Friday links

On digital comics

An important fact about digital comics, pinched from Dharbin! via The Magaziner:

With everyone trying to protect themselves from the same thing that happened with music after the rise of mp3′s and the iPod, the existing system seems wrapped around the idea of convincing people that paying nearly the same price for much, much less is the best thing for everybody. Digital comics apps like Comixology essentially sell a license to read a comic. It’s not a matter of DRM – you never own the comic. You just pay for the privilege to read it on your device. You can pay $2.99 for a 22 page color print comic, read it multiple times, loan it to your friends, cut pages out and make a Psylocke collage if you like. Or perhaps it becomes collectible, like comics famously do, and you sell it in a few years for a profit or something like one.

Or you can pay $1.99 for a Comixology comic and get … permission to read it on your phone. Unless Comixology goes away, or its licensing arrangement with the content publisher changes, or there’s a problem at a data center, or you stop using Comixology … well those comics are gone. Comixology is not the only digital distribution application, but it’s the largest, and most of the others are close to it in terms of what the user is actually getting, which is to say: not much.

In the UK, print comics are a mess. If I manage to find the comic I'm after (usually a baffling ordeal), I'm then expected to pay £2.50 for twenty pages of adverts for American products I couldn't buy even if I wanted to, interspersed with an unsatisfactory, incomplete story fragment. The digital alternative is massively flawed in terms of price, ownership and hapticity (which may or may not be a real word). Result: I just don't buy comics any more. I buy big-ass hardback collections of old comics instead.

The industry no longer understands itself, too preoccupied with stubbornly sticking to the comics-as-serial model (that, as Braak recently pointed out, is completely redundant in the digital arena) and selling film rights – no doubt a significantly bigger earner than the comics themselves.

Which raises the question: does the comics industry actually need comics any more?

House Bird

This, dear friends, is House Bird. He's the first (and hopefully not the last) Eames addition to the studio. I toyed with other names for him (he's definitely a him), such as Raymond, Charlie and Boyd, but "House Bird" just seems to suit him. It'll be nice having him sat there on the desk, looking all wise and birdular, keeping me company as a I work.

Big thank you to Dr B for ensnaring him.

Arts & Architecture

I'm a sucker for two colour geometry. I dug this gem out of my bookmarks the other day: the cover of Arts & Architecture, August 1954. As illustrated magazine covers go, this is about as close to perfection as it's possible to get (and seemingly a distant cousin of the Summerteeth sleeve I posted a few days ago). I've had Taschen's box set reprint of the magazine on my wishlist for some time now – it's just a tad pricey at £450! It'd look lovely on the Vitsoe shelves that I also can't afford. I know I've banged on about this before, but I still think Arts & Architecture – every issue filled to the brim with Case Study Houses loveliness – would make for a perfect back-issue-app-archive thing – something I wish more owners of defunct magazines should consider. Every issue of The Face on your iPad, anyone?

Eleven Nine One

This photograph was taken ten years ago today.

That's me there, on the right. I'm sat in the reception of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, where myself and a handful of colleagues were visiting to check it out as a potential conference venue. We'd already seen the towers collapse on the television and before that … I may have seen the plane strike the second tower, live. I can't say for certain, which is odd. Live footage and recorded footage were interspersed, and it was all I could do to keep up. Time has jumbled the images together. My colleague on the left, a dutch girl called Carole Somethingorother, had a small radio, so we listened to the surreal news reports whenever we had a chance.

It was quite sunny, as I recall. I'm wearing what was my favourite green shirt and some awful, awful shoes. My hair is shocking. This moment was a brief respite from the tour of the University – we continued to look around and ask all the usual questions about room capacities and refreshments facilities, knowing that the answers meant absolutely nothing at all. This was our own personal The Pet Goat – we continued with trivial matters because everything else had stopped making sense.

What I recall from looking at that picture is the feeling of it happening. Not the way we look back at it now, as a horrific yet contained, defined event. Right there, in that moment, we had no idea if it was going to be a few planes or a thousand planes. On that day it was impossible to fathom if this was it, some of it, the start of it, what. Was London next? Edinburgh? Everywhere?

All we could do was listen to the end of the world as it crackled through cheap headphones.

Superabundance

I've moaned before about the excessive number of crossover titles in DC and Marvel's overarching story arcs, but they are merely a symptom of a bigger problem: too damn many damn titles. All the big names have multiple series on the go – there are currently ELEVEN Batman titles! – and all the supporting characters have their own spin-offs. It's only a matter of time before Alfred gets his own series.

Walking into a comic shop is pretty intimidating. Walls and walls of comics, all jostling for attention, but absolutely none of them being the definitive Batman or Spidey or Avengers. They all cancel each other out. New readers have no idea where to start. More often than not, I just give up trying to fathom this indulgent and impenetrable barrage of comics and walk away empty-handed.

So, DC/Marvel, here's an idea: fewer comics. Why not have ONE Batman title and make that the must-buy comic? Get all that talent and energy currently being smeared thinly across the existing comics and make something bloody brilliant.

Also, why is there no comics equivalent of Lovefilm/Graze/Ocado? Why can't I just pop online, set up a subscription and bosh, next day it's there on my doorstep?

See also: Grant Morison on the death of comics.

Twisdom

People are quite splendid. I've written a few "aaargh, I'm going freelance, help me!" posts recently, and the subsequent outpouring of wisdom and advice from you lot has been incredible (seriously, anyone contemplating a similar move should check out the comments on this post – invaluable stuff). Another source of constant wisdom is of course twitter. I've just been sifting through my favourites today, and I thought I'd share some of the gems I've collected over the last couple of months:

  • @DavidAirey, being as inspiring as usual: "Whatever it is you want to do in the future, start doing it now, even just a little."
  • I like this one from @Angry_Drunk: "Some people espouse the Golden Rule, I prefer the Golden Mean: Treat others 1.618 times as well as you would like to be treated."
  • This Fred Wilson quote tweeted by @hiutdenim had me nodding: "The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary."
  • This from @pieratt reminded me that things I obsessively toil over in my own time aren't always a waste of time: "Spoke with a guy yesterday who pays his rent every month with the money he makes from his two Premium Tumblr themes."
  • @johnpavlus made me LOL my teeth out: "Someone called me a "polymath" recently, which to me means "someone who will forever rely on their spouse to provide the health insurance.""

In related news, please welcome the wisest of the wise, @DrBenneworth, to the twolar twystem. Follow her and confuse her with hashtags at once. And no, I'm not going to stop arbitrarily appending tw– onto words. The English language is my playtwing.

Who would have known how bittersweet this would taste?

It's infuriating, it's been going forever, I care very little about what happens to the winner, I'm not entirely sure who one of the judges is (she's the girl from Love City Groove, right?), it's responsible for the angry cock-legged juvenile squawk that is Cher Lloyd … and yet, I'm still going to be tuning in to watch the new series of the X-Factor. I love it, okay?

Unfortunately this love comes at a price. A terrible, terrible price. Basically, I have to come to terms with the fact that, over the next 107 weeks, Adele's "Someone Like You" is going to be torn to shreds by a procession of callous auditionees. It's a bloody brilliant song, but alas it has zeitgeisty-warbling-showcase written all over it, and so it must be thrown to the dogs for the sake of prime-time entertainment. It doesn't stand a chance, poor thing. And this is a song that has already survived the scrutiny of Aidan Moffat. It's time has come.

So farewell, "Someone Like You". Farewell.

Image pinched from The Gentlewoman No. 3, the best magazine cover of the year, by a long shot.

The spend of print

After posting this pic of Jessica Hische's exemplary studio, I keep returning to it and being drawn to one item in particular. That printer, that beautiful chunk of a printer. After a spot of investigation (that's right: I know how to use Google, therefore I'm a PI), I've identified it as an Epson Stylus Pro 3880. It prints great big colour A2 prints. I want one.

I've written before about my general contempt for my home and work printers, but I've tolerated them up until now. Now I need something good, something reliable. Something that doesn't make a whispery hellmouth sound when it's not doing anything (still haven't figured that one out). That Epson A2 beast seems a bit costly though – simultaneously planning a freelance career and a wedding means I have a list of very expensive items that I really shouldn't be adding to. Even though I'm sure it'll pay for itself over time (I'd love to produce short-run prints in-house), Printzilla can probably wait a bit longer. For now, I'm after a Printzooky.

So, it's weekly questionadvicewisdom time again: what printers do you folks use? Is it worth getting anything bigger than A4? I've heard nice things about the HP Envy – is that any good, or is it just a pretty face? Do decent printers actually exist?

Summer Screen

Just returned from a pleasantly un-rioty weekend in London, having attended a night of films at my favourite empty square full of potential, Somerset House – something of an annual tradition for the Gray-B household. Thanks to the fact we emptied Selfridges' food hall (in a non-looting, entirely paid for fashion), we managed to sit on the hard stone and stay awake for Gremlins (classic … and surprisingly violent), Troll Hunter (great fun, if a little patchy towards the end) and Tremors (one of my all time faves, seen on the big screen for the first time).

Okay, so I may have nodded off a bit towards the end of Tremors – it was a long day, okay? – but thankfully I was wide awake when the "swiss cheese and bullets" line came up, and was dutifully cheered by my lovely fiancee.

Yes, that's where it's from.

Where it all went wrong

Right, not sure who created this (tweeted this morning by @nccox and @jag4091, amended slightly by yours truly), but it says it all really, doesn't it? You just can't beat a big pile of lovingly glued and painted model spaceships. I'd rather see a three-dimensional model shot in 2D, than a non-existent one shot in 3D.

On cities and the Internet

A couple of quotes I've had stored away for ages:

“For Londoners, London is obscured. Too thinly spread, too private for anyone to know. Its social life invisible, its government abolished, its institutions at the discretion of either monarchy or state or the City, where at the historic centre there nothing but a civic void, which fills and empties daily with armies of clerks and dealers, mostly citizens of other towns. The true identity of London is in its absence. As a city it no longer exists. In this alone it is truly modern. London was the first metropolis to disappear."
— Patrick Keiller, from his film London

“Serendipitous encounters between people who know each other well, sort of well, and not at all. People of every type, and with every type of agenda, trying to meet up with others who share that same agenda. An environment that’s alive at all hours, populated by all types, and is, most of the time, pretty safe … New York had become the Web. Or perhaps more, even: that New York was the Web before the Web was the Web, characterized by the same free-flowing interaction, 24/7 rhythms, subgroups, and demimondes.”
— How NYC is like the Internet, Jennifer Senior, New York Magazine

The overlap between city and Internet fascinates me. I've never considered these two quotes side-by-side before, but I think they say a lot about how our view of the world has changed over the last twenty years. Keiller's quote, from 1994, predates the web as we know it today, and yet perfectly captures the essence of the void that it was to fill, a vacuum devoid of social glue.

I was raised on Richard Scarry's Cities Are Really Quite Busy And Full Of Pigmen books, perfect representations of the twentieth century ideal of a model society. Half the activities depicted (playing, shopping, socialising, laughing at cats in lederhosen) now take place in the online arena. What Scarry and Keiller could never have predicted was that the city hasn't disappeared at all – it's just that we now carry it around in our pockets.

STS-135

The Space Shuttle prototype Enterprise, 1977. From The Atlantic's The History of the Space Shuttle.

A little heads up for those of you who didn't know: STS-135, the last ever shuttle mission, launches at 15:26 GMT this Friday. Given how exciting it was to watch the launch of STS-134 online a couple of months ago – one of those rare communal twitter experiences where it seemed everyone was looking at the same thing at the same time – I'm just a little bit goose-bumpy about this.

Be there or don't.

Tapeworm

Tapeworm: one of my favourite typefaces, based on the lettering used by arthero Ed Ruscha on numerous paintings. Ruscha refers to it as Boy Scout Utility Modern, which is a far better name – I'd much rather see that pop up in my fonts menu! I've used it for the HESVA campaign, but am always on the lookout for another opportunity to use it.

You can get it from urbanfonts.com.

Train in vain

On Friday, Dr B (who's in charge of such matters) picked up our tickets from York station for two fairly simple return journeys we had booked. Two people, two return journeys. Each trip involved one change of train at Peterborough. Pretty simple stuff.

Now that could be four documents, couldn't it? One ticket per person per return journey, with all the relevant information printed on each. But no. Apparently twenty-five makes more sense.

How utterly absurd is that? The information you need is unnecessarily duplicated and segregated, and some of it is completely useless – we could've done without the two seat reservation tickets that simply said "there are no seat reservations". The whole ticketing system needs a serious rejig, and not just for us travellers, but to make the actual trains and stations more efficient. Imagine how much quicker a ticket inspector could get down a train if every single passenger didn't have to shuffle a deck of cards before finding the right one?

It reminds me of Tyler Thompson's mission to redesign boarding passes to make them useful and readable. Somewhere along the way, ticket designers forgot about humans. No doubt the next step will be to stick a designwart QR code on them just to make the world that little bit more hateful. With the profusion of rail providers, the old system is simply not fit for purpose any more.

One journey, one ticket. How hard is that?

Infected Words

If you haven't seen Pontypool, be warned that what follows is bit spoilery. And you really should see it. It's not perfect, but it's one of those intelligent, claustrophobic horror movies that does a heck of a lot just with atmosphere and shots of people thinking.

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