an obscene tableau, and when Mrs. Thompson offers her a penis-shaped cookie, she flees.

Later that night, Mrs. Murray returns to the Thompson residence with the church's assembled flock, to sing carols in protest of the Thompsons' pagan celebrations. To their surprise, Mr. and Mrs. Thompson are out on the lawn, naked and about to consummate a fertility ritual to "wake up the sun."

The church-goers are horrified by this, but as the Thompsons copulate, Mrs. Murray is overtaken by a strange vision of herself, naked. She encounters a horned Santa Claus who reveals his enormous erect penis to her. As the two make love, Mrs. Murray has a revelation. "How could I ever have forgotten... that the universe... is an eternal... YES?"

Farley introduces here themes that will obsess him in later works-- religious conflict and psychedelic supernatural transcendence. He also reveals stylistic elements that will carry forward-- broad satiric caricature of reactionaries, and shocking, over-the-top scenarios.

Overheard at the Rave (1998)

This classic tale is one of Farley's simplest works, and also his most emotionally delicate one. A father has accompanied his daughter Kelly to a rock festival, and she coaxes him to follow her out into the field to look at the stars. Kelly thinks they're beautiful; "Each star casts a shaft of starlight through the Earth's atmosphere." She explains to her father that if you study the stars closely enough, "You can feel the galaxy rotating."

As her father becomes absorbed by the astronomical revelation, emotional barriers come down. He confides to her how much he misses her mother.

"It's so incremental. You don't realize how your attention is being absorbed by your job. By the bills. By the game... you don't realize it until you lift up your head again and see that twenty years have escaped you."

The script of this scenario is Farley at his most subtle and natural. Pauses in the conversation convey the building sense of awe and wonder, and the transition from talking about the stars to talking about life is handled perfectly. A final, amusing revelation closes the piece with just the right note of transgressiveness, sharing and tolerance.

The transcendence in this story seems more powerful and dramatic, perhaps because it has a tangible source, the evening sky. But it's also more emotionally potent because it is a moment shared with another person.

Thanksgiving Special (1998)

Having dispensed with Christmas in an earlier story, Farley takes on Thanksgiving in a dark and creepy comedy.

A family sees commercials for "Natures Turkeys," an ironically named species of genetically-engineered birds who are grown in a tank, pre-plucked and headless. The grotesque creatures have a shocking secret that we won't reveal here, except to say that it will certainly put you off your feed.

The Guy I Almost Was (1998)

This apparently autobiographical story is one of Farley's most fascinating pieces. It's not only a portrait of the artist, but a portrait of his generation, and a scathing critique of the futurism which has obsessed him.

He describes his childhood obsession with the future, which he anticipated with wildly unrealistic expectations of a coming Golden Age.

"Tomorrow's city would be a Space Age coral reef, teeming with millions of funky life forms, its limitless nooks and enclaves seething with parties, discos, arcades, and mind-blowing good times... Computers and solar-powered robot factories would be doing most of the work. Consumer goods would be mostly free, and the U.N. would be paying us all not to work... No matter where you went, you would find millions of groovy freaks boogying down, partying hearty, and tossing off symphonies, rocketship designs, and cures for cancer as freely as a tree drops fruit."

This optimism contrasts starkly with his fate as a college student who ekes out a friendless, rat-like existence in a low-paying job, hiding from his roommates because he can't afford the rent. The only thing separating him from the the homeless people he observes is that he's still relatively clean and well-groomed, and he has an awareness of the internet.

In fact, he's obsessed with cyberculture, as proselytized by William Gibson and magazines like Fast Forward, Mondo2000, and Phringe Surfer. "From the moment I read about the existence of the cyberculture, I wanted to be a part of it," he says. "All those hackers, freaks and revolutionaries... each of them was exactly the kind of person I wanted to become.. a sort of hypersexed, optimistic genius... a cross between Buckminster Fuller and Ziggy Stardust."

But when he attends a Cyber-Expo and encounters cyberculturati first hand, he's keenly disillusioned. Far from being an enlightened tribe, they are "an elite club of middle class snots showing off their toys to each other."

After drowning his disappointment in alcohol, he happens to share a puking toilet with an old hipster who turns out to be the editor of Future Shock magazine. Amazingly, the editor reveals to him that cyberculture doesn't exist, that the magazines invented it, and even ran fake interviews and photographed staged events.

The editor explains, "The day is over when countercultures will spontaneously erupt from the grass roots. Even the hippest among us, even the most ardent radicals, are controlled by the media more profoundly than our pride will allow us to admit. If you want to see a positive counterculture emerge... you've got to manipulate the media and create your own counterculture!" He describes how he and his friends devised a plan to scam the corporations into marketing for a new counterculture, and thus brought this counterculture into existence. And he freely admits that participating in the new counterculture has less to do with a liberated soul, and more to do with "disposable incomes."

But for the young man, being disabused of his illusions about cyberculture is liberating. He manages to graduate from college, and begins to adjust to his financial plight and get his act together. And he considers a radical shift in his value system, away from technology and towards an appreciation of a humble existence.

This alternate life is represented by a 1962 Hermes 3000 typewriter he purchases (the same model on which William Gibson wrote Neuromancer.) At first he finds the machine ugly, but then comes to appreciate its simplicity and integrity. Having no paper, he uses the back of his college diploma, and the first sentence he types is "I don't need a computer."

He plans for himself an entire alternative existence as a 1950s-obsessed existentialist intellectual. "After years of chasing the Future, I'd find my equilibrium in the present. From here, I'd rediscover the simple, sturdy pleasures of life." But his fate is changed by a job opportunity which propels him into a secure middle-class existence working for a computer firm. He's happy, but remains haunted by the knowledge of the person he almost became.

This story has relatively little of the bold stylistic experiments that characterize Farley's later work; the aforementioned animated television screen is here, and a few other effects, like flashing beams of light coming from a typewriter. But this story doesn't need stylistic flourishes, because it's so real, so substantive, and so provocative. It is also very shrewdly written, and utilizes symbolism very well. The typewriter, the diploma, the homeless camp, the jumping from a window to escape his housemates, these are all used effectively to summarize the issues in the young man's life.

The Jain's Death (1998)

This impressive piece includes one of Farley's earliest forays into realism. It's also a precursor to The Spiders in its focus on a third world culture.

The story is simple, but depicted with great clarity and intensity. Anuradha is a Jainist disciple making a pilgrimage. On the road she meets a farmer who offers her food. But when she explains her ethical refusal to take the life or even the honey from an insect, he grows angry and strikes her down. He declares that locusts brought famine to his farm which caused his daughter to die, and that if he had his way, all insects would be destroyed.

She continues on the road until nightfall, then lays down to rest. The next morning, she awakens to find herself covered with ants from a nearby hill. She dares not move for fear of killing an ant, and endures countless stings as she lays still through the day.

That night, only one ant remains in her hair, but she can't shake it out without harming it. Then a tiger approaches, and she cannot flee for fear of hurting the ant. The tiger attacks her, and death comes.

Many centuries later she experiences rebirth, reincarnated as a fantastic creature grown from an enormous seed. She is being cultivated to become a living interstellar vehicle, to be used by the survivors of humankind to escape from the dead planet earth. As she prepares for takeoff, the first passenger to enter her explains that he knew her in a former life. She asks, was he the farmer who struck her down on the road? No, he explains, he was the ant who was stuck in her hair.

Farley is quite successful here in immersing us in a foreign culture. Particularly striking is the page where he describes the kalpa, an inconceivably vast unit of time. He visualizes the concept with an animated silhouette of a man walking. Why? Perhaps because the steady walking of the figure suggests a vast distance crossed, and the time it takes to cross it. Whatever the meaning, it gives us an empathic bridge to the realization that there are things beyond our understanding.

The piece is also Farley's most disquieting evocation of apocalypse. A haunting description brings home the finality of the devastation in memorable fashion--

"The soil. Filled with evidence of catastrophes. Incontestable records of human blunder written across fragments of mutated DNA. Fossilized remains of molecule-sized robots which had been programmed to eat organic molecules and vomit out cancerous grey goo. Food plants, tricked into aborting their own seed embryos, which had cross-pollenated with wild forests and blighted whole continents in the blink of an eye. Poisons; layer upon layer of toxins, saturating the Earth's crust as deep as her roots could penetrate."

But we're left unsatisfied by the examination of Jainism. The scenario seems to be an uncritical endorsement of the religious philosophy, and obvious questions are left unaddressed. The dead, toxic Earth is presented as the outcome of the farmer's outlook (i.e., that no insect has survived.) But it's simplistic to view the farmer and Anuradha as an either/or proposition. After all, what if reincarnation isn't real? Then Anuradha's death, however beautiful it seems to her, will have been meaningless. And isn't the farmer's caring and nurturing behavior more likely to perpetuate life than Anuradha's passive, futile purity?

Indeed, the piece is so serious and grim, that it becomes a joyless experience. Anuradha may be euphoric in her new life as the rescuer of humanity, whose very feces are worshipped by the strange, spacesuit-garbed survivors. But we greatly prefer her in her former life as the white-garbed lady on the road.

Chrysalis Colossus (1998)

'"These are no ordinary tickets," the good people at the Blue Unicorn Travel Company had explained to me earlier. "There are no vehicles to be boarded. You simply eat the tickets, and be transported."'

In another piece the same year as The Jain's Death, Farley shows us the flip side of apocalypse, as two travelers plunge into a psychedelic exploration of the universe; their mode of travel is apparently pharmaceutical.

As the tickets take effect, the travelers are plunged into one impossible environment after another, all spectacularly illustrated and described with feverish intensity:

"These ancient vessels were cargo ships, transporting the frozen seed-data of unborn civilizations across infinite vacuum. They were enormous; the largest blue whales would be as minnows next to them. Electric hieroglyphs pulsated across their translucent membrane hulls and flickered deep within their plasma cores, layer within layer of nanoscopic complexity. I could only wonder who had built them and where they had come from..."

The story passes from one flipped-out tableau to another, until the male traveler meets up with a giant caterpillar who discusses the butterfly effect (i.e., "the Butterfly who flaps his wings in Calcutta and causes a hurricane in Florida.") The caterpillar queries, "is there really such a thing as a 'trivial occurrence' at all?" He bids the traveler look through a telescope in which he sees his descendants, and the traveler realizes, " Humanity's future was uncertain, but this much I knew: any action I took would ripple out across the eons to have enormous impact. Entire posthuman civilizations millions of years hence would rise and fall on the choices made by me, now, in the present."

The caterpillar then grants the traveler a view of his more recent descendants, and the traveler is surprised by their utopian existence. "Would you or I, in this nightmare of a century, believe how happy the inhabitants of this future were? Could you or I believe that -- despite all our hard work to ensure the contrary -- our descendants finally figured out a way to live without hurting each other?"

On this optimistic note, the story comes to a close. The caterpillar transforms into a butterfly (the recurring death and rebirth motif) and the travelers are returned to their concrete existence.

Graphically, this piece is a highly playful experiment with pure collage, and the results are consistently pleasing eye-candy. But we feel disconnected from the characters. They never become anything more than the Victorian cut-outs they started as.

Rush Limbaugh Eats Everything (2000)

This satire harkens back to the outrageous style of Saturnalia and the revulsion at meat-eating from Thanksgiving Special. It also takes up the apocalyptic theme, but from an entirely absurd standpoint.

The tale begins with a relatively credible situation. Rush Limbaugh is trying to make the transition from radio to television, and a Fox network marketing executive comes up with the idea of him eating endangered species on the air, in order to create controversy.

The tactic is a success, and as the show goes on, Rush is eating more and more, and larger and larger animals, even whales. As he does, he gradually grows fatter and takes on an immense size. And all the while he continues preaching his trademark right-wing blather.

The beauty of the storytelling is that you're not quite sure when the story becomes impossible, though it's certainly crossed the line when Rush begins consuming the Rain Forest. It is a gradual descent into madness that's riveting and disturbing. And most disturbing of all is how his throng of followers keeps growing, completely insensible to the destruction he's causing. That, alas, is all TOO credible!

Terrors of the Night (2000)

This essay on childhood fears is a minor work for Farley, but an enjoyable one. It makes a nice companion piece to The Guy I Almost Was, filling in the details of the artist's earlier life, and his closeness to his oldest sister. It's also a fun retrospective of fright films that gave him sleepless nights, especially Trilogy of Terror with its terrifying Zuni warrior doll.

Artwise, this piece is excellent, and demonstrates Farley's growing skill and confidence as a draftsman.

Shapeshifter (2000)

Yet again Farley takes up the subject of transformation and transcendence, this time via coffee beans that have had a close encounter with a magical jungle spirit. We see how the coffee becomes enchanted, then we shift scenes to an urban setting where a young office worker drinks a cup of coffee and takes a dazzling, transformative journey.

This is one of Farley's most flawed works, with wildly uneven artwork and a script lacking in substance and revelation. The characters are crude stereotypes, particularly the overbearing supervisors who heap verbal abuse on the other characters; there are three such characters in the story, but for all intents and purposes it's the same guy, who's written without any attempt whatsoever by the author to understand his social role or treat it with any depth.

Farley uses Poser 3D characters to populate the story, but he doesn't always use them successfully. On his website, he comments, "the cgi characters have not aged well." Indeed, Farley is working here with a rudimentary set of characters, the P4 models, who are constructed in low resolution and have very limited variation of facial features. But the problem is more that he hasn't at this point learned how to work with the models. Character expressions are forced and unnatural, their postures stiff and underdeveloped, their lighting exaggerated and out of place with their surroundings. In some scenes he can't even position the eyes right so that the characters are looking at each other. Furthermore, he makes no attempts to correct the flaws of the models in post-production. A faulty overlap of a model's shirt with his belt is left untouched. There's even a panel where a model's coatsleeve is rendered too large, and the structure of the wireframe is visible; a little Photoshop airbrush would hide it, but the artist leaves it as rendered.

The naked, hairless Poser female who appears in the climactic transcendental scene works much more successfully. She flies through psychic space gracefully and with sensuous beauty. She fits in with the Bryce-rendered 3D landscape, her body faithfully reflecting the weird, dramatic light. This latter sequence is handled so well that it almost redeems the piece.

The transcendence sequence is unique in Farley's work because there is no dialog or text of any kind. For once, the visuals alone carry the narrative.

Recent Works

Farley's comics for 2001 through the present have been ambitious, exquisitely-textured and technically polished. They've all been series that carry the tag "to be continued," though it's not certain that any of them will have more chapters added.

The Spiders (2001 - 2003)

This alternate-future saga of war and emerging technology is Farley's most complex and experimental work. It evokes feelings of intense despair and horror, and reading it can be an exhausting and emotionally-draining experience. More than any other current work in the medium, it establishes the expressive power of webcomics as a separate and distinct artform. It's also a significant step forward for the artist in terms of script, characterization, and polished realistic artwork. Overall, it is an impeccable work.

The series may have been conceived as a near-future tale, but current events have overtaken it, transforming it into an alternate-future story, with Al Gore as president and the U.S. conducting a war with Afghanistan that is more protracted than the Bush invasion.

The story thus far follows two women. Zaafira is an Afghani Moslem who begins as a member of a band of women refugees. Suffering from a fatal and painful disease, she has grown mad with the pain, and aspires to destroy all men.

Lieutenant Celicia Miller is an American soldier sent on a mission to remove Zaafira from a combat zone she has entered to assassinate a Mullah. In the process, she's exposed to a pacifying dose of the experimental nerve gas MDMA. Partly from exposure to the gas, partly from exposure to Zaafira, Miller undergoes a transformation while on the battlefield. Her emotional barriers drop and she feels the full horror and dread of a previous mission liberating a Serbian rape camp.

Then, in a pivotal scene, Miller detects a Taliban soldier, a 15-year-old boy, sneaking up on them. She catches him by surprise and shoots him, while at the same time witnessing the rage on her own face, as broadcast back to her by the spiders. She is rescued by American soldiers and taken back to camp, but is haunted by the memory of her own demonic expression at the moment of killing the Taliban soldier. In a subsequent incident, she finds she can no longer kill, even when another Taliban combatant is a threat to her own life.

Miller relates much of this in flashbacks, while she is being held for observation in a military hospital and being interviewed by a general. She is lactating as a result of exposure to the gas, and she's told that she may experience cerebral growth

Surveillance devices

The spiders referred to in the title are mobile video cameras that are crawling all over the battlefield. They are thought by the Taliban to be military surveillance devices, but apparently are run by a network ("SpiderNet") of internet hobbyists who want a first-hand view of the fighting. And since the devices are equipped with speakers, their internet controllers can actually participate in the battle, offering medical aid to combatants, or capriciously offering to play music for them.

Actually, the story isn't clear about who created the spiders or who controls them. The U. S. army can tap into their surveillance, and in one scene, a General Conchis sends a spider as a surrogate for himself to interview a soldier; and the same general refers to the spiders as part of the army's attack strategy. There are flying surveillance units called hovercams as well, which seem to behave similar to the spiders.

The spiders are ever-present in the story's combat scenes, and come to play a pivotal role in the action. To aid in her defense, the U. S. command networks Miller's helmet visor in with hundreds of spider surveillance feeds simultaneously, expanding her perception in strange and paradoxical ways. With her expanded perception, Miller discovers that Zaafira is empowered by a secret network of 100 million SpiderNet users who identify with her and give her mind-controlling powers.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the spiders is their effect on the storytelling. Oftentimes we are pulled back from a narrative to be shown that we are witnessing it via a web browser. Scene two is presented in a summary mode, with some information inaccurate (misassigning the identity of a killer from a previous scene) and some information missing because the cameras didn't catch it (such as Zaafira kissing a good-hearted war prisoner.) Ever-present in the comic are video distortions in the panels, reminding us constantly that surveillance devices are our eyes and ears.

The effect of this is to create distance between the reader and the events depicted. It provides a degree of comfort and safety while we are witnessing horrific events. But paradoxically, the distance created by this intervening context causes us to concentrate more fully, to try harder to sort through the confusion to find out what's really going on.

Modern warfare

"I realize I've arrived at the place I've always wanted to be -- the battlefield -- the place where the Future is made. I can feel that crazy, chaotic, fractalline magic at work here -- like we're on the Edge of Everything. This is my true spiritual home." --Lieutenant Miller.

One of Farley's most notable achievements with the story is to capture the terror, confusion, and absurdity of modern warfare. Parallel narratives show the impending combat simultaneously from American and Taliban perspectives; those narratives merge when Zaafira's bullet penetrates the Mullah's brain.

To convey Miller's spider-enhanced senses, Farley employs his rapid-replace style of animation flashing multiple perspectives on the screen. In spite of the surveillance overload, the American command is plagued by misinformation; their A. I. thinks that Miller is an unidentified combatant and tries to terminate her, while the disrupted U. S. command is trying valiantly to prevent her from being killed-- and simultaneously consulting lawyers about whether or not to recapture Zaafira.

Farley never loses site of the human perspective. The Taliban killed in the first scene is recalled by his fellow soldier, "He was only eighteen... an orphan... couldn't even remember what his mother looked like." An instant before he is shot, Corporal Sagheer learns that his wife has had a baby boy. And Miller says about the young soldier she kills, "Ultimately, he just wants what every other human being wants... To be loved."

Delta Thrives (2002)

This short piece is an impressive attempt at wall-to-wall photographic realism, achieved through photo-collage and 3D applications.

The heroine, Delta, leads an idyllic life in a future city that floats in the sky over the ocean. The narrative is a quasi-blog entry, which she broadcasts to an audience of fans who watch her on a webcam. She describes the sighting of an intelligent "post-feline" cat who pilots an aircraft. She tells of her experience testing a new sex toy that provides her with a three-hour orgasm. And, in her most prolonged entry, she relates an account of the death of a great blue whale, and the psychic interlude that follows.

The blue whale, whose name is Hototo, is slain by pursuing killer whales while Delta watches from above, stricken. Then one of the attacking whales peels off from the pack, and Delta witnesses it delivering a baby.

This transports her into a fantastic realm where she encounters "The Great Gem Snake," a DNA-like structure topped by a "thousand-petalled flower." It is also a heaven-like realm, "a place where new species are dreamed of, and extinct organisms are remembered." Here she encounters the blue whale again, intact in this afterlife. The whale performs "an empathic file transfer" of a whale emotion to her, a rush of impressions, "like contentment, like trees, like children" and many more, displayed in rapid-replace animation. Then she drifts towards an event horizon where a new blue whale is about to be born-- but she is repulsed by the egg's laser weapon and re-enters reality.

The story revisits familiar Farley themes-- transcendence, death and rebirth, information overload. Delta resembles the blissful future humans encountered in Chrysalis Colossus. In fact, she quite resembles Farley's adolescent fantasy of the future humans as described in The Guy I Almost Was; "...groovy freaks boogying down, partying hearty, and tossing off symphonies, rocketship designs, and cures for cancer as freely as a tree drops fruit." Delta is sweet and likable enough, but she seems to be a mere tourist in her life, watching flying cats and dying whales, or enjoying her three-hour orgasm. Is this the most we can hope for from utopia?

The artwork is quite impressive, especially the depictions of whales. The one flaw in it, however, is the 3D model for Delta. It appears to be a more advanced, high-resolution model (a Daz3D Victoria model, apparently) compared to the ones used in Shapeshifter. Farley's handling of the model's facial expressions is much improved over that earlier piece, but the body posing is still rather stiff. And for some reason, the model isn't rendered with a realistic skin texture; perhaps they weren't developed at the time of rendering, but more likely, Farley was simply unaware of this technical feature, which would have greatly enhanced her looks and given her realistic eyebrows.

Barracuda: The Scotty Zaccharine Story (2002)

This short-lived comedy series follows a failed dotcom entrepreneur as he tries to hustle his next deal. The punchlines are funny, the artwork bright and well-crafted; but there's not enough here to make much of an impression.

One notable feature of this series is the theme music that plays on the cover page, a driving rhythm with a heavy beat. It sets the mood well for what's to come.

Apocamon (2003)

Perhaps the ultimate apocalyptic satire, this cartoony nightmare drawn in a manga style is nothing less than a depiction of the book of Revelations, as inflicted upon the modern world.

The sheer horror and cruelty of the Biblical prophecy takes one's breath away; raining fire, oceans turned to blood, and an invasion of monstrous giant scorpions. Farley pulls no punches in depicting the mercilessness of God's wrath-- a blind woman becomes one of the first victims of the scorpions, and a white-robed Christian leads the beasts to where a three-year-old child is hiding.

Even the scenes in heaven have a nightmarish quality, with a many-faced Proclaimer floating through the sky, and a seven-horned and seven-eyed lamb emceeing the proceedings and spraying a great fountain of blood on Christ's followers.

One odd quality of the piece is that it depicts liberals and scientists like gross caricatures out of a Jack Chick pamphlet. A group of scholars gathering at "Mapplethorpe University" declare that they've proven there is no God. "Ya hear that, everybody?" shouts one scholar, " We're free of all moral constraints!" They promptly begin celebrating and planning a rampage of murder and rape. Unfortunately, the timing of this scene doesn't make sense; it should be happening before the rain of fire, to suggest cause and effect.

It would seem the point of all this is to remind us of the troubling insanity of what fundamentalist Christians actually believe. Even John the Baptist, summoned from the past to witness the event, has to be bullied to stay in line. As an angel sternly reminds him, "A word of advice, young man. If I were you, I wouldn't wonder so much."

Farley is notorious for his infrequent update schedule. But he doesn't get many complaints, because when he updates, it's worth the wait.

He is one of the choice few who have succeeded in ambitious, boldly experimental projects that are enlivened by sophisticated ideas. His overall body of work represent an almost unbelievable diversity of style and tone, suggesting a sensibility operating outside of normal limits.

It's difficult to tell where Farley will go from here. His site promises nine additional episodes of Apocamon, and at least one additional chapter of The Spiders. And he's announced that in January he will premiere The Mother of All Bombs, a much-anticipated collaboration with Nowhere Girl artist Justine Shaw. Only one thing is certain: whenever his next comic appears, and whatever it happens to be, the eyes of webcomics aficionados will be on him.

One final note about browsing the archives of e-sheep.com. These stories occupy an enormous amount of bandwidth, and the site is no doubt expensive to maintain. The artist has provided a bitpass tip jar for your convenience. Hit it generously and hit it often.

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