The webcomics blog about webcomics

Ironic, Even

Ryan Pequin does some awesome comics on the web, including hourlies at his own site, and at Top Shelf 2.0 (and I forget what the accepted convention is for ending a sentence immediately after a decimal number, so I’m going to pad out here … pay no mind). To those outlets he’s now added a short-sketch site, to be found at Three Word Phrase. Starts here, and 30 updates in the archive already. Occasionally disturbing, as in the final panel of the latest update.

So everybody remembers Latin Heartthrob Aaron Diaz‘s magnum opus, Hob, right? Massive, 27-part story that unfolded over 20 months at Dresden Codak, with massively detailed art, essentially forming a manifesto on transhumanism and the technological singularity, and still managing to include references to Richard Feynman and a girl in a miniskirt kicking high in the air (I like to think he’d approve)? Got my copy in the mail yesterday, and boy howdy is it pretty.

I’d just like to point out that for a work that posits (even celebrates) a time when technology and life merge into indistinguishability, it’s oddly comforting that it’s been encapsulated in a form of storage that might be called archaic: the hand-bound book. Hell, my copy had pages that were stuck together as an artifact of the production process, just like hand-printed and -bound books always had for the first 450 years or so of their existence.

Diaz produced 50 of these babies, and later took orders for a run of softcovers (which should be going out shortly by my calculations), but as far as I know, that’s it. If you want to see what the fuss is about (and with the large-trim pages, the images are bigger than on my monitor, and dang do they look nice), come over to my place, ask politely, and please make sure your hands are clean. But you can’t have it, it’s mine.

Ahhh. now I see what you were trying to tell me about Dresden Codak. Didn’t click for me before; I’ll give it another spin…

ah, shoot, somehow I missed this.

I guess I’ll just have to drop in to good ol’ NJ some time.

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