Electric Sheep Comix is a blanket title for a site featuring several webcomics by Patrick Farley. (“Electric Sheep” comes from the title of the Phillip K. Dick novel, Do androids Dream of Electric Sheep, from which the movie Blade Runner was adapted.) Electric Sheep Comix includes three main comics and several older ones. Some of them are drawn traditionally (ink on paper) and some use various digital image creation techniques. Some of the comics are augmented with bits of animation, (something that comics purists seem to object to, but I obviously don’t since I’ve always done it with my own webcomic).
Delta Thrives: set the controls for the heart of the sun (image above) is my favorite, a sci-fi short story done with images created in Poser and Bryce and then heavily manipulated and digitally painted in Photoshop. The comic is read in a long horizontal scroll, a format I’m normally not fond of, but Farley uses it to advantage here as his panels and background elements blend continuously into a horizontal band, creating the effect of one continuous graphic.
The Spiders is a much longer, traditionally drawn sci-fi comic about an alternate war in Afganastan, and Apocamon is “the manga version of the New Testament Book of Revelation”.
There is also a assortment of older, usually shorter, works, as well as a prologue for a new strip called Mother of all Bombs that is reachable only from the home page, not from the table of contents. I’m unsure of how recently the site has been updated. I do know that the site depends on donations to keep going; there are PayPal and BitPass links to make it easy to make a small donation. (I used BitPass, which also allows you to access or donate to a number of other online comics).
Note: the material contains nudity, sexual references, strong language and violence. Avoid it if you’re likely to be offended.
Any idea what has happened to the Electric Sheep website? Are there some of Patrick Farley’s comics still online somewhere?
According to Wikipedia Farley has taken a hiatus from comics to pursue work in the film industry. It looks at though he has not only not maintained his online comics site, he’s let his domain name lapse.
This sucks, traditionally for Christmas I would get blotto and read ‘Saturnalia’… Any archives?
I haven’t been able to find any so far, and the Google cache is long gone.
the wayback machine (archive.org) lets you access the site, as long as you stay with the html links as opposed to the flash/php stuff. Saturnalia is here: http://web.archive.org/web/20060304015914/e-sheep.com/Saturnalia/