| Website of the Week |
|
ESC!Webs Site of the Week Week of June 18, 2000 User Friendly Main Web Sites: What's the first thing you do in the morning when you get the newspaper? Read the weather? The Sports? Or perhaps you are one of the ones who turns to the comics page first. That's me. I love the comics. Oh sure the rest of the news is good to have, but I always want to find out what happens to Dilbert next or to my friends in Peanuts. So, naturally, one of the first things I turn to when I start up my web browser in the morning is the comics. There is one in particular I never miss and that comic is named User Friendly. Okay, So I'm A Geek User Friendly (by Illiad) follows the exploits of a small ISP (that's Internet Service Provider) and it's staff. It's a typical staff consisting of upper management, middle management and the lowly tech staff who are the ones actually keeping the organization running. Keeping with great comic tradition, you will also find the halls of this particular ISP populated by the likes of a creature named Dust Puppy (think LARGE dust ball) and his pal -- a computer named Erwin. User Friendly is written for and read by geeks like me who can understand the "lingo", but the humor is not lost on those who don't compute. Much like the aforementioned Dilbert -- which has a decidedly more managerial bent -- User Friendly can be appreciated by everyone and doesn't just cater to the tech savvy. To give you an example of this, the most recent series involves a newly promoted manager and her desire to bring the staff closer together through a camping trip. Now while I find the references to Ethernet in the woods and 1600x1200 views of the wilderness funny, other, non techy types, will more likely recognize the joke as the typical fish-out-of-water premise. The Style and Substance Illiad's style is most reminiscent of Berke Breathed and Bloom County. I don't quite find his illustrations to be on par artistically with Breathed's, but it is very similar to the early Bloom County in that regard. I think it always takes an comic artist a while with his characters before they begin to flesh out. I've seen this happen with Peanuts, Bloom County and even Dilbert's creator Scott Adams is getting better with the pen. For those of you who browse back to the earliest User Friendly's, you will notice Illiad's drawing style maturing as well. Much like Bloom County, the reader must be cognizant of the goings on in the background to get all of the jokes. Sometimes it's as simple as reading a box that might be sitting on a table in the scene or looking at the image framed on the wall! Where To Start If you haven't been reading User Friendly, I suggest you go to the site and start with what is called the Daily Static. This is the strip of the day. From there you can go to previous strips and even go back to the very first one if you'd like. If you're going to start reading now, though, might I make the following suggestion? Get the books! Yes, User Friendly has released two books so far chronicling the series so far. The first is called User Friendly and the second is called Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell. What Else Is There? The User Friendly web site is more of a community than a wrapper for the strip. Oh sure you can read each day's installment, but you can also search for jobs on the Geek Finder job board, read the latest news regarding Illiad and his staff, comment on the day's strip or purchase the obligatory User Friendly merchandise. It is a very tight knit group which, I have to say, I have not immersed myself into. Many of the readers compete to see who can post first about each day's strip. Go there. Read it. Enjoy it. If you don't get it, don't ask me to explain it -- that's not what geeks do.
Click Here to See Past ESC!Webs Sites of the Week These links will open up a new browser window on
your PC. |
||||