User Friendly
By J.D. "Illiad" Frazer
Published by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
As soon as you pick up this book, you know that O'Reilly is venturing into new territory, as they've chosen to put aside their very distinctive, recognizable-from-six-shelves-away cover design used on all their recent computer books, and go for a look more in line with a typical comic strip collection. Its covers are wide, soft and colorful, and the only animal on them is Dust Puppy, the fuzzy mascot of Columbia Internet's employees, whose adventures have been chronicled every day, and followed by a countless and growing number of fans, since 1997 via the website of J.D. "Illiad" Frazer, and now, thanks to ORA, collected in this volume. So let's open the cover, utterly forget we're holding an O'Reilly book, and look at the comics.
The strip deviates from mainstream cartoon convention in both writing and artistic style. Much of this is forgivable, of course, since, unlike other strips spawned wholly from one person's workplace observations, such as "Dilbert", User Friendly does not try to make its subject matter appeal to an audience wider than the field it parodies, and this is fine, surely adding to its attraction for those who get it.Take, for instance, one strip, where the strip's buffoonish suit, the company's marketing guy, looks over the shoulder of one of the techs as he sits before his computer. He comments about the beautiful graphics on the screen, and asks if this is some sort of slide show demonstration. The tech, not taking his attention away from the monitor, says, 'No, it's "Unreal".'
Where else could jokes like this go down? I got it right away, knowing he was talking about an enormous and diabolically resource-hogging computer game published last year, and giggled. Since you're the type of person to have followed the necessary hyperlinks to read this review, I bet you caught the reference, too. It would fall flat if printed in a mainstream newspaper, but again, it's not aiming for that, so there's no fault here.
The humor I personally find more distracting involves jokes that are really pointers to earlier occurrences in the strip, and are meaningless without context. Why, in one strip, do Pitr's X-rays reveal someone's hands in his stomach? How come Mike jumps into the ceiling when another everyday character says 'Hi' to him? You wouldn't know unless you read the last few, or perhaps one that happened a couple of weeks ago. Though I happen to find the effect a bit jarring, I can aslo see this as another example of the culture to which Illiad is so intimately attuned: inside jokes and obscure references are a staple of hacker humor, and Illiad often chooses to elevate their prominence from sight gag or other subtlety to punchline. Still, it's a trade-off; the best comic strips boast both punchy humor that offers smiles to anyone of the proper mindset who picks it up, as well as elements woven into the background to enrich the strip's setting and reward longtime readers, and Illiad chooses to lean more heavily on the latter.
Sadly, there's no delicate way to put the issues I have with this strip's artwork: the guy really ought to learn to draw. This is not to say that every cartoonist should be da Vinci, but Illiad's overreliance on what a friend of mine has dubbed DORM technology -- Draw Once, Read Many -- means that his characters, drawn with very little variance, usually either stiffly standing up or stiffly sitting down, and seldom wandering from a single, neutral facial expression, gives the poor people about as much expressiveness as bendable soda straws. While a comic strip's writing is most certainly what makes it good or bad, as User Friendly's popularity has proven, the best cartoons combine the style of their words and pictures; a strip presenting words hanging in the air over crudely rendered, cut-and-pasted characters would be just as well -- perhaps better -- presented as a textual dialog. This visual flaw represents my biggest barrier to fully enjoying this cartoon; if Illiad could learn to loosen up his style quite a bit (or perhaps commission someone with more cartoon flair), "User Friendly" would move closer into the realm of a Very Good Cartoon, in my judgment.
To provide a supporting parallel from another spot in the same sphere: The enigmatic "Nitrozac" draws After Y2K, another daily strip that enjoys quite a bit of popularity among the global geek crowd. Even though she obviously possesses an enviable degree of graphical talent, I still find her characters in severe want of some basic expression range. Perhaps in her case the influence comes more from comics like Red Meat, a rare specimen where the flavor of humor fits the exclusive level of DORM technology it uses, but I don't perceive comics like Illiad's as trying to achieve the same nihilistic atmosphere.
(And, a small pet peeve, aimed at the comics world in general: I really don't like the now-common practice, used by Illiad and a growing number of other cartoonists, some professional, of lettering via computer, invariably with some overworked 'comic' typeface. While I suppose many find this tool a blessing, especially if they believe their everyday handwriting isn't too pretty, experience has shown me, whose handwriting, when observed by others, often leads to joking questions about why I didn't choose a medical career path, that it's really not that hard to spend extra time drawing the particular lines and circles of the Roman alphanumeric set yourself when cartooning, just as you might draw the recognizable shapes of noses or eyes or fingers in the same panel, and you will then have lettering that looks so much more joyously alive than machine-printed words.)
In conclusion, it's good to see ORA venturing out into tangential markets while still taking care to keep its focus on material of interest to the technically minded, whether it be to teach or entertain, and I hope that Illiad takes advantage of the wave of popularity he currently rides by steadily improving on his work. Given enough good cartoons, I firmly believe, the world can yet be saved.
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