Friday, June 24, 2011

Read (and share) Gabriel Blackwell's Neverland

It's been almost a year since Gabriel Blackwell first sent me this wild, funny, strange, rich story. In the time since then, he has slowly, painstakingly reinvented its form with a series of additions: YouTube videos, audio recordings, old-school ads, and general strangeness. Neverland uses the medium in which it exists more extensively than just about any narrative prose I've seen before, and for that reason alone it's worth your time (and your promotion on Twitter, Facebook, and so on).

At first, Gabe asked me to design a container for the story that would look like a crappy corporate site from the late '90s. Then he suggested it should actually look a bit more like Wikipedia. I ended up somewhere in the middle. I mention this so you'll know that the mistakes are usually intentional. 

Like several of Gabe's stories, Neverland is a rich satirical brew, appropriating and combining a number of sources into one totally original concoction. It's one of the very few things that made me actually laugh out loud this year -- and it did so repeatedly. I hope you'll read it.

No comments:

Post a Comment