User Friendly was a webcomic written by J. D. Frazer, also known by his pen name Illiad. Starting in 1997, the strip was one of the earliest webcomics to make its creator a living. The comic is set in a fictional internet service provider and draws humor from dealing with clueless users and geeky subjects. The comic ran seven days a week until 2009, when updates became sporadic, and since 2010 it had been in re-runs only. The webcomic was shut down in late February 2022, after an announcement from Frazer.
Contents
Premise
User Friendly is set inside a fictional ISP, Columbia Internet. According to reviewer Eric Burns, the strip is set in a world where "[u]sers were dumbasses who asked about cupholders that slid out of their computers, marketing executives were perverse and stupid and deserved humiliation, bosses were clueless and often naively cruel, and I.T. workers were somewhat shortsighted and misguided, but the last bastion of human reason... Every time we see Greg working, it's to deal with yet another annoying, self-important clueless user who hasn't gotten his brain around the digital world". Although mostly gag-a-day, the comic often had ongoing running arcs and occasionally continuing character through-lines.
Cast
A.J., Illiad's alter ego, represents "the creative guy" in the strip, maintaining and designing websites. As a web designer, he's uncomfortably crammed in that tiny crevice between the techies and the marketing people. This means he's not disliked by anyone, but they all look at him funny from time to time. A.J. is shy and sensitive, loves most computer games and nifty art, and has a big-brother relationship with the Dust Puppy. A.J. is terrified of grues and attempts to avoid them. He was released from the company on two separate occasions but returned shortly thereafter.
In the strip as of September 16, 2005, he and Miranda (another character) are dating. They also have previously dated, but split up over a misunderstanding.
The Chief is Columbia Internet's CEO. He is the leader of the techies and salespeople.
Illiad based the character on a former boss, saying, "The Chief is based on my business mentor. He was the vice president that I reported to back in the day. The Chief, like my mentor, is tall (!) and thin and sports a bushy ring around a bald crown, plus a very thick moustache." The Chief bears a superficial resemblance to the Pointy-Haired Boss of Dilbert fame. However, Illiad says that The Chief was not inspired by the Dilbert character. His personality is very different from the PHB, as well: he manages in the laissez-faire style, as opposed to the Marketing-based, micro-managing stance of the PHB. He has encouraged the office to standardise on Linux (much to Stef's chagrin).
Born in a server from a combination of dust, lint, and quantum events, the Dust Puppy looks similar to a ball of dust and lint, with eyes, feet and an occasional big toothy smile. He was briefly absent from the strip after accidentally being blown with compressed air while sleeping inside a dusty server.
Although the Dust Puppy is very innocent and unworldly, he plays a superb game of Quake. He also created an artificial intelligence named Erwin, with whom he has been known to do occasional song performances (or filks).
Dust Puppy is liked by most of the other characters, with the exceptions of Stef and the Dust Puppy's evil nemesis, the Crud Puppy.
Production
In a 2008 article, reviewer Eric Burns said that as best he could tell, Frazer had produced strips seven days a week, without missing an update for, at that time, almost 11 years. Frazer would draw several days' worth of comics in advance, but the Sunday comic – based on current events and in color – was always drawn for immediate release and did not relate to the regular storyline.
The website for User Friendly included other features such as Link of the Day and Iambe Intimate & Interactive, a weekly editorial written under the pseudonym "Iambe".
In late 1999, User Friendly and Sluggy Freelance swapped a character (A.J. and Torg).
The strip and Loki Software teamed up for player skin and custom level contest for Quake III Arena in 2000. A Flash cartoon based on the series was also produced.
Author
J. D. Frazer was born in 1969. He began his career in law enforcement and served as a corrections officer, hoping eventually to join the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but he changed his mind, leaving law enforcement to pursue more creative endeavours. He worked as a game designer, production manager, art director, project manager, Web services manager, writer, creative director, and cartoonist. As of 2014 he lived in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Creation
Frazer started writing User Friendly in 1997. According to Frazer, he started cartooning at age 12. He had tried to get into cartooning through syndicates with a strip called Dust Puppies, but it was rejected by six syndicates. Later, while working at an ISP, he drew some cartoons which his co-workers enjoyed. He then drew a month's worth of cartoons and posted them online. After that, he quit his job and then worked on the comic.
Success
Writer Xavier Xerxes said that in the very early days of webcomics, Frazer was probably one of the bigger success stories and was one of the first to make a living from a webcomic. Eric Burns attributed initial success of the comic to the makeup of the early internet, saying, "In 1997, a disproportionate number of internet users... were in the I.T. Industry. When User Friendly began gathering momentum, there wasn't just little to nothing like it on the web -- it appealed and spoke to a much larger percentage of the internet reading audience than mainstream society would support outside of that filter.... in the waning years of the 20th Century, it was a safe bet that if someone had an internet connection in the first place, they'd find User Friendly funny."
On April Fools' Day 1999, the site appeared to be shut down permanently after a third party sued. In future years, the April 1st cartoon referenced back to the disruption that was caused.
In a 2001 interview, Frazer said that he was not handling fame well, and pretended not to be famous in order to keep his life normal. He said that his income came from sponsorship, advertising, and sales of printed collections. These compilations have been published by O'Reilly Media.
Since 2000, User Friendly had been published in a variety of newspapers, including The National Post in Canada and the Linux Journal magazine.
Ideas
In a 2001 interview, Frazer estimated that about 40% of strip ideas came from reader submissions, and occasionally he would get submissions that he would use "unmodified". He also said that he educated himself on the operating system BSD in order to make informed jokes about it.
In 2009, Frazer was found to be copying punchlines found in the MetaFilter community. After one poster found a comment on MetaFilter that was similar to a User Friendly comic, users searched and found several other examples. Initially, Frazer posted on MetaFilter saying "I get a flurry of submissions and one-liners every week, and I haven't checked many of them at all, because I rarely had to in the past" but later admitted that he had taken quotes directly from the site. On his website, Frazer said, "I offered no attribution or asked for permission [for these punchlines], over the last couple of years I've infringed on the expression of ideas of some (who I think are) clever people. Plagiarized. My hypocrisy seems to know no bounds, as an infamous gunman was once heard saying. I sincerely apologize to my readers and to the original authors. I offer no excuses and accept full blame and responsibility. As a result, I'll be modifying the cartoons in question. No, it won't happen again. Yes, I've immersed myself in mild acid."
While published books still contain at least one cartoon with a punchline taken from MetaFilter, Frazer has removed these cartoons from the website, or updated them to quote and credit the source of the punchlines, and fans searched through the archives to ensure that none of the other punchlines have been plagiarized.
Suspension
The strip went on hiatus from June 1, 2009 to August 2009 for personal reasons. In this period, previous strips were re-posted.
A second hiatus lasted from December 1, 2009 until August 1, 2010, again for personal reasons. New cartoons, supplied by the community as part of a competition, started to appear as of August 2, 2010.
From November 1, 2010 through November 21, 2010, Illiad published a special "Remembrance Day story arc", and stated that it is "vague and at this point random" what will happen to the strip afterwards, that "going daily again is highly unlikely", but that "there are still many stories that I want to tell through UF, over time". Since then, previous comics have been re-posted on a daily basis.
After the de facto stop of publishing new content, three one-off comics commemoration special occasions were published:
19/03-2011: The Fukushima nuclear disaster
09/10-2011: The death of Steve Jobs
01/01-2012: The death of Dennis Ritchie
On 24 February 2022, Illiad announced that the website would be shut down soon, "at the end of this month. If not, it won't be much later than that."
At approximately midnight Pacific Time on the evening of 28 February 2022, the website was shut down.
Reviews
User Friendly has received mixed reviews over the years.
In a 2008 review, Eric Burns of Websnark called it a "damned good comic strip", but felt it had several problems. Burns felt that the strip had not evolved in several years, saying "his strip is exactly the same today as it was in 1998... the same characters, the same humor, the same punchlines, the same punching bags as before." Burns said that characters learn no lessons, and that "[i]f Frazer uses copy and paste to put his characters in, he's been using the same clip art for the entire 21st century." Burns also criticised the stereotypical depiction of idiotic computer users as outdated. But fundamentally, Burns found the strip funny, saying anyone who had worked IT would likely find it funny, and even those who had not will find something in it amusing. Burns felt that some criticism of User Friendly came from seeing it as general webcomic, rather than one targeted at a specific audience of old-school IT geeks, and he considered that the targeted approach was a good business model.
Writer T Campbell declared JD Frazer's work as "ow[ing] a heavy debt to [Scott] Adams, but his 'nerdcore' was a purer sort: the jokes were often for nerds ONLY-- NO NON-TECHIES ALLOWD [sic]." He continued "He wasn't the first webtoonist to target his audience so precisely, but he was the first to do it on a daily schedule, and that kind of single-minded dedication is something most techies could appreciate. User Friendly set the tone for nerdcore strips to follow." Time magazine called User Friendly "a strip in the wry, verbal vein of Doonesbury...the humor is a combination of pop culture references and inside jokes straight outta the IT department." The strip was among the most notable of a wave of similar strips, including Help Desk by Christopher B. Wright, General Protection Fault by Jeffrey T. Darlington, The PC Weenies by Krishna Sadasivam, Geek & Poke by Oliver Widder, Working Daze by John Zakour, and The Joy of Tech by Liza Schmalcel and Bruce Evans.
Comic writer and artist Joe Zabel said that User Friendly "may be one of the earliest webcomics manifestation of the use of templates... renderings of the characters that are cut and pasted directly into the comic strip... I think the main significance of User Friendly is that in 1997 it was really, really crude in every respect. Horrible artwork, terrible storyline, zilch characterization, and extremely dull, obvious jokes. And yet it was a smash hit! I think this demonstrates that the public will embrace just about anything if it's free and the circumstances are right. And it indicates that new internet users of the time were really hungry, downright starving, for entertainment.... his current work [speaking in 2005] is comparatively slick and professional. But I suspect that his early work had enormous influence, because it encouraged thousands of people with few skills and little talent to jump into the webcomics field." Zabel also credited User Friendly's success in part to its "series mascot", Dust Puppy, saying that "the popular gag-a-day cartoons almost always have some kind of mascot."