Internet Archive Insanity Max 30

[Tolomeo Tanguay]

Aword of warning: there are mild spoilers throughout this interview.

Internet Crusader is wonderfully evocative of a specific era of the early days of the internet. What kind of research went into recreating the look and the feel of those dial-up days?

I also had to do a lot of research about the writing, like how to write in the different voices on each page. So I turned to the Internet Archive again to see, for example, how the description on a browser game in the late 90s was written, or what kind of spam ads and popups were around at that time. I actually downloaded an archive of spam and browser ads, just so I could get the fake ads in the book to be more accurate.

The density of the information on the page makes reading Internet Crusader feel less like a linear narrative and more like an interactive experience. Was that your intention going into this project, and if so how do you begin to plot a story in that way?

Yeah, absolutely. I find drawing linear comics to be really tedious and frustrating, and I always lose steam after a while. So the arrangement of these pages was just a way to keep me interested. Each page has a different composition and a different unique element to draw, so I was never drawing anything repetitive.

Born and raised in Birmingham, England, when Matt's not reading comics he's writing about them and hosting podcasts about them. From reading The Beano and The Dandy as a child, he first discovered American comics with Marvel's Heroes Reborn and, despite that questionable start, still fell in love and has never looked back. You can find him on Twitter @MattLune

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