Spiders - Top-notch SF web comic
There’s some great webcomics over at E-Sheep, including the fantastic Guy I Almost Was, a bitingly funny deconstruction of cyberculture.
But I was completely blown away by Spiders, a re-imagining of the Afghanistan war. This is a world where President Gore was elected, and where the US military is experimenting with radically unconventional warfare, dropping web-controlled ’spiders’ across the country so that wired-up teenagers in Ohio can play their mp3 collections to the terrorists, and try to make friends. Follow that up with ecstasy bombs and retro-viruses that target the empathy centres of the brain, and you have a phenomenal piece of near-future science fiction, snappily written, beautifully drawn and strewn with extremely clever uses of HTML and Flash elements.
Too often, webcomics are simply standard three-pane wonders (something that XKCD does very well, and bless ‘em for it), so it’s fantastic to see the limits of the form being extended, while at the same time an amazing, thought-provoking and actually rather affecting story-line is played out, chock full of top-notch SF concepts. Go read.
