Review: 3D Workers Island and The Land of Laughs
Review: 3D Workers Island and The Land of Laughs
3D Workers Island by Tony Domenico (2024)
3D Workers Island is an unsettling web comic about an eponymous nineties-era screensaver and an online community committed to observing and analyzing its secrets. The screensaver itself depicts the animated goings-on of six characters on a small island that contains a house, a couple trees, a picnic table, and a beach.
The story is told through a mix of screen grabs of the screensaver, forum posts on 3dwiscr.com, a website dedicated to the screensaver, and sundry other artifacts from the late-nineties web, including Geocities websites, Snopes.com, and AIM messages. The comic deftly integrates these IRL components into its story, lending it a verisimilitude similar to other fictional works that blend reality and fiction.
The forum posts are the heart of the story, as dedicated observers swap theories about the screensaver and maintain a near-Straussian outlook on its interpretation. What to most observers would appear to be innocuous graphical bugs become freighted with dark meanings. Some watchers allude to thinly-veiled pornographic imagery and themes of violent abuse and torture. Other posters seek to suppress the seeming truth. Some forum participants are trolls committed to being transgressive or playing into the bit. Neophytes cannot see the hidden meaning behind the screensaver and complain that it's boring.
It's captivating. As one faux-reviewer of the screensaver observes of the workers on the island: "You will find yourself relating to them and understanding them. They may even confound and anger you at times."
The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll (1980)
While 3D Workers Island is concerned with the morbid and unseemly speculation that surfaces within an obsessive fan base, Jonathan Carroll's 1980 novel The Land of Laughs depicts what happens when a superfan of a dead author gets too close to the real thing.
The book tells the story of Thomas Abbey, a superfan of Marshall France, a writer of fantastical children's stories. Abbey, after meeting another fan named Saxony Gardner, sets off to the town of Galen, Missouri, where France lived and died. They are intent on writing a biography of the late author.
What starts off as a realistic novel about a pair of wannabe biographers slowly veers into magical realism as Abbey and Gardner become enmeshed in the uncomfortable familiar of small-town America. After some time, it is revealed that Marshall France's fictional writings control reality in the town of Galen.
This is a premise with potential for inventive integration into the narrative structure of the book. Unfortunately, Carroll doesn't fold this premise into the narrative, and as a result, the book never lands. Instead of having readers slowly recognize the similarities between the fictive writings of France (and later Abbey) and the real world in Galen, Carroll resorts to having the townspeople observe the similarities out loud. The book is also let down by its characters. Abbey is a dolt, even as he is celebrated in the town as the second-coming of Marshall France. Gardner, a more dynamic and driven character, is given short-shrift.
This novel is sometimes seen as a narrative influence on John Carpenter's 1994 film In the Mouth of Madness. Both works concern writers whose fiction alters real events. Both are set in small towns. However, Carpenter's film is both more imaginative in deploying the same premise as The Land of Laughs and more narratively controlled in its tight 95 minute runtime.