Review: Internet Crusader (2019)
30 Comics in 30 Days
Day 7 - Internet Crusader by George Wylesol
When looking back on the early internet, it’s easy to slip into uncritical nostalgia. (AOL Instant Messenger!! Stupid little flash games!!) I’m barely old enough to have participated in the pre-smartphone web of the 2000s, and I slip into this mode sometimes.
What I like about Internet Crusader is that it seems like a nostalgia ploy but only if you stop at the surface.
Wylesol’s art mimics the clunky graphics of the 1990s. This garish web was ugly as sin, but it's easy to glamorize: When compared to today’s homogenized walled social media gardens in which we’re all trapped, the old (Livejournal!! Geocities!!) seems better, more free, more authentic.
Internet Crusader, however, quickly undermines any simplistic perception that there ever was a free, authentic internet.
We follow the online exploits of an adolescent boy with the screenname BSKskater191. Our hero does everything you’d expect of a twelve-year-old male without supervision: IMing his friends, playing games, but also chatting with strangers, trying to download porn, etc.
As BSKskater191 does his thing, the shittiness of the old internet makes itself increasingly visible. His screen is plagued by pop-ups, spam, computer viruses, and the dodgy website of a satanic cult. Meanwhile, BSKskater191 is drawn into a computer game with real-life stakes which may or not have been programmed by God.
Because of the way the comic is structured, where each page is framed as though it’s BSKskater191’s computer screen, Internet Crusader FEELS interactive. But as our naive protagonist fights his way through four circles of hell on behalf of “God,” we learn BSKskater191 — and by proxy, readers — never actually had freedom of choice. He (and we) were always at the mercy of authoritarian forces: parents, God, the devil, or whoever is programming the websites we visit.
It’s 2023 and hopefully we’re all skeptical about any promise that the internet will liberate us. Internet Crusader asks us to question whether freedom was EVER on the table and does so through the lens of a fun and deranged story.
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