by Joe Zabel
"There is nothing, anywhere, for any of us. Our boring lives and ridiculous deaths go unobserved. I exist in the sealed, air-tight container of my own consciousness, where no one can ever touch me."
--Tristan Farnon, Q. A. Confidential.
Shortly before I began writing this, the news reported that an Orange County teen had donned a dark cape and paintball mask and left his house with rifle in hand to go on a shooting spree. 19-year old William Freund used his 12-gauge to annihilate a young woman and her father. Then, after failing to kill several others, he walked back home and turned the shotgun on himself.
For some, it might be more frightening than amusing that satirist Tristan Farnon has featured variations of this scenario in several of his comics, and that the specter of raw, insane violence by firearm is one of his regular motifs. But Farnon's oeuvre is the black comedy of rage, and his work may tell us more about paintball massacres than a dozen earnest sociological studies.
Leisure Town's citizens have few resources to help them face the horrible vacuum of their boring, meaningless lives. They care for no one, and nobody cares for them. Petty frustrations take on the dimensions of massive, crushing injustices, crippling them to the point where the only remedy they are capable of is murder or suicide.
Farnon does have a compassionate and optimistic side, which expresses itself in spontaneous outbreaks of slapstick hilarity. Indeed, it's sometimes difficult to tell where hilarity leaves off and tragedy begins. But the drama played out in his most ambitious works is the clash of this optimism with the forces of abject despair.
Candy-colored anarchy
"So barbaric is the sensory domain of the eyeball that curiosity supersedes logic, sight is my opiate."
--Robert Williams, Visual Addiction.
The uniquely-weird cartooning style Farnon has invented subverts his epic themes to a degree that is almost violent in itself. The photographed twisty-toys he uses for characters always look completely ridiculous, a mockery of any presumption of seriousness. Cutting and pasting these toys into photographed scenes as human-sized players creates a weird alternate reality. He crafts the scenes so well, with meticulously consistent lighting and shadows, that the result is strangely convincing, and draws us inexorably into the false universe.
Farnon uses photography to inject the junk and clutter of the modern world into his comics. Candy bars, keyboards, porn magazines, softdrink cups and pinball machines inhabit his universe with the same insistence as his toy animals (which are consumer products as well.) Leisure Town is a gleaming, modern city where little vegetation and few natural landscapes are glimpsed. The candy-colored toys look perfectly at home pacing down the quiet, orderly hallways, the sheen on their bodies reflecting the artificial lighting. And when their bodies explode in bloodshed, the brilliant red matches the color scheme.
No one this side of Art Spiegelman has used anthropomorphism with such savage irony. Farnon's technique distances us from the characters' pain and destruction, making them something ostensibly to laugh at. It also depicts their grotesque, unlovable bodies, without triggering our guilt or pity. These are unsightly gnomes, the kind we look away from and cross the street to avoid. But Farnon obliges us to spend some time in their shoes, and see the world through what he has described as their "big, empty eyes."
Between 1997 and 2003, Farnon churned out pages at a frantic pace, 903 in all. Their continuity is often garbled, their dialog raw and impulsive. But through this abundant outpouring, Farnon achieved a reckless spontaneity, and an intuitive grasp of the secrets of storytelling.
His stories observe a fairy-tale logic that steers unfailingly to the crux of the matter. In Farnon's world, a bullet doesn't simply penetrate a suitcase of cash. It explodes it, and causes all the stacks of cash to immediately incinerate-- because it's necessary in the story for the cash to be destroyed. Perhaps this is simply a matter of forcing action to match plot points, but in the context of the absurd Leisure Town universe, it works.
Farnon's plots race forward in leaps and bounds, creating a remarkably compressed narrative. His stories almost always have limited time spans-- an hour, an afternoon, a day. But in that time he can circumnavigate the longitude and latitude of modern disaster like no other cartoonist on the net or off.
Selected short stories
Rhapsody in Yellow
This may be the most approachable of Farnon's works, a purely visual exercise in pantomime. Farnon demonstrates that he can do wordless storytelling with the best of them, including Demian5.
The story concerns a yellow giraffe who makes a wondrous discovery about his blue umbrella. When he opens the umbrella, the weather changes from rainy to bright and sunny. But this liberating discovery soon becomes a source of unbearable frustration. So unbearable, indeed, that the giraffe eventually puts a gun to his head and pulls the trigger. When that fails, he goes on a rampage, gunning down everyone on the street.
The story unfolds with great economy and clarity. Farnon uses sound-effects and non-verbal symbols to focus the action and give it punch. A forecasting symbol for sunny 90 degree weather is used repeatedly to signal the abrupt shift when the umbrella is opened. The giraffe's weeping is depicted with large blue drops radiating from his face. The most extensive wielding of symbols occurs as the giraffe forlornly sits on the sidewalk grieving the loss of his umbrella. Symbols of jelly beans, video games, booze, the bible, a bagel, and a bicycle surround him, but nothing can console him.
This is one of Farnon's lightest and most genial works, even considering the shooting spree (the carnage of which has vanished by the next panel.) It concludes with gentle irony, neatly pulling in details from the opening.
He returns home, finds nothing in the mailbox (apparently a white pony could not mail a yellow letter to him because the giraffe kicked over a mailbox earlier.) So the giraffe sits in his apartment, his thermostat cranked up to 90 degrees, and watches out the window as the rest of the town goes about carrying their umbrellas.
American Masturbator
"There's only 2 kinds of women who don't whine: gifs and jpegs."
Farnon sets his sights on porn-obsession, in a story reminiscent of Joe Matt's The Poor Bastard. A porn-addict makes a revealing odyssey to the adult bookstore, and gets more than he bargained for when he arrives.
This is one of Farnon's most realistic tales, a hard-hitting study of a borderline-psychotic, misanthropic pig.
In the first scene, we witness the private life of the porcine protagonist, whose only companions are stacks and stacks of mens' magazines. He addresses the photographed models like they were his harem, his to ridicule, insult, and make demands of. Then he becomes enraged when he realizes he has no new magazines and nothing that will give him the desired inspiration.
Fast forward to his journey to the porn shop. Along the way he encounters two couples whose bad behavior reinforces his angry introversion. Then he sees a woman in a laundromat whose beauty touches him. But he quickly persuades himself that's she's the same as the rest. "All I have to do is beat off, and you cease to exist."
Finally arriving at the bookstore, he starts berating the other customers. The store manager grabs him and tosses him out on his ear. Then Farnon shows the highly courteous exchange between the manager and the other customers. "It's civility is what it is, plain and simple," says the manager. "Common courtesy, and demonstrating a little respect for pornography."
This neat little exchange clarifies the theme. The problem is not with pornography, it's with a person who has allowed himself to harbor a steady stream of poisonous thoughts about his fellow human beings.
Short Graphic Novels
Around and Around
A relatively mellow, oddball piece. A non-descript young couple take a hallucinogen and have an extremely weird night on the town. Their drug trip is alternately exhilarating and terrifying, but doesn't seem to have much point. 
Nonetheless it's a fascinating travelogue with many incongruous elements, including cops who give out hugs instead of issuing citations; and coprophilic pervos who try to abduct one of the protagonists for watersports.
Particularly troubling are two liquor store clerks with thick yiddish accents and the habit of misunderstanding what's said to them in profane ways. Returning to the store while tripping, the young couple stumble upon a scene of horrific carnage. But this turns out to be (implausibly) a practical joke.
I have no idea if it was intentional, but Farnon's rendering of the liquor store clerks is blurred and distorted, giving them a weird, sinister presence even before any drugs are taken.
Yay for Me
"I give a shit about my job and the bus and everything else. Water me, folks. I'm a fucking flower!"
An equine anarchist discovers the liberating power of acting like a jerk, in this manic episode of wish-fulfillment.
Returning home from a life-draining job, the protagonist, a small white horse, goes into a shopping mall and starts misbehaving and making a spectacle of himself in a "one man fag parade." After being kicked out of the mall by an antagonistic yellow giraffe, he takes out a lease on an apartment and continues his antics in the empty rooms. "Finally," he declares, "a place to be dumb!"
Days later, he decides to get a prostitute. This leads to an antic adventure with him stealing a motorcycle and riding it into the mall, wrecking havoc and "making a mockery of the food court." He returns home beat up and sore, but when the prostitute (a blue cow) arrives, she is friendly and digs his dumb-as-you-wanna-be lifestyle.
Farnon's works often feature irrational exhibitionists. Yay for Me greatly resembles a pair of shorter Farnon tales, Umbrella Patrol and Film Student. Both feature insanely disruptive white horses, and Umbrella Patrol also has a roll for the benevolent blue cow.
What's different here is that the author has created a benevolent universe for the story's hero. When he visits the Victoria's Secret store, he suddenly produces a plate of fresh muffins to charm the female customers. Later, he pulls out a wad of bills, more than $3000, to pay for the new apartment. The prostitute with a heart of gold asks no payment of him, and agrees to stop by often. One subtle, indirect reference runs counter to this benevolent scenario-- the character refers to "putting his affairs in order," suggesting a planned suicide.
What's also different is that the horse in Yay for Me is specifically rebelling against a soul-crushing job, which gives his antics a purpose. Given his alternatives, we can't help but cheer him on.
Pussy Driven
"Our sex is well thought out and it comes with snacks, so fuck you if you can't appreciate it!"
One of Farnon's best pieces, and a striking change of pace. The polar opposite of the loveless loser in American Masturbator, this story's brown bear protagonist is a two-timing womanizer being hounded by his conquests.
The story is structured around a shopping trip the bear has with his wife. He is constantly interrupted by his cell phone, and it's always his girlfriends who are calling. All this female attention has done nothing to cheer him up. At one point, like many another Farnon hero, he fantasizes a murderous shooting spree; he also has a habit of striking out at children.
Seemingly the only one who understands him is a blue cow girlfriend-- he calls her on the cell phone, and she's able to extract promises from him that he will have trouble keeping.
The blue cows are the most alluring creatures in Farnon's menagerie, and often the most benevolent. The friendly prostitute in Yay For Me is a blue cow, as is the idealistic waitress in Winter Pageant. Pussy Driven's blue cow is one of his most subtly-wrought characters, a femme fatale who's ruthlessly manipulative, but also pathetically lonely. A forlorn glamour clings to her as she sits alone in the lunch room puffing on her cigarette; you literally forget you're looking at a twisty-toy and not a human being.
A Comedy Crisis
"COMEDY vs SOCIETY. It's a dilemma I've been faced with my whole life."
This is the story that got Farnon in trouble with Dilbert creator Scott Adams and United Media. It's about a yellow giraffe office comedian who chops up Dilbert cartoons, reletters them with fart jokes and fuck jokes, and hangs them up around the office. Adams and company came after him for copyright infringement. Per Farnon, Adams himself wrote to him asking, "Do you want to go to jail?"
Oddly, this is a case of reality chasing fiction, because the giraffe's co-workers react with similar indignation. "He's making a horrible statement of some kind!" "His work is completely derivative!" "Never have I seen such a lack of talent!" "He's violated every copyright law I can think of!"
Another exhibitionist anarchist, the giraffe puts the focus specifically on comedy, which he sees as his mission in life. When a red-faced Santa Claus rescues him from suicide, the giraffe suddenly finds himself in ideal employment circumstances; but he still must wreak havoc and destroy, because that's what comedy is all about.
The Dog Mess
"...nobody steals from the Devil!"
Another departure by Farnon, this one a chilling portrait of evil. The yellow giraffe in this story is a real bastard, and his uncontrollable anger is all the more disturbing as he takes it out on his pet dog, shouting at the creature and threatening it.
Then we learn that he's not only angry, but a cold-blooded murderer. He visits an eccentric, feline seller of coin-operated pinball machines. He makes friends with the oddball cat, who explains his affection for the old machines and confides his surprisingly revolutionary philosophy. "Steal what you love, that's my own personal commandment," says the cat. But the giraffe interrupts him by pulling out his gun and blowing the cat's brains out.
It turns out the giraffe and his partner are after the money still in the old machines-- but the machines turns out to be filled with, not money, but Chuckee Cheese tokens (inexplicably, the villains describe them as Canadian coins.) The yellow giraffe is so incensed by this that he's about to lose control. "I'm raging with all the fires of hell!"
Meanwhile, the dog has found a rescuer in the giraffe's next door neighbor, who overheard the abuse of the animal. A dog himself, the neighbor takes the abused pooch out for a picnic in the park. This idyllic scene is a stark contrast to what has preceded.
The story climaxes in a harrowing chase, and an atypically happy ending.
The characters here are not complex, the social commentary not especially penetrating. What's notable about this simple but sincere morality tale is it's reassuring nature. With most authors you don't need to be reassured that they hate evil and cherish love and protectiveness. But Farnon so often reports from the point of view of angry, psychotic characters, that it comes as a relief to see him assume a conventional attitude.
Graphic Novels
Q. A. Confidential
"What's that you say? Please pass the suicide?!?"
This 90-page opus is one of Farnon's most densely written and meticulously illustrated sagas, an impressive exercise in sustained craftsmanship. It's also one of his most bewildering stories.
The piece begins as an instructional narrative about how to achieve success without working. The recommended avenue, apparently, is to get hired as a quality assurance engineer in a software company. The story then segues into a freewheeling rant on the stupidity and hypocrisy of the Q. A. profession. Then, on page 34, a double murder occurs. Briefly there is a plot, but this segues into the main character (an innocent-looking dog) obsessing about how he's going to steal a desktop PC from the company. He finally commences with the theft, and a madcap comedy of errors and horrors ensues, and at the climax we learn the identity of the murderer.
For want of that particular desktop PC, the software company goes out of business, and the resulting mayhem escalates into a tempest of destruction. Shooting sprees, suicides, pile-ups, and firebombings unfold before our eyes in mind-boggling succession. "Eventually, of course, the Earth blows up," comments the narrator as the planetary detonation erupts with a "Honk!" He then speculates that another form of intelligent life will someday coalesce into a new civilization, "Another entropy factory, recursively propagating increasingly flawed, fucked-up shit forever."
But our steadfast narrator drifts away from armageddon and lands on an Eden-like planet of beautiful women, for a completely unearned happy ending! Furthermore, some of these idyllic climactic scenes look familiar, having been glimpsed in the beginning of the story. Is this then an endless cycle, the ending transforming into the beginning? Inquiring minds would love to know!
The story's greatest flaw is the lack of individual characters. We see the world through the eyes of the narrator, a sociopathic misanthrope who believes he's the center of the universe, and who views the rest of humanity with all the compassion of a blowtorch. Since he has no meaningful interactions with the rest of the world, we see no counterpoint to his amoral outlook. And as he bobsleds down the ethical slope from timecard cheat to equipment thief to murderer, he becomes impossible to care about.
Q. A. Confidential is a study in excess. The sendup of software companies goes on too long, the essay on office equipment theft reels on forever. The cluttered panels try our patience. Too much cynicism. Too much strident pessimism. But however exhausting it is to read this delirious saga, you come away from it awestruck. It's a comic like no other, that's for sure.
Winter Pageant
"Being alive and being dead are the same thing. It's just a big black hole that goes on and on forever and never shuts up."
This is Farnon's longest and in many ways his finest work. It features his most complex and memorable characters, and his most serious grappling with the issues his other stories have raised. It's also Farnon's most benevolent story, and one in which he shows great compassion for all his players.
It's narrative is one of his best, alternating between probing dialog and strange, wordless passages. It's extralogical plot is alternately dreamlike and mundane, confounding but always intriguing.
The basic story is about two waitresses who are close friends. One of them, a white poodle, is hounded by bill collectors to the point of despair. She has an idea that she could sell all her worldly possessions and use the cash to take an extended carefree vacation. When the money runs out, she'd take out a pistol and blow her brains out.
She confides this plan to her friend, a blue cow, who finds it very troubling. Amidst the hustle and bustle of working in the coffee shop, she has frightening visions of her friend's suicide. But the blue cow's attention is caught by another distraction, an attractive purple giraffe customer. When he departs the shop, she goes on break to follow him.
She befriends the giraffe, and he shows her a briefcase full of cash that he's carrying. It transpires that he is living out the idea earlier described by the white poodle; and he already has the gun he will use when the money runs out. It falls to the blue cow to try to persuade him that life is worth living, in an extended dramatic scene.
Meanwhile, the white poodle has also gone on break, wandering off in a daze. She follows some train tracks into a dangerous-looking tunnel. Then there's an abrupt, inexplicable shift to a b&w "family film" titled Abortion, about a misbehaving child who goes on a shooting spree, kills his father, and then begins cramming Snickers bars down his throat. Another shift, and the white poodle is in a strange clinic for the purpose of assisted suicide. The fatal drug administered, she floats through space and lands on a living room chair in some kind of heavenly waiting room. In this heavenly limbo she meets her daughter and finds some answers to her problems. She also runs into the purple giraffe.
Awakening from what turns out to be a fever dream, she's still in the tunnel, and barely avoids being run over by a train. She meets up with the blue cow and they head for home, and what appears to be a deepening friendship.
Suicide is a frequent motif in Farnon's stories, but this is the only one to treat the subject seriously. For that purpose, sympathetic characters are needed; sympathetic suicidal personalities, and the caring figure of the blue cow to represent the reasons for not committing suicide. Even the boss at the diner is sympathetic, a gruff but forgiving employer who's responsive to a hug.
There are a number of hugs given in this story. The narrative doesn't pretend that a hug, or a good screw for that matter, is the answer to a character's deeper problems. But it may be the only answer available, and for some it will have to suffice.
"The characters in Leisure Town have nowhere to go. They’ll never be immortalized in print or make that leap to the silver screen. They can’t compete with robust, animated entertainment available elsewhere. They lie awake each night staring at the ceiling, afraid of their dwindling bank accounts and afraid of tomorrow."
-Tristan Farnon, Leisure Town donation page
Farnon recently revived the Leisure Town website after it was shut down for over a year. It was last updated with new stories in 2003. He has lately written for the website Rotten.com, but none of his work can be found there now.
Considering how completely he's realized his dystopian vision, one wonders what more he can show us. But stylistic and thematic departures are quite prevalent in Leisure Town; there's no doubt that Farnon still has the ability to surprise us. Whether he will ever exercise that ability again remains to be seen.
Leisure Town is a vast collection of startling works (only a portion of which have been discussed above.) Largely forgotten or unknown to current webcomics fans, it's a strange universe that is well worth exploring.
