Keenan's Book Reviews: Search results for artist

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Sunday, May 18, 2014

Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk

Douglas Wolk’s book Reading Comics has two major sections. In the first section, outlines a framework for comic book criticism. First, he makes it clear that the comic book (or graphic novel) is a distinct medium. Comics are not half-assed attempts at some other media such as film or prose.

Next he draws a distinction between mainstream comics and art comics. Mainstream comics have always been an corporate effort. It is corporate in the sense that it has been controlled by publishers. It is also corporate because most mainstream comics are the product of a team (a writer, an artist—sometimes separate penciller and inker—a colorist, and a letterer). Both of these types of corporate authorship give rise to a house style.

This gives rise to one of the major points of distinction between mainstream and art comics. Mainstream comics are dominated by a house style. Art comics are an expression of the style of the cartoonist. There is an element of auteurism in this understanding of art comics. An art comic, to a much greater degree than a mainstream comic, is a single artist’s interpretation of what he sees or envisions. Art comics are valued as an expression of their creators’ visions. The more skillful the cartoonist, the more likely he is to produce good comics.

There is more to Wolk’s framework of comics criticism than this, but it seems to me to be the central element. Wolk does not claim to be making a comprehensive system of criticism. Comic books are too new a medium for that, especially because comics criticisms is necessarily younger.

In the second section of the book, Wolk discusses the works of particular cartoonists. Some of these work heavily or mostly in mainstream comics, but the focus remains on how the artist interprets and expresses his vision in comics, with or without the expectations of mainstream comics.

One of the great examples of this is Alan Moore. Moore’s work for mainstream publishers had turned the mainstream, and especially the superhero genre, on its head while still producing comics that work excellently as mainstream comics. Moore bucks the trend of artsy cartoonists by being a writer only; all of his comics are mainstream-style collaborations with an artist. Wolk mentions several works of Moore, but the grand example is Watchmen. Moore, and especially Watchmen, has cost a long shadow on mainstream comics. He has pushed the mainstream to be much better, and eager imitators have unfortunately produced some horrible comics by learning all the wrong lessons.

Several cartoonists receive attention: the dark, strange visions of Steve Ditko (cocreator of Spider-Man), the epically deep world-building and beautiful drawing of Jaime Hernandez, the epic opus of Cerebus comics by Dave Sim, the artistry of Will Eisner, the power of Frank Miller (sometimes overpowering), and the consciousness-expanding ouvre of Grant Morrison (another writer, but not artist).

Even though the book is not new, it introduced me to cartoonists and comics that were new to me. It was worth the read for that, though Wolk’s perspective on the development of mainstream and art comics is interesting, too.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

American Splendor (Film)

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics by Dennis O’Neil

How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster

Maus by Art Spiegelman

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Writing for Comics with Peter David

Douglas Wolk. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2007.

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Scan Artist by Marcia Biederman

When I want to find some information, I can pull my cell phone out of my pocket and search for it using Google (or some other search engine, but probably Google). I can remember a time when that was not an option. If the information I needed wasn’t in the dictionary or encyclopedia I had at home (which was already of date in some areas), I’d have to go to the library for additional references or—heaven forbid—the morgue of a newspaper office. Getting useful information was not a trivial affair. The generation before mine that saw a pre-Internet explosion of printed information after World War II especially felt the difficulty of keeping up. Evelyn Wood was there with an answer; Marcia Biederman tells her story in Scan Artist.

Evelyn Wood did not invent speed reading. She did not even like the term. However, for decades her name and face was more strongly associated with it than any other person. Though she built her reputation on being a school teacher, she never was not a regular classroom teacher (she was a school counselor) and she was not a reading specialist. She had a master’s degree in speech, earned under the direction of a professor who a studied theater.

Theater may be the lens for looking at Wood’s career. She started writing and staging plays when she was in high school and a college undergraduate. Many of these had religious themes related to her Mormon faith. When she was in Germany, where her husband served as president of the Mormon mission in Frankfurt as the Nazis began their aggressions, she fell in love with the opera and cajoled her way into back stage of the opera house. She began bringing what she learned of stagecraft into her own productions.

Back in the U.S. the Woods put Evelyn’s theatrical skills to work as lecturers on their European experience. They changed their focus as American sentiments shifted from Germany to Britain. They also put a pretty heavy spin on the Mormon relationship with the Nazis and greatly embellished the dangers they face leaving Germany.

Evelyn Wood’s success as a seller of her speed-reading system was largely built on such theatrics and embellishments. She claimed student could read thousands of words per minute; the faster one read the better their comprehension. (The fastest people can actually read is about 900 words per minute. Anything faster is skimming, and comprehension suffers when one skims). She managed to get endorsements from senators and she encouraged, or at least never corrected, the misconception that she was tied to John F. Kennedy and his reportedly fast reading speed. (Ted Kennedy took her course as a senator, and staffers in the Kennedy, Nixon and Carter administrations took the course, including Jimmy Carter himself, though Wood was not the teacher.)

The company she started changed hands and business models several times. A lot of money was made with her name and methods, and in the sale and resale of the company, but the Woods received only a small portion of it. Even so, she was ready to promote herself, her methods and the company that still paid her a consulting fee. She slowed down, but continued to make appearances and accept interview requests even after suffering cancer and a stroke.

While one may sympathize with her, especially in her illness later in life, the Evelyn Wood presented by Biederman is not easy to like. The Wood adopted a teenage girl largely to have a live-in nanny for their natural daughter when they moved to Germany; they never really acknowledge their adopted daughter or even saw her much once she was an adult. Wood was in some ways a con artist who played on the insecurities of her marks, some who were never knocked in spite of the mounting evidence that her program was at best an overprice lesson in skimming.

Wood found a way to take advantage of the insecurity of her day. She built a brand on it. While primarily a biography of Wood, Scan Artist reveals interesting things about America of the time and the obsession with self-improvement. It has not disappeared. Speed-reading apps still claim to greatly increase both speed and comprehension. TED-talkers claim to read a book or more a day. The Internet makes it easy to acquire a shallow knowledge of almost anything quickly, so perhaps people have become satisfied with what they can learn from skimming hundreds of books a year. Deep learning and understanding remains slow and effortful.

Biederman, Marcia. Scan Artist: How Evelyn Wood Convinced the World that Speed-Reading Worked. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2019.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Schumacher, Michael. Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010. Will Eisner was a great innovator in comic books who spent his entire adult life working in the field. Michael Schumacher’s biography of the man, Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics, is a chronological review of his life and major works. Several things set Eisner apart as a comics writer and artist. From the beginning of his career, he thought comics could be serious art that could be more than cheap entertainment for kids. Unlike many comics artists, he was also a savvy businessman. He expanded the scope of comics from entertainment to education. Though his early work in comics is of high quality and displayed great creativity, he pushed himself to do more and better things with his chosen medium. Comic books were held in low regard in their early days, even by the writers and artists who created them. Most of the creators who worked in the field were just biding their time and making ends meet until they might move into more lucrative and respected work in books, magazines, and commercial art. It was also a market open to Jews, like Eisner, and other minorities who had a hard time breaking into other markets. In contrast, Eisner always saw potential in comic books to be serious art that could communicate to people in unique ways. While publishers were interested in gimmicks and characters that sold magazines, and Eisner provided them with that kind of material, Eisner’s desire was to focus on great storytelling through comics. He got his chance when he produced The Spirit, a comic made to be a weekly insert for newspapers. He negotiated a level of creative control over the comic that was uncommon in the industry. Eisner enjoyed the process of negotiation. This had much to do with his success as a businessman. For most of his career, Eisner ran his own shop producing comics for other publishers rather than working as an employee for freelancer. He was intelligent and flexible in his business dealing. He reaped the financial reward of his artistic work in a way few comics artist of the time did. Schumacher attributes this dual nature as artist and businessman to his parents. Eisner’s father was a painter who barely scraped through the depression; his mother wanted to see her children to something practical and have stable jobs. When comics began to face troubles in the postwar years, Eisner was already moving on to the education market. He had proven the concept of educational comics while he was in the army and created comics that supplemented preventative maintenance programs. He expanded this work later, contracting to produce a preventative maintenance magazine for the army during the Korean War, and expanding educational comics to other customers. In the last decades of his life, Eisner returned to telling stories through comics. Rather than returning to the genre stories he told earlier, he told longer, deeper, more personal, and sometimes autobiographical stories. Though not the inventor of the term "graphic novel," he was an innovator in telling longer stories through comics, tackling subjects that previously were the realm of mainstream literature and nonfiction. He developed relationships with publishers and editors that pushed him to produce great work. Schumacher doesn’t find all the work of this period to be great, though some is incredible. It seems to be a complaint that not all of Eisner’s work was as good as his best work. Though their may be something to this, we see in Eisner a man who is pushing into new areas of the art and publishing of comics when most of his contemporaries had long retired. If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon American Splendor (Film) Maus by Art Spiegelman Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu Will Eisner’s The Spirit by Darwyn Cook

Sunday, April 13, 2014

Kirby by Mark Evanier

Jack Kirby, born Jacob Kurtzberg in 1917, picked up the nickname King when he was young. That is not the only reason Mark Evanier applies the title to him in Kirby: King of Comics. Kirby was one of the most influential creators in comics over the course of his long career, beginning in 1938 at the Eisner-Iger shop, which began in the early days of the medium.

Kirby is a coffee table book, full of images from Kirby’s work. Though Evanier’s biography of Kirby is interesting, I suspect these images, some of them large, full-page reproduction were always conceived as a major selling point of the book. Kirby was a professional artist, mostly in comics, his entire career, which was long, so it only makes sense that you need to see a selection of his drawings to understand why he had such an impact on comics.

You can see Kirby’s influence everywhere in comics, especially superhero comics. He worked for both Marvel and DC at different times, and had a hand in creating or co-creating many popular characters and settings.

More than that, he had an influence on the style and visual language of comics that writers and artist still used today. He was one of the first comic book artists to break away from strip layouts (carried over from newspaper comics) to designing for a full page. His characters busted through the panels. His drawings were dynamic and suggested powerful motion; this is a striking characteristic of his work that is discussed by nearly everyone who writes about Kirby. I find his drawings can seem strangely flattened out and dimensional at the same time.

Because Kirby worked for so long, on so many comics, for so many publishers, and had such an influence on the artists who grew up reading his work, you’ll still see many Kirby touches in current comics. I see them in the depiction of technology, the design of characters and costumes, the framing of action scenes, and even the continued use of Kirby dots (especially at DC, no doubt because they just look so cool).

He was an innovator who introduced new types of images into comics, such as collage, and new genres, such as romance. He even foresaw the future of the comic books, pushing his publishers for better quality material and printing, new formats, longer stories, and new ways to market and sell comics. Publishers balked at the cost of such innovations at the time, but many of the changes Kirby predicted and sought for the industry eventually came to pass.

Kirby is known mainly as an artist, but he was also a writer. It may be fair to say that Kirby couldn’t leave a script alone and regularly modified scripts he was adapting to drawings. His solo writing was packed with big ideas and wild concepts and sometimes had trouble finding large audience in his day, though these comics have often done well when collected and reprinted. I do not think it unfair to say that some of his best work was collaborations with other writers. For much of the first half of his career, he partnered with writer Joe Simon, with whom he created Captain America and romance comics. In the 1960s, he collaborated with Stan Lee at to co-create much of what is now the Marvel Universe.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Evanier, Mark. Kirby: King of Comics. New York: Abrams, 2008.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Intersting Stuff June 29, 2010

Annie comic strip has final day in the funnies
Batman Issue No. 700 is a keeper
Brooklyn Bridge getting a $500 million makeover
Fantasy artist Frank Frazetta passes at age 82
How ancient China was built on sticky rice, literally CNNGo.com
Howard the Duck back in quack
Interesting Stuff May 12, 2010
Little Orphan Annie comic strip canceled after 85 years
Little Orphan Annie ending
Marvel leads the $3.99 charge with 70 titles this July
Oil Inspectors on Meth?
Robert Crumb Genesis museum exhibit
Scott Pilgrim vs the World evil exes movie posters
Vatican beatifies Blues Brothers…well almost
Vatican newspaper: Blues Brothers is a Catholic classic

Sunday, March 27, 2016

Amazing Fantastic Incredible by Stan Lee, Peter David & Colleen Doran

When a book is entitled Amazing Fantastic Incredible, Stan Lee must be involved. That is the title of Lee’s graphic novel memoir, co-written with Peter David with art by Colleen Doran, about his long career in comic books.

Lee has a career in comic books going back the Golden Age. He started working in comics soon after they became a popular medium. Few people have had a career in comic books as long as Lee’s, partly because he is still working. No one has been the public face of comic books, or a spokesman and promotor for the medium, as much as Lee.

Because Lee’s career in comics is well known, at least among fans, some of the more interesting parts of the memoir deal with other aspects of his life. He depicts himself as being crazy in love with his wife, Joan, even after decades of marriage. He recalls himself as a lonely kid during the Great Depression, who took refuge in books and the world of his own imagination. He retelling of his army service during World War II, mostly serving as a writer stateside, is mostly humorous.

I suspect Lee’s humor has a lot to do with his popularity. He comes across as self-aggrandizing with a self-deprecating wink.

Even so, Lee’s status as a comics celebrity has sparked criticism in some circles. He was the face of Marvel Comics, and so has taken the heat for the way the publisher treated the artist who worked for him (comics publishers treated artists shabbily for decades). Maybe he could have done more for the artists who worked for him, and maybe he would have been unemployed if he tried. Lee doesn’t get into this matter much, but when he does he shifts the blame to publisher Martin Goodman.

Lee addresses some of his most famous characters and the artists who co-created them. Some might see his recognition of co-creators as a defense against detractors who say he has claimed too much credit. I think the book presents the situation the way Lee would like to remember, and the way he would like others to remember it. I think he genuinely liked and admired many of the people he worked with. Throughout the book, Jack Kirby is depicted as handsome, powerful and dynamic, almost like a superhero, even when there was a rift if their personal and professional relationship.

This is a memoir, not an autobiography. Lee and his collaborators do not attempt to independently confirm memories, though they straightforward about some memories being fuzzy. A few scenes a clearly constructed to present information in a manner more interesting than direct exposition, though they may have had some root in an actual event. Lee’s conversations with his boyhood self are plainly fictional; I thought they tended to be the weakest parts of the book, though they were functional.

Fans of Lee will probably enjoy the book. Someone who wants a brief and easy history of comics, and isn’t too concerned about the lopsidedness that would naturally come with Lee’s perspective, might also like it. Lee would know, he was there.

Stan Lee also wrote Spider-Man with Steve Ditko. Peter David also wrote Writing for Comics with Peter David.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics by Dennis O’Neil

Kirby by Mark Evanier

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Lee, Stan, Peter David & Colleen Doran. Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir. New York: Touchstone, 2015.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

Raphael, Jordan, and Tom Spurgeon. Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2003.

This biography of writer, editor and promoter Stan Lee is also a history of comics, particularly Marvel comics. Lee’s long career with Marvel, especially as its public face, has made them inseparable.

If you’re interested in the history of American comics, Lee’s career is worth considering. He started in the industry shortly after it became a popular media as a gopher for Captain America creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Soon he was editor of a line of comics, which he actively worked on for parts of four decades before moving on to becoming the public face of comics and less successful efforts in other media.

Lee is best known for overseeing a revolution in comics in the 1960s. He introduced characters that were as notable for their flaws and human frailties as for their extraordinary abilities. He took elements from genres a varied as romance and giant monster stories to create relatable superheroes. This sparked a creative revival for the both Lee and the industry.

Lee is a great promoter and salesman, and one of his most daring creations has been his own public image. Raphael and Spurgeon are careful not to be caught up in the hype while still recognizing their subject’s contribution to popular culture and particularly to the characters he oversaw.

One of the interesting things that come out of the book, though the authors don’t focus on it directly, is Lee’s place as a writer. He entertained dreams of writing novels and screenplays, but didn’t. He only wrote one full screenplay and seemed to think it was an onerous chore. During his creative heyday in comics, the Marvel method involved Lee writing story concepts and synopses that were fleshed out by the artists with him adding the dialogue to the drawn pages. The system worked well for Marvel financially and seems to have been Lee’s forte.

The authors recognize this in summarizing Lee’s career. They say he may have been the greatest comic book editor ever. His famous creative contributions were collaborative efforts with artists and he got consistent quality from lesser contributors. He kept a marginal comics publisher going through tough time until he and others were ready start a creative renaissance in their medium.

Editor can be an inglorious position. The title suggests a secondary position to the writer and artist, but at his height he was very directly involve in the creation of Marvel comics. His ability to manage a burgeoning, collaborative, creative enterprise made the Marvel revolution possible.

Lee’s contribution as a writer, editor, creator and collaborator are obscured by his career as the public face of Marvel. He is a natural promoter and, some might fairly say, glory hound. His rise to celebrity almost necessitated the minimization of others contributions, which lead to strained relationships with his friends and the industry he represents. His public persona has cast a shadow on his career that both darkens his reputation and obscures the real value of his creative work.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in these fictional takes on comics history
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life by Bryan Lee O’Malley

O’Malley, Bryan Lee. Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life. Portland, OR: Oni, 2004.

Precious Little Life is the first in series of critically-acclaimed graphic novels by writer-artist Bryan Lee O’Malley. This comic, like the others in the series, is a paperback book rather than a magazine.

Scott is 23 going on 17. He is immature, dating a high schooler, unemployed, and mooching off his roommate. He is even in a band, Sex Bob-omb. (When I was young, bands were cool and dangerous. Now they can be full of video game-playing, comics-reading nerds like Scott Pilgrim.) He runs from trouble. He is a jerk to nearly everyone he knows. Fortunately for him, they seem to care about him anyway and stand up to help him.

Scott’s immaturity is epitomized by his dating a high-school girl, Knives Chau, who hasn’t even kissed a boy. His friends and sister confront him, but he justifies himself. He seems satisfied with a simple, no-pressure relationship with a girl whose world of school and conservative, Chinese family is even smaller than his own.

His satisfaction with Knives disappears when he meets and falls in love with Ramona Flowers, a woman his own age who has a lot more going on. This is complicated by the fact that Knives is falling in love with him, or at least the adventure and independence he represents to her. In attempting a retreat to a simpler time (he even takes Knives by his childhood home, though is family moved out), he unwittingly open’s her eyes to a new world where she can try things she never imagined doing before.

That is only the beginning of the complications. To date Ramona, he must defeat her seven evil exes. Fortunately, Scott is a good fighter, having learned from video games (his defeated opponents disappear in a “pop” leaving a little pile of coins behind). In this volume, the first evil ex makes his appearance.

The fight may be the main fantasy element of the book, but fantastic things begin with Ramona, who skates through Scott’s dreams to deliver packages because a subspace highway runs through his head—and there isn’t much traffic there. An opposing band knocks out the crowd with lightning and Kirby crackle. Scott’s Toronto is a little bit magical.

One can probably read this book as a stand-alone story. However, it is definitely the start of a series. If you can’t leave something at “to be continued,” you may want to skim the series to see if you’re willing to commit. Alternatively, the movie adaption presents the main story line for the whole series.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Maus by Art Spiegelman
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Film)

Friday, April 23, 2021

The Apparitionist by Peter Manseau

Photography was introduced to the United States at around the same time that a new religion was born in the nation. Spiritualism promised a connection to the dead in their realm through human mediums, and some thought photography might capture physical manifestations of spirits. Peter Manseau tells the story of the first spirit photographer in The Apparitionist.

The man who captured the first supposed spirit photograph was an amateur at the time. William Mumler thought he had made in error in cleaning the glass on which the photonegative was captured when a faint image appeared in a self-portrait he shot in 1862. He was using the photo studio owned by Hannah Stuart. The married photographer, soon to be widowed and soon after that to be Mrs. Mumler, was a Spiritualist, and she convinced him that the image was not an error, but an apparition. The photos caught the attention of the Spiritualist press, first in the New York-based Herald of Progress, then in Mumler’s hometown of Boston in the Beacon of Light, which published the address of the Stuart studio.

Soon the studio was producing many spirit photographs; they even took orders by mail from across the country. Bostonian Spiritualists compared photos and found evidence that Mumler was faking the images. Discredited, the Mumler’s moved to New York to quietly offer spirit photographs again. Their practice there let to criminal prosecution in 1869. Photographers knew of ways to produce such images, but no investigators could figure out what Mumler was doing. Though the judge gave did not suggest the photos actually captured images of spirits, he rejected the prosecution’s case because it did not adequately support the charges of fraud and similar crimes.

Even with such tepid vindication, the atmosphere in New York was too hot for the Mumlers, so they returned to Boston. Though Mumler continued to take spirit photos, he had developed a much deeper understanding of the art and science of photography. He developed a process that allowed for the direct reproduction of photos on newsprint; founded the Photo-Electrotype Company of Boston and licensed his process to companies in other cities. This allowed newspapers and magazines to less expensively reproduce images without preparing an engraving first.

Manseau also discussed the development of photography in the United States after the art was introduced here. This includes American pioneers of photography such as Samuel Morse, also inventor of the telegraph, and Civil War battlefield photographers Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope

Buried Alive by Jan Bondeson

Chief Engineer by Erica Wagner

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

Enchantress of Numbers by Jennifer Chiaverini

The Explorer King by Robert Wilson

The Man Who Loved Books too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

Scan Artist by Marcia Biederman

Super Attractor by Gabrielle Bernstein

Manseau, Peter. The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Saturday, January 26, 2019

The Revenge of Analog by David Sax

The joke about visions of the future that never panned out is usually, “Where is my flying car?” The proliferation and promises of digital technology over the last two or three decade might prompt us to pose some other questions such as, “Where is my paperless office?”

In The Revenge of Analog, journalist David Sax discusses how analog technologies are sometimes thriving in the digital ages. Some are making comebacks. Some never went away. Some are growing more popular because of digital technology, not in spite of it.

Sax looks at a lot of analog technologies. This includes vinyl records, paper and pen, tabletop games, books and brick-and-mortar stores.

Some of these have very interesting histories in how they have fallen, risen and interacted with digital technology. What I found most interesting in the book is the reasons analog persists. It is usually because it brings something that digital technology leaves out.

For instance, analog technology appeals to the senses. I know a lot of bibliophiles who love the smell of books, though it would not seem to be a pertinent feature. The IRL space is simply much richer that even the most detailed virtual space.

“There’s never going to be a virtual environment as completely engaging as the physical environment is,” computer game designer Bernie De Koven quoted in The Revenge of Analog

Analog is usually slow. Generally, a strength of digital is that it is almost always faster. We don’t always want fast. Sometime the slower pace, the pauses, helps us to take things in and savor them. For instance, when you listen to a vinyl record, you can’t skip songs at the touch of a button, you have to lift the needle and move it or even change records. You can’t listen to any songs you have in random order, but you have to listen to song on a single album in the order the artist or producer arranged them unless you introduce a lot of pauses as you interact with the discs and player.

Analog is limited. The digital world can be so rich with information and choices that it can be overwhelming. Paper and pen limits the size, colors and effects you can produce. These limitations help us hone in on the main issues quickly and get moving.

“People think limitations are bad things. But it moves the process forward, in a good way. You can easily get lost in the process. It’s easier to stick to a plan when you have limitations,” analog recording studio owner Chris Mara quoted in The Revenge of Analog

In the real realm of communication, analog is more intimate that digital. The ultimate analog communication is a face-to-face conversation, mediated by nothing but the air in between two people. We send off a lot of nonverbal signals when we speak, and we sense these signals from others, which gives us a more rich and nuanced understanding of what is said (and unsaid) than we can get from a text message or even over Skype or Facetime.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Learn Better by Ulrich Boser

The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin

Sax, David. The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter. New York: PublicAffairs, 2016.