Speaking of Neal Von Flue…
May 20th, 2009
…this collaboration with writer Alexander Danner from 2005 is five kinds of wonderful if you’ve never read it. Reading it again yesterday, I was reminded of Neil Gaiman at his most dry (and most succinct—it’s a quick read).
Neal Von Flue used the original “infinite canvas” application developed at Vienna’s University of Technology by Markus Müller under the supervision of Peter Purgathofer in 2003-2004 (not to be confused with Microsoft Live Lab’s recent experiment). The app isn’t being actively developed anymore, but a few artists gave it a try with some cool results. The implementation on Alexander and Neal’s story is simple, but I think it adds a lot to the reading experience.
March 3, 2021
I agree, that’s a great comic!
It’s a shame that Markus’ app didn’t catch on in a bigger way. Live Lab’s trial is cool, and I’m gad that someone is still developing these ideas, but Markus’ IC still has everything else (so far) beat in terms of the available features. Too bad it wasn’t cross platform – probably would’ve done better…
But, yeah… great comic!
“The cockroach must be secreted into the food — if you believe that your daughter or wife would knowingly eat a cockroach, you will love her less.” HA! What a great line from a great comic. Interesting that it presumes the gender of the reader is male.
Wow, thank you Scott!
It’s funny that you’re mentioning this now–just last night I downloaded Markus’ program to play around with myself (I only recently went Mac, so it’s the first opportunity I’ve had). I don’t know that anything will come of it, being as limited in my visual abilities as I am. But I did recently chop up a bunch of Neal’s old artwork to remix as a big, messy, infinite canvas story that I think might benefit from the viewer. So we’ll see what happens.