Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
:: Kimmie66 by Aaron A. ::
by William the Bloody
Welcome to the 23rd century. Here computer and internet life has blossomed into, well, pretty much the greatest thing ever. They have created a new fangled virtual reality link up which allows users to almost literally go inside computer generated settings. All you need is a set of "blinders" (re: goggles), which you put on over your eyes. This blocks your vision from being distracted by the real stuff around you and lets the nano technology in the ear parts to get into your brain and completely mess with your sensual perception so that you experience everything in the computer setting as real as real life. You can hang out on a virtual hill top and feel the grass under your feet, smell the air, see the big blue sky over head. In the 23rd century, most people use this technology to meet people in hang out in places called "lairs" (this is the name given to a virtual setting). You pick the lair style of your choice (anything from superheroes, to ancient Greece, to gothic vampires, and outer space adventures), create an avatar (what your presence online will look like), and you're free to spend your time in that lair to meet new friends and create an online life. The only thing is, once you choose a lair, that's pretty much your lair. You're not allowed to constantly jump around into different lair worlds. Telly met NekoKat and Kimmie in the Elysium lair, a gothic, victorian setting with vampires, ghosts and werewolf avatars. The three of them were best friends. Then one Halloween, Kimmie sent Telly a note. A suicide note. But what do you do when you only know this friend online? How do you know if it's real or a joke? You don't really know anymore than a person's online life and pretty much nothing about their "real" life. Telly doesn't know what to think about this, when suddenly Kimmie starts turning up all over the internet, and Telly sees her herself at their favourite virtual hang out. Is she dead? A ghost? Can ghosts even get online? Or is it all some sick joke?
The Good: It's no secret that I'm a big Aaron A. fan, but I didn't know too much about what to expect with this other than "internet ghost story," and I was glad it didn't disappoint. Aaron's art style for this book is ever so slightly different than some of his other comics, and it totally works here. This comic is fully inked (as opposed to Serenity Rose which was some ink, some heavy pencil), and yet has a completely different look than his other recent offering, Confessions of a Blabbermouth. The character designs are pretty neat looking and I really love how Aaron A. does his layouts. The way some pages are on white, grey or black paper really works for this book's design. The characters as people really work. Telly and NekoKat have different reactions to Kimmie's suicide note and what, if anything, to do about it. The background story of the 23rd century's technology is pretty cool and it all has a plausible sound to it.
The Bad: Some of the dialogue used sounds really very out of place and forced. Terms like "vidya games" and "in my time big buildings full of bound-paper information receptacles have pretty much gone the way of the triceratops" (I can't even begin to say what I don't like about that last sentence) feel particularly bothersome. Also, the matter of people not being allowed to visit more than one lair sounded really silly to me. I mean, Telly, our main character is a teenager. Quite a few people change their tastes during their teen years. Maybe you start out in a wizard adventure land and decide two years later that wizards aren't for you any more and maybe you'd like ancient Greece instead? How would something like that work, exactly? Two or three sentences in the exposition pages would have been nice to put my mind at ease over it. For all I know, it could be a matter of subscriptions. Like you're not allowed to have a subscription to more than one lair at a time but when it comes time to renew you can change lairs. Or something. My point is, it's not really explored WHY going into more than one lair is a bad thing, merely that it is so accept it.
All in all, I did enjoy this little digest comic from MINX. It was a good story with neat characters and a well thought out background setting. I could very easily see this comic animated as a mini series. Before I read it, I was a little afraid it was going to be too much like Serial Experiments: Lain, or other future-setting-virtual-world stuff, but it really wasn't. It made its own world, and it worked.
A-
