Leisure Town
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Leisure Town is a comic strip for which the creator, Tristan A. Farnon, photographs bendable toy figures and digitally places them in photographed backgrounds. While the "characters" are children's toys, the comics explore adult subjects such as sex, abortion, and ever-present references to sodomy of various kinds. Farnon, known for his work on Jerkcity, created over 25 strips (some with 100+ pages and featuring dozens of locales and poses) during its life from 1997-2000; from then until late 2003 he created comics in the same vein but usually limited the strips to a much leaner length, while still maintaining an accessible archive.
Between 2003 and 2005, Leisure Town was removed from the Internet entirely, forcing fans to rely on mirrors such as please.leisuretown.us.
On or around March 9, 2005, Leisure Town was restored; as of April 6, 2005, Leisure Town remains online, with a redesigned site, one "new" feature, ("Pussy Driven"), and two "new" articles ("World On A Stick" & "What's In A Name?").
In addition, Leisure Town now features a store (http://www.leisuretown.com/ltstore.html) on which the figures used can be purchased online; whether they are the figures used in Leisure Town or merely the same kind is not precisely known at this time.
Leisure Town gained some notoriety in 1997 when Farnon scanned Dilbert strips and changed the dialogue to become profane and often racist (the story was that a giraffe became irate in his office job and started creating the strips). Dilbert's lawyers came calling and the characters were replaced with stick figures; Farnon then reverted to the Dilbert versions, until the lawyers called again.
It has been rumored that a Leisure Town book is in the making, but consider this comment from an interview with Farnon, published in the Comics Journal (#232, April 2001):
- CRANE: Your comics are incredibly lush and colorful. I can't help but think how nice they'd look in a big book, full color with glossy pages, nice cover. Any plans to release the online stuff in print?
- FARNON: I have no confidence schlepping around town peddling this kind of portfolio. I don't think a book version would work. These images only look good on the screen; when printed out they're really quite appalling. They're designed for online viewing, or display devices that just don't exist yet. A few years ago we all thought e-books were going to come along and save our lives, but they didn't demonstrate much beyond very light bitmaps. Possibly handhelds will evolve only when the right content is ready for broadcast. You never know when a lovely assortment of full-color back-lit comics wrapped in a modular HTML framework might be just what America's searching for. That's gross. I apologize.
- One complaint I hear over and over about online comics is "you can't take them with you to the toilet." Who cares already? That's supposed to be my intended target audience? An equal number of arguments can be made against printed comics. You need light to read them, the wind can come along and blow pages around, they fall apart in the tub. Kids do everything online from day one, I'm sure they can wrangle my complicated documents just fine on the toilet.
External links
- Leisure Town (http://www.leisuretown.com/)
- An interview with Tristan Farnon (http://www.tcj.com/232/i_farnon.html)
- Jerkcity (http://www.jerkcity.com)