A Townsville Fairytale is a comic strip about living in Australia. Well okay, about living in a certain part of Australia. That is — TROPICAL NORTH QUEENSLAND!
It tackles all kinds of social issues like looking for work, looking for love and dealing with drugs and alcohol.
It’s also a fairy tale, using the style, structure and all the trimmings. It’s about using fairy tale settings and places as metaphors for modern concerns. Like, I dunno… a troll under your bridge demanding money and then setting up an electronic checkpoint. A troll toll, as it were. (I could have just gone with troll bridge, but nooooo!)
So the comic also tackles all kinds of fairy tale related social issues like fighting dragons, the desperate desire for a magical sword, and the problems with mad scientists.
Yeah, I know, mad scientists and fairy tales? Well duh, get with the times people! Science is the modern magic.
ABOUT TOWNSVILLE
A Townsville Fairytale is not set in a mythical or made up place. It’s set in the city of TOWNSVILLE!
Townsville is a real place. It’s a small city right in the middle of regional Queensland. It’s a coastal city (most Australian cities are!), with low rainfall and high humidity. The locals used to call it “Brownsville”, but it’s a lot greener nowadays than it used to be.
Townsville has a stupid name that sounds made up. So much so that the Powerpuff Girls used it as the joke name for their home city. The story of the name is actually kinda pathetic — the city’s named after an incredibly creative dude named Robert Towns who funded the settlement (I do mean “funded” not “founded” he only ever visited Townsville once, but he paid for the place to be set up). Yup. His name was Robert Towns so they named it Townsville. Just sad.
Townsville is where I, that is the author of this comic, live. So expect to see real places and settings from the city in the comic. You should be able to actually recognise stuff if you live here — or if you visit you should be able to visit some of the places presented in the comic. Maybe. If I draw them well enough to be recognised.
By the way, acknowledging the Powerpuff Girls before? That’s so you don’t have to make any jokes about them, okay? Good.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
His name is Andrew Sorohan, and he likes drawing.
ABOUT THE UPDATE SCHEDULE
A Townsville Fairytale updates every Wednesday at 9am. That’s Townsville time, mind you. Which means that it could update Tuesday for some of you out there — and might not update until much later in the day if you’re, say… in New Zealand. But Townsville time it updates every Wednesday at 9am.
I chose this time of week to do the updates because of the dreaded ole Hump Day. The middle of the week, the drudgery of it. I’m hoping the comic can lighten the load a little bit and give you something to talk about on those horrible, bleak days.
Plus it gives me two days’ grace after the weekend to get it online.
ABOUT THE STUFF YOU WON’T SEE ANYWHERE ELSE
This Web Comic is unique! It is unlike any other web comic out there in all of existence! Don’t believe me? Check out this list that I wrote without thoroughly researching it to make sure it was absolutely factual — it will bamboozle you with lots of things that are unique to this web comic AND THIS WEB COMIC ONLY!
Seriously, read the list, you will suddenly feel a warm glow of admiration for this web comic afterwards. Because that is the entire point of the list.
Or I just like to write lists.
- FAIRY TALES — A lot of web comics use fantasy elements, but it’s always either crappy anime/manga type fantasy… or swords-and-sorcery type fantasy. (Or also techno-fantasy.) But something using fairy tale type fantasy? You’ll only find that here, baby!
- MAIN CHARACTERS IN SHORTS — Townsville is a hot place.
- SWEAR WORDS — I’m pretty positive that this is the only web comic ever to have the daring to use naughty swear words. IT WILL BE FRICKIN’ AWESOME!
- NO STAR WARS REFERENCES — That’s right, you will find absolutely zero Star Wars references in this web comic! None! This is something you will NOT FIND ANYWHERE ELSE. Seriously, man. Every goddamn webcomic ever references Star Wars. Stupid Star Wars. I get it. You’re geeks. You like Star Wars. STOP REFERENCING IT!
- AUSTRALIANISMS – No, not dodgy slang thrown in to pretend to sound Australian — this comic is written by an Australian for Australians. (And… uhhh… anyone else who wants to read it, I’m not singling out people here. Anyone can give it a burl.) There will be slang, words, spellings all carefully crafted to be Australian. Seriously, this will be totally Aussie.
- THONGS — As an illustration, in this web comic there will be thongs, that you WEAR ON YOUR FEET! In Australia we call the other type of thong a g-string. Crazy, huh?
