Physical Graffiti
Happy July 4! Just a reminder: a country is not its government and a government does not speak for everyone in its country. Celebrate the helpers and the people doing good things.
Sony announced this past week that they’re discontinuing production of physical discs for Playstation games. I’ve never been a big video game collector (although I know some people who are), but the idea that upcoming games will only exist on the internet is a bummer. I know it’s because the corporations want to control how we consume media. Still, you lose something when you’re no longer interacting with a physical object. This push towards turning all media into digital ephemera is one of the major reasons I’m running the Kickstarter for WAYPOINT. It’s important for me that my book exist in the real world.
No, the internet is not the real world.
I know it’s a little silly to want to print physical copies of my book. It’s a huge expenditure – especially in current times, where costs fluctuate based on the whims of a decrepit maniac’s brain dribblings – and distributing it in digital form would completely remove that cost. And don’t get me wrong, there will be PDFs you can get if you back those tiers. I read lots of comics in that format on my iPad. But PDFs… they’re code in a machine. They don’t really exist as a physical object other than the space they take up on your hard drive. The files can get deleted, they can get lost in the depths of a digital comic collection. While paper certainly isn’t permanent (fire tends to shorten its lifespan considerably), it’s still a tangible thing that exists in the world. You can look at its spine on the shelf, you can share it with friends, you can appreciate the signed bookplate I’m going to be including with every trade paperback purchased through Kickstarter.
It’s not just the ego boost of holding something I made in my hands, though. Human beings are complex creatures. We have five senses and we experience the world through them. These days we’re so used to communicating entirely through a flat glass screen that it’s easy to forget that you absorb things through all three dimensions.
It’s about texture.
I have, frankly, far too many records. But goddamn is it so much more satisfying to listen to music on a big chunky piece of vinyl than it is to stream it on Spotify or listen to an MP3. The enjoyment of looking at the album art, the feel of the cardboard, the sensation of sliding the LP out of the sleeve, the sound of the needle hitting the groove – it all enhances the experience. That’s all texture. It’s superfluous to the listening experience but who cares? Enjoying art doesn’t need to be “efficient.”
Even just taken visually, viewing things on a computer makes for an inferior experience. Digital reproductions of great artworks don’t have quite the same impact – you can’t see the subtle brush strokes or the small lift of the paint off the canvas. Those things make a difference. It’s extremely subtle, but our brains are pretty good at taking in information. When you read something digitally, through a screen, you don’t retain it as well. You don’t have any sensory experiences to distinguish it by.
There’s a reason that I’ve spent so much goddamn time deciding what paper to use for the book. It feeds into the experience. There’s something really satisfying about touching the paper, turning the physical page. When you read a comic printed on cheap paper, it lessens the comic. But conversely, if the paper is too slick it feels more like a magazine. The ink used, the texture of the paper itself – these all feed into our enjoyment, whether we’re aware of it or not. We’re used to a certain “feel” to the pages of a comic book. Even smell comes into play – the paper has a woodsy scent we’re used to. I don’t recommend tasting your comic book, but I guess you can if you want to.
My buddy Matt Maxwell, who I’ve mentioned in this newsletter before, used to have a blog called Intrapanel where he’d take photographs of comic panels. But it wasn’t just a flat-on photo of the panel – it was from an angle that emphasized its position in reality, the way the light shone off the ink, the way the printed image interacted with the paper. I’d be lying if I said I always got what he was going for but it was a really cool way of looking at familiar pictures in an entirely different light. You can’t do that with a computer screen.
Video game discs are certainly not as satisfying as shoving a big chunky NES cartridge into the system, closing the lid, and pushing power. There’s a reason those are still collectors items despite the easy availability of emulators, both official and un-. Still, it gives the game a physical presence in the world. Something a corporation can’t take away from you. Frankly, it’s also a disaster for archivists, but I can’t speak as much to that. All I know is, if I’m going to engage with something – painting, comic, movie, game, album, whatever – I want to have the best possible interaction. And for WAYPOINT, that’s the physical issues and trade paperback.
Speaking of WAYPOINT, the Kickstarter goes live in a little over a week. Please, please, sign up to follow the Kickstarter page and pass it around to anyone you think would be interested. I even created an easy-to-remember portal page:
Its very existence depends on you.
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