The internet is an all consuming, hellish fire, one that we can’t seem to look away from. But then the irl world also burns. We live in both these hells, but one is much more entertaining. In George Wylesol’s “Internet Crusader” we live on the screen of a 90’s PC as a 13 year old boy surfs the web as the world around him, off and online, burns apocalyptically. The internet has always been a hell of our own creation, but it’s one we can have fun in.
Cover by George Wylesol
Written & Illustrated by George Wylesol
Ever have one of those days where you’re talking to a smokin’ hot chick online and she turns out to be a robot working for an evil cult… and that hot chick sends a computer virus masked as dirty pictures… and that computer virus allows Satan to come through everyone’s computers and hypnotise them… but the family computer has parental locks on it so you don’t get the virus… and then God messages you to say you’re the only person on earth who can save human existence? Anyway, that’s the set up for this part art book, part graphic novel and 100% true, deep dive into early internet culture from creator of Ghosts, Etc. George Wylesol!
“yo. ur abt to read 1 of the greatest storys ever told. its the story abt how i went on the internet and single handedly saved the world, killed the devil and made friends w god. i call this story INTERNET CRUSADER.” – BSKskator191
Wylesol’s approach to drawing the internet of twenty years ago has an innocence to it. Everything’s simple shapes and bright colors, mashed together with the messy style of a child learning how to put shapes together. In a way, this garish mess is what an early internet looked like, but Wylesol takes it further — even images that are supposed to be pictures (JPEGs of naked women) are still MS Paint-esque blobs. The child-like cartooning embeds this nostalgic sense into the pages. I am just a little too young for the specifics of nostalgia for this internet, but that nostalgia is still strong from the cartooning alone, I can feel it, and it builds this innocent, loving tone to a book that is quite hellish in a lot of ways.
This tension between light-hearted nostalgia and hellish reality is a duality at the heart of “Internet Crusader.” While this is a story presented entirely as if on a computer screen, Wylesol has put this texturing on the pages that it makes it look as if it had been printed by an old, cheap home printer. This adds to the kind of basic, nostalgia aesthetic of the book, making the digital life of the story seem antiquated. I read this as a PDF on my tablet, but it created this tactile experience. It sits between past and future, set at a time with the internet on the precipice of consuming our entire lives, but still being novel. A kid posting edgy blogs, looking for porn, and gaming is set against eternal battles between heaven and hell. A biblical apocalypse happens on the verge of y2k. It’s a juxtaposition that makes this book so fun, it’s an absurd joke that these silly parts of the internet can become life and death on a world-ending level.
Comics, as a form, is built on juxtaposition, so these dualities feel fitting in this medium. The only thing missing is that “Internet Crusader” doesn’t really look like comics. Usually, you expect to see clearly defined panels, images placed next to each other to create a greater meaning. But here every page is a splash — about half of them double page splashes — just showing what is on the computer screen, where is the sequence within that space? On the one hand you could say that the pages next to each other form a sequence enough to call it comics, but I think the more interesting sequentiality happens within the content of the pages. There’s multiple windows opening on the screen, introducing characters and actions, forming an in-story juxtaposition of images. In most comics, the paneling, the layouts, are things happening on top of the world of the story. They matter a lot to how the story is told, but they aren’t part of the characters’ experience of the story. What’s really neat, and innovative, in “Internet Crusader” is how Wylesol weaves the sequentialness of the images into the bones of the narrative in such a subtle way.
This reflects the interactive way that using the online spaces portrayed by Wylesol in the book work. As users online, we determine how we use the spaces we’re in, choosing what parts of websites we use, who we interact with, what we read. This can feel true in games, where you are making decisions and controlling your character through the world. But this agency is also a lie. Obviously, Wylesol is constructing everything in “Internet Crusader” for his characters, and for us. Online, our experiences are increasingly dominated by algorithms written by corporations to make us see more ads. In games, the whole world is constructed, options limited to fit into the parameters of what the developers have written. People often talk about the early internet as a kind of free, wild west, but it was still a limited space, infected with old, irl, problems and narratives. God could I.M. you to recruit you to cosmic eternal battles fought by playing a video game that is just a Doom clone. The world is hell, and the online world is a level of that hell, maybe since the 90’s we’ve descended further through the levels, but can still have fun in it.
