William Gibson has written a comic

Want to swap jobs?

While we have some impressive technologies, the way we apply them to real life is usually at best boring, and at worst depressing as fuck. I can't name any tech introduced in the last 10 years that made my day-to-day life better or at least more interesting in some significant way. Kindle, maybe? Definitely not smartphones.

My hopes for the AI field are dwindling. The current tide of hype will probably culminate in a few mediocre services from Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Etc. The services will have serious downsides, the downsides will be downplayed by the marketing, everyone will begin to integrate with them, and as a result we will get more complex, unstable and invasive software.

I still have a lot of hopes for VR, since it's not widely available yet and there is room for creating fundamentally new things there during the adoption period. Hopefully, the ideas of Bret Victor will not go unnoticed.

Hey at least you don't have to worry about Russian mycotoxins or hundreds of megabytes of illicit data stashed in your head, and you're probably staying somewhere nicer than Cheap Hotel.

Warn Nixon about Watergate.

Just imagine the bliss of no -gate stories in the media.

You get over it.

I came to the artform later in life and found it a weird transition. It's definitely a different experience and you have to change your approach... it's no longer just about reading the words, but also about studying the panels, which take the place of a lot of typical written prose.

Ye, I've also had a very hard time enjoying this mix. I feel clumsy and I suspect it's something one has to get used to.

I've never been able to get into long-form comics. They just don't hold my attention. I don't find them immersive at all, presumably due to the words<->art transition you refer to.

I'm not a visually-oriented person. I enjoy art, but I like concepts much better. I like comics because it skips all of the description that books need to do in order to tell their story. They just show it instead. A picture is worth a thousand words, etc.

Some people like the descriptions that books offer, and that's fine. But for me they are annoying, and I want to get back to the story/dialogue.

Have you tried black-and-white comics, like most Japanese manga? In my own experience, I've had that jarring feeling when reading full color comics, but only rarely for black-and-white (regardless of origin). I think full color makes it too easy to become engrossed in/distracted by the artwork, while black-and-white maintains a better balance so the transition back and forth is smoother. The level of detail in the artwork also seems to make a difference.

As an aside, Japanese (and I assume Chinese as well) also has an advantage due to its glyphs being visual by nature - i.e. you can view a panel in its entirety and still pick up meaning from the text without actually reading it word for word.

I think it really depends what you start with at what age. Some of the books I loved as a kid and where the stories are great, are painful to re-read now because the exposition is clumsy.

If you want to try something, I'd recommend Alan Moore. Especially his Swamp Thing run or Watchmen. They are both very literary to the extent that you could if you wanted to largely ignore the art (you'd lose out, but the story still largely makes sense) and just read the text. It lets you let the art just be there in the background.

Swamp Thing is basically a gothic epos of the man become monster (sort of; that was the original origin, which Alan Moore slightly upends in the second issue he wrote) who struggles to find his humanity and love, and then learns that his place in the world goes far beyond his old human identity.

Yes, definitely. One thing that I have found to be very comic-positive, is finding the archives and having the archives. Seriously, just knowing that you have the complete set of the comic/serial format, makes all the difference in the world.

I'm a fan of HEAVY METAL and METAL HURLANT magazines, myself. I just love the fantasy genre. I could stare at the lines of Moebius for hours. It is delightful to realize the effort put into the works.

But you have to find your niche. Not everyone is down with DEN. For some, HM/MH magazines are little more than titty-magz. (Not so, btw. Is Fantasy.)

Anyway, when you've got the full series, the experiences become really complete. Serialization is broken. Route around it.

I think it also depends on how you learned to read -- for a couple of years as a child I mostly read the Tintin books. Over and over, until they fell apart. As a result, the graphical style of comic books just makes sense for me as a storytelling medium. Although Hergé set a pretty high bar, and I do find a badly laid-out page hard to follow.

I would recommend Ghost In The Shell. Also, Appleseed by the same author. Then Blame! is also one of my favorits.

I recently stumbled upon a webcomic called Drugs and Wires. It may have more comedy than you'd expect from the subject matter, but it builds an excellent dystopian world.

Yes, Gibson's writing style requires some getting used to. Once it all "clicks" though it is usually a fun ride. That being said, these days I prefer writers who write in a much more straightforward style. For instance I'm reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and despite the fact that the book is large and the content rather technical it is an effortless read.

I'm the opposite — I wish there were more writers who were capable of writing with the same kind of rich texture as Gibson.

J. G. Ballard comes close; The Atrocity Exhibition is very Gibsonesque in places, though with a much bleaker sense of alienation than anything Gibson wrote. Cormac McCarthy is also great, though not like Gibson at all.

People seem to like Neal Stephenson's early work (Snow Crash in particular), but I was always put off by his apparent plagiarizing of Gibson's style.

Edit: Also James Ellroy.

>I usually don't like it

Have you made or are making an exception in this case?

My local comic store is sold out, but they are carrying it, just waiting for more stock.

William Gibson is always relevant on HN. He single-handedly made hackers and hacking cool in the early-to-mid 80s. A pity that he was never technically proficient, but perhaps that would have compromised his art somewhat.

William Gibson articulated some of the metaphors and mental imagery that became a significant way that non-technical people came to understand computing and the internet in the 1990s.

RTFA