My favorite chapter so far in Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media is called “The Print: How to Dig It.” Not sure how legal it is, but you can read the chapter online, as well as the whole book. Here are some choice excerpts which really hit me:

It is relevant to consider that the old prints and woodcuts, like the modern comic strip and comic book, provide very little data about any particular moment in time, or aspect in space, of an object. The viewer, or reader, is compelled to participate in completing and interpreting the few hints provided by the bounding lines.

AND:

In the low definition world of the medieval woodcut, each object created its own space, and there was no rational connected space into which it must fit. As the retinal impression is intensified, objects cease to cohere in a space of their own making, and, instead, become “contained” in a uniform, continuous, and “rational” space. Relativity theory in 1905 announced the dissolution of uniform Newtonian space as an illusion or fiction, however useful. Einstein pronounced the doom of continuous or “rational” space, and the way was made clear for Picasso and the Marx brothers and MAD.

I’m plowing through this book the way I plowed through Ulysses back in the day: full steam ahead, take what you can where you can.

I’m ridiculously pleased that Gerry and the folks at Backwards City Review will be publishing my 5-page comic, “After The War,” in their fourth issue, which will be hitting the shelves soon. Not only is this my first paper-published comic, it’s also the first longer-format comic I ever worked on (drawn specifically with BCR in mind), and a rougher version of the technique I’m using to do Calamity. If you can tell, I was looking at a lot of Lynd Ward woodcuts, Frank Miller’s Sin City, and the illustrations for Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend:

Next to MOME, BCR is my favorite journal, one I go out and buy after each issue, so this is a real treat. Gerry and I have similar tastes (check out the blog!) and he’s even managed to get graphic work from Lynda Barry, Kenneth Koch, and Kurt Vonnegut.

I really suggest you check it out. Library Journal named it one of the best magazines of 2004, and called it “a flawless mix of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and comics—yes, comics” that “easily surpasses most of the more established literary titles at the local Barnes & Noble.”

For those of you who live in Cleveland, Suzanne carries it at Mac’s Backs in Coventry.

It was a beautiful tree, two doors down. i stood next to the cooks from the chinese restaurant across the street and watched it disappear…