It can be quite difficult to find something to say about Spork's Web Site, because at first glance it seems deceptively simple. The Spork collection doesn't make a great show of technical accomplishment. Most of it's in HTML rather than Flash, Director, QuickTime or whatever. It's heavily text-based, and the text is presented in a very straightforward manner: the words don't move around on the screen, there are no changes of font-family or font-size, no layering, no randomising of the text, no requests for wreader interaction Even the hyperlinks are relatively few and far between. In other words, many of the usual New Media strategies are absent, and what we have instead is something which seems almost startlingly straightforward and accessible.

In this context, one of the first things you notice is the humour. "Spork" is a funny name, and the picture of Spork at the top of the home page is funny too - goggly-eyed, apparently leaning forward to fix us with his stare. Then there's the little animation at the bottom of the home page, entitled "Spork's Stage", which depicts Spork walking up and down a sloping strip of red carpet, apparently talking nonstop without ever pausing or looking at his grainy-looking audience. The text below informs us that "Spork risks arrest or commitment as he addresses the masses of hippies and homeless people in Washington Square Park on the conditions of the mentally ill today. He has not obtained a permit to do a public event nor is his carpet regulation size and height..."

One of the interesting things about the humour here is that it's absurd, but the absurdity points in two different directions - both towards Spork and towards the authorities which threaten to have him locked up. The idea that there should be a "regulation size and height" for a speech-making strip of carpet is ridiculous, of course, and suggests the slightly Kafkaesque nature of the bureaucracy against which Spork finds himself pitted because of his mental illness. But the way in which he struts compulsively up and down his strip of carpet, babbling away without paying much attention to his audience; and the fact that he is there without a permit, running the risk of arrest or commitment either because he's too disorganised to cope with the relevant paperwork, or because his overwhelming need to unburden himself is forcing him to behave like this whatever the consequences; these little details are highly suggestive about Spork's inner life; and they also tell us that, even though Millie is clearly on Spork's side, she doesn't feel inclined to sentimentalise him, to make out that his craziness either doesn't exist or is really some kind of gift which "ordinary" people are too dull to understand.

In "Spork's History", Millie tells us that Spork's mother rejected him when he was born because he "was about twice the normal size and his feathers were colored in Crayola-primary yellow which would do nothing to camouflage him in the snow ... and that antenna-- ugh!" Spork's colour is important because it separates him from the other Skuas: Millie humorously links from "Spork's History" to another web page entitled "Spork Compared with a Normal Skua", which shows one of her bright yellow drawings of Spork next to a photograph of a dowdy-looking grey-brown bird. Spork can't blend in: his difference from the rest of his kind can't be camouflaged. But the phrase "Crayola-primary yellow" also suggests a couple of other things. Firstly it hints at a childlike quality. Crayola is a famous brand of brightly-coloured wax crayons commonly used by very young children who are just learning to draw. Spork's primary yellow colouring labels him as eternally childlike, eternally naive and compulsive in the way he thinks and the things he does, eternally unable to repress, mediate or disguise his thoughts and feelings for the sake of conformity. Secondly, the phrase can be related to the apparent childlike simplicity with which Millie draws and animates Spork - always in bright colours, always in simple flat shapes without any shading - and through that to the apparent simplicity with which the different parts of the Spork story are presented. If you look at other parts of Millie's website (which is called SporkWorld, after all) you will see that her sense of design is always offbeat and individualistic - but nowhere more so than in the pages devoted to the Spork story - and in those pages it has a particularly intense quality which reflects Spork's personality.

Then there's Spork's antenna. "Spork's History" makes it clear that his antenna is virtually the same thing as his identity, at least in his own mind: "My antenna is ME!" he screams when his teacher, Ms. Meddling, explains that it will be a disadvantage in later life and ought to be surgically removed. But the fact that the curious wobbly-looking appendage on top of his head is always referred to as an "antenna" seems to imply that it allows him to pick up information which other people (or birds) cannot hear. At times Spork hears voices - "The voices continued even when he plugged his ears. From that time on, Spork was tormented by cruel voices..." - and the mere use of the word antenna leads us to wonder, without anything explicit ever being said, if these voices are coming from somewhere outside him rather than being purely delusional. But the antenna doesn't just convey material into Spork's head: it grows out of his head like a mad idea - oversized, brightly-coloured, wobbly and eccentric. It seems symbolic of Spork's thoughts, his compulsions, his inner life. It makes him what he is, it gives him his peculiar abilities, but it also marks him out, like the mark of Cain.

It is Spork's dread of losing his antenna which gives rise to one of the most fascinating passages in "Spork's History":

"Spork ran away from home because he could not bear to have a piece of his body removed. It was part of his identity. He started flying back towards the arctic, wondering who his biological parents were and whether they looked like him. As he flew and walked uptown through neighborhoods he had always known, he discovered something he had never suspected: Everyone wanted to cut off his antenna... He also began to hear people insult him... From that time on, Spork was tormented by cruel voices which insulted him and commented on his life. They sounded like real people talking about or to him, but other people said the voices were 'all in his head' and doctors diagnosed him with schizophrenia."

Spork's attempts to protect his identity drive him to strike out on his own, and the effort of doing so leads him to a moment of insight when he suddenly realises how other people feel about him. But this genuine discovery shades into delusion. Part of the power and ambiguity of the passage derives from the fact that Millie never makes it clear where Spork's insight stops and his delusions begin. But his delusional state leads to him being labelled as a schizophrenic, and this label allows the authorities to pigeonhole, manipulate and medicalise him. He manages to preserve his antenna, in other words, but only by damaging his already-precarious relationship with the rest of society.

What Millie manages to do in the Spork stories is to make him a sympathetic character without sentimentalising him, and to show us the unfeeling and often wrongheaded nature of the social and medical authorities with which he has to deal, without attempting to minimise or conceal the fact that there are times when he genuinely needs help. Probably only someone with first-hand experience of mental illness could have written these stories. They are not perfect works of art. There are times when Millie's anxiety to make her points leads her to speechify at the expense of her narrative -

"Pong does not argue that there should be no involuntary commitment. But he does say that current laws make it too easy to commit people and too easy to keep them for long stays. 'Think of the taxpayer money [from Medicaid funds] that is wasted,' he said, 'At over $1000 per day it's a real scandal!'"

Millie has certainly done more formally perfect work elsewhere. But there is a sense in which a more technically correct collection of stories would have been unsuited to the subject-matter. Like the wacky simplicity of Millie's cartoons and illustrations, or the offbeat individuality of her page-designs, the eccentricities of her prose style seem perfectly attuned to Spork's personality. In any case her style in everything she does is as individual as a thumbprint, and we should be grateful that the Web is allowing one-offs such as Millie to find niches and make themselves heard, whereas conventional offline publishing would undoubtedly have either ignored them or tried to remould them into imitations of somebody else.