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Kevin has blank eyes, much like Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie (an idea seemingly inspired by Chester Brown and his Louis Riel). First and foremost is his character design. Piskor manages to evade cliche with this tact through a number of clever devices. Piskor quickly establishes a central struggle for his protagonist, and it's not an unfamiliar one: a technical wizard struggles to connect with other humans, especially girls. While Kevin's interest in hacking was almost purely a type of intellectual exercise, Winston was more fascinated by its political (and otherwise anarchic) possibilities.

We're then introduced to Winston Smith (one of many winks to the reader by Piskor), Kevin's boyhood friend, who serves as one of the primary narrative devices in the story. Some folks think of him as a dangerous criminal, others marvel at his remarkable skill, and others perpetuate rumors, legends, and tall tales about him.

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Piskor begins the book with a series of talking heads, all discussing assorted legends surrounding Kevin. He revels in the grotesque, creating characters with slumping postures, unkempt hair, shaggy eyebrows, and bad skin. I especially like the way he draws hair-scraggly hair and beards on men, odd curls and swoops on women. That said, he always adds a certain decorative touch even in talking head scenes he always goes the extra mile to give us interesting people to look at. Piskor is mostly about moving along the story. His art is mostly naturalistic, with the occasional stylistic flourish. Piskor is also careful to let his pages breathe a bit, including the occasional panel that doesn't necessarily advance the narrative but does provide a beat or two to slow the story down a bit. When his characters have conversations, Piskor often depicts them walking and in different poses from panel to panel-anything to keep a reader's eyes moving across the page. He switches between Kevin's friend Winston doing a radio show and various people listening to what he has to say, to Kevin as a kid going about his day (with no other narration), to Kevin narrating images via caption (with no word balloons), to having Kevin and Winston in the background of someone else's story, to a mix of caption narrative and dialogue, to an omniscient narrator commenting on Kevin's lack of self-esteem.

That affords him the opportunity to easily jump back and forth in time, but it also makes his historical anecdotes easier for a reader unfamiliar with the subjects at hand to digest. He always has the reader in mind when illustrating a scene, breaking the book up into easy-to-digest vignettes, man-in-the-street features, look-ins on other characters, and flash-forwards to Phenicle's prison experience and railroading by the justice system. Given the crazy stories he bases this book on, that's not a surprise.Īt the same time, Piskor clearly has his work cut out for him in drawing a book that features a lot of sitting around. Wizzywig (the onomatopoeia for WYSIWYG, a computer acronym that stands for What You See Is What You Get) very much lives up to its title-even as a satirist, Piskor doesn't go in for subtext or subtlety in this book. Phenicle is a narrative device for Piskor to expand upon and explore this wealth of research, and he becomes less approachable as a character the more the story unfolds.

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Piskor's obviously scrupulous and obsessive research allows him to tell stories about phone phreaking, hacking, how to live as a fugitive, and the ins and outs of prison life. In the hands of Ed Piskor, his character Kevin 'Boingthump' Phenicle (a composite based on several real-life computer hackers and phone phreaks) acts as a blank slate to help him tell four very different but linked narratives.

Wiziwig tv reviews