In an unusual creative effort that mixes fictional techniques with serious nonfiction research, cartoonist Ed Piskor has self-published the first two volumes of Wizzywig, a planned four-volume graphic novel that folds the history of the hacker community into a single fictional character named Kevin Phenicle in order to document the history and technological and social development of hacker and online culture.
Piskor has printed the first two volumes of Wizzywig through a Print on Demand service and is selling them via his website. So far, Piskor said he has sold about 1500 copies of Volume 1 and 1000 copies of Volume 2 and expects to publish volume three later this year. He also provides previews of the books online at his website.
Piskor got hooked on the history of hacking while working on the drawings for Harvey Pekar’s 2007 graphic novel Macedonia (Villard). At the time he discovered a 25 year long archive of a radio show called “Off the Hook,” hosted by Emmanuel Goldstein, about computer hacking and social activism. Although he admitted he had “no previous knowledge” of the hacking community, Piskor said the radio show “sounded cool and naughty, and opened my eyes to someone into [hacking].” Wizzywig: Volume 1: Phreak focuses on Phenicle’s entry into the world of hacking with “phone phreaking,” the practice of illegally manipulating the phone system as well as using it to manipulate people socially. The volume ends when Phenicle receives an early personal computer and in Wizzywig Volume 2: Hacker, the story continues with Phenicle’s exploration of the burgeoning new online world of the Internet through his new computer.
Based on Piskor’s extensive research, Kevin Phenicle’s story combines not only the general history of hacking and the Internet, but also the lives of real and notorious hackers such as Kevin Mitnick and Kevin Poulsen. “These guys and their stories are incredibly interesting and I thought how cool would it be if all of this had happened to one person,” explained Piskor. Piskor also noted he is “not interested in creating a text book” on the history of hacking, but instead wanted to “tell a comic story of hackers because I had the time to listen to it, and I didn’t think any other cartoonists could tell it.” After discovering the world of hackers, Piskor said he quickly noticed they had “the same kind of obsessive personality it takes to be a cartoonist. They not only share qualities I can relate to, but are similar to each other, so I crammed the life experience of several hackers into one character.” Piskor said he “spent some time shuffling around little ideas and anecdotes I wanted to include. It wasn’t difficult to take one guy’s childhood and merge it into another. I added some fictional elements and it really kind of wrote itself.”
While structuring the story Piskor said he had to juggle two potential audiences: tech savvy readers and technological newbies, in order to write a story that, “people interested in high tech can latch onto but not too [technologically detailed] for the casual reader.” The story is structured by alternating between various points of view on Phenicle’s life as expressed by the different people around him, such as his best friend, Winston Smith (host of a radio show and based on Emmanuel Goldstein); as well as other hackers, a right-wing TV host and others. Piskor said this narrative structure offered “two sides of a coin”--the coin being Phenicle’s curious life--and he pointed to cartoonists such as Dan Clowes and Chris Ware as inspirations for this kind of storytelling.
Piskor also documents his research and the first volume of Wizzywig includes a “director’s commentary” section in which Piskor annotates references and source materials from throughout the book. And Wizzywig Volume 2 has an extensive bibliography of the books and resources he used to create the work. Among many other sources, Piskor cited the radio show; 2600, a hacker magazine edited by Emmanuel Goldstein (a pseudonym taken from Orwell’s 1984 and from which Winston Smith’s name is also derived) which spans 30 years; and an online magazine Phrac, which Piskor said existed before the Internet.
“I just wanted to get the project to grow legs through word of mouth and Internet channels,” explained Piskor about his publishing and distribution choices. So he decided to “pretty much do it on my own.” He prints 100 or 200 copy batches of the books through a Print on Demand service--in POD a book is stored as a digital file and a copy is printed only after it is sold--and sells them almost entirely through his website, “over the course of a week or month. I continuously add stock.” Like many publishers, Piskor said he was cautious about print runs and said it was “scary” to overprint or to invest too much in inventory. “I’d hate for the [books] to be used as placemats or coasters,” yet he acknowledged that the book “turns a decent profit.”
Piskor is also “working with stores all over the world and reaching out to stores in and around Silicone Valley,” order to get the books into conventional retail outlets. Piskor mentioned making sales to a comic shop in Nova Scotia and in Norway as well as “comic shops sprinkled around the country that buy 5 or 10 copies.” The Beguiling, a highly regarded comics shop in Toronto, has also “sold a bunch,” Piskor said.
Nevertheless, while the book documents online culture and Piskor offers large chunks of the book for free via online previews, he told PWCW that he prefers how comics look in print, rather than on screen. Piskor said he’s also “considering creating a website around the book,” which might feature the comic in its entirety.
The series will include four volumes in all and Piskor said he is “working hard” on the third volume, which he plans to finish by late fall or early winter. He also hopes that “maybe somewhere down the road it will be collected [in a complete book] if people get interested.” Piskor is represented by literary agent Bob Mecoy. But Piskor said “I’ll think about that when I’m in the home stretch,” and emphasized that he has “no problem with it being underground,” much like the Hacker culture it documents. Besides giving the book, “street cred,” Piskor said that choosing to go it alone and self-publish Wizzywig, gave him freedom from likely “editorial interference” from conventional book editors.
Piskor has even sent copies of Wizzywig to employees at Google and Microsoft, and said some of the subjects in the book have bought copies. “Everything has been 100% positive. I handle hacking with a real sensitivity to hackers, which isn’t done in the media,” Piskor explained, “hackers are people too, and they appreciate that I see that.”
