It’s why paperbacks were such a revolution: they were cheap and they could be stuffed in a pocket.Holy McLuhan, Batman!
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Portable culture is crucial to any society in motion. Manga in all its indigenous forms has been a thing built for Japanese commuters. Part of why that style of anthology doesn’t play so well in America is that America’s a culture of private cars, not public transport.
Sometimes the medium really is the message.
ReplyDelete(Coxnag. Word verification. Very strange combination of morphemes, no?)
I hate to confess it, but I've found the perfect form factor for comics is digital on my laptop (I carry the damn thing everywhere I go anyway).
ReplyDeleteAlas, until a viable economic model exists for digital comic content, karma requires that I purchase the trade paperbacks, but they go into storage unread.
It is remarkably liberating to have (for example) a digital version of all of Frank Miller's work on your laptop. Many a plane trip has been liberated by a revisit to Sin City or Elektra: Assassin.
Remind me to chat at some point about my idealized economic model for episodic content in the digital age.
Ray