The Eve of Destruction
Tomorrow, the media world will unsurprisingly be a-buzz over Apple’s new gadget, but today, as I have been gathering work from sketchbooks for the publication of CENTIFOLIA II, my thoughts are with the former Quebecor World being bought by Quad/ Graphics from Wisconsin.
Why was Quebecor– you know them as the go-to printers for most of the comic world– even for sale? It’s easy to guess; a steady decline in demand for print, rising costs, competition from east Asia… it goes on.
I like a doo-hickey as much as the next person, but I’m not fond of Apple’s products in general. I don’t really see my future self reading exclusively on a tablet device, but while we were (deliberately) internet-free in December, I picked up a daily paper and it sure added up to a lot of recycling. I dunno.
January 26th, 2010Topic: comics
January 26th, 2010 at 10:28 pm
Paper books still have their good usages. Ditto magazines and newspapers, for all their drawbacks. And for all the help the electronic doodads provide me in making those things myself…I still like the pencil and the pen on a regular basis, too.
January 27th, 2010 at 1:59 pm
Ink and paper will always have a place in society, despite the advances in technology. It is more practical, accessible, and personal to have a printed object rather than having it displayed on some portable monitor. That isn’t to say that we should not embrace technology; rather, I think there should be a happy medium.
January 27th, 2010 at 8:22 pm
Horses will always have their uses in this age of the internal combustion engine.
In a similar way, paper and ink will always continue to be used… though hopefully rarely. Paper-making is usually an ecological catastrophe (even though it need not be) and inks are mostly not safe either. Computers let us (potentially) store data longer, enable searching, and are more compact (a truckload of paperbacks can fit in my pocket). That said, our storage systems are currently inadequate — hardware is unstable (flash drives last a decade or so, and hard drives even less) and software is often tied to secretive, proprietary, DRM’ed, non-standard formats that don’t survive innovation (it gives historians nightmares.) Until we sort out electronic storage properly paper will continue to have an important part to play… however temporary that might be.
January 28th, 2010 at 12:54 pm
First of all, I love the drawing and I can’t wait for a new CENTIFOLIA, and if that’s all I say of value, then hopefully that’ll do.
The second thing is this; North American culture is carefully cultivated to be obsessed with the new thing; the new star, the new toy, the new scandal. And then, after the shine has gone off and the thing has gone away, the Wes Andersons can come back to it in fifteen years and proclaim how they’ve always loved it (unless that position is uncool, then it is loved ‘ironically’).
So, to summarize: I love that drawing.
January 29th, 2010 at 2:23 pm
Have to say Miriam, in general computers are not at all even a little bit beater for the environment than paper. Arguably none of it needs to be bad, none of it.
But as is far more refined waste and factory activity goes into even the smallest of electric doodads than the daily mail. On top of it if you consider a few google searched = driving a car round the block in collective power usages by all the servers and networks involved, the serious problem with E-waste, here and more so in developing countries, the mixed blessing of social impacts we’ve taken on with our obsession with 24/7 connectivity and really, the argument that it’s better for us falls apart.
I’ll be publishing my work digitally and looking forward to a lot of aspects of that, but when it comes to social and ecological aspects, we’ve made more work for ourselves this way, not less. And so it goes.
January 29th, 2010 at 5:04 pm
Thanks for all the thoughtful comments.
I’m fond of paper, as a technology, and as aesthetic object. Apple, with it’s perpetual cycle of surface-level re-invention (Colour! Smaller! Bigger! Thinner!) is one of the western world’s worst offenders in the realm of expensive, wasteful, proprietary disposable gadgetry, which is partly why I single them out.
There’s more (and more toxic) clutter than ever– why continue to use your now-obsolete mobile phone once the 3-year contract expires? I can still post a letter (or a small comic) for less than $1, and it can be buried in compost when it arrives.