Created in the mid-late 1990s, Son of Baz is an interactive comic history of the British town of Basingstoke that blurs the line between fact, folklore and complete nonsense.
Presented as a scholarly historical website, it traces Basingstoke’s “true” history from prehistoric alien civilizations and a caveman named Baz, through Romans, Saxons, King Arthur, the Crusades, Basing House, Oliver Cromwell, post-war town planning and finally to a modern conspiracy involving Fanum House and mysterious ley lines.
Along the way it mixes genuine local history with increasingly absurd inventions, parodying everything from archaeology and television documentaries to The X-Files, Chariots of the Gods?, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and British travel writing. Every chapter treats the ridiculous with complete academic seriousness.
Rather than simply telling jokes, the project encourages readers to wander through the story using photographs, illustrations, maps and hyperlinks, creating one of the kinds of nonlinear web experiences that flourished during the Web’s early years.
Viewed today, Son of Baz is both a satire of conspiracy culture and a fascinating time capsule from the early Internet, when personal websites were handcrafted page by page and experimentation was often more important than polish. Long before Wikipedia, social media or YouTube, it demonstrated how the Web could become a medium for interactive storytelling rather than simply publishing documents.
It also foreshadows many of the themes that would later appear throughout Chuck Whelon’s work: elaborate fictional histories, deadpan world-building, affectionate parody of fantasy and mythology, and the idea that every ordinary place hides an extraordinary secret beneath the surface.
Read Son of Baz here:
https://planeturf.com/Basingstoke/bazindex.html
