Scan barcode
A review by unladylike
Private Eye by Brian K. Vaughan
5.0
The Private Eye couldn't have hit the crucial journalistic elements of timeliness and relevance better. The premise is both novel and apropos, the writing is executed flawlessly, and the art is gorgeous. What more could you want from a comic book?
It's 50 years in the future (2076) and the only Millennial we see in the entire story is now a living anachronism, constantly asking his grandson for help getting his smartphone or massively multiplayer online first person shooter game to connect. Apparently, his generation took so much Adderol etc. that he's forgotten how the world changed: There is no Internet.
After everyone's most vulnerable, private Internet searches, naked selfies, and everything else bursts into the public from the Cloud, privacy becomes the nation's (world's?) number one value.
Every citizen who can afford it wears a full costume/disguise in public, trades in pseudonyms, and trusts in the Fourth Estate to serve and protect the truth. Journalists have taken the role of the police. And one illegal paparazzo who is known only as P.I. is being drawn into an important homicide investigation.
This was apparently released online-only (at a name-your-own-price rate!), as sort of a joke and an experiment playing with the content and realistic fears within the story. BKV, Marcos Martin, and Muntsa Vicente were apparently putting this together even before Sony's major e-mail leak, before Samsung started selling Smart TVs with the user advisory "Do not talk about or reveal private information in front of your TV [because it is literally watching you now]."
The story doesn't get lost in the world-building, but makes perfect use of it, showing us the day-to-day technologies that have resurfaced: payphones, cassette tapes, pneumatic tubes transmitting freshly-printed information. But there are also various technologies that were developed during the significantly accelerated period of five years before the Cloud burst. So, hovercars, hologram-projecting cowls, etc.
I'm not working through the bonus "leaked" e-mails showing the initial proposals and dialogue as the creators worked out this masterpiece.
It's no surprise to learn this won both the Harvey AND Eisner awards for best Web/digital comic in 2015. But if you don't trust your credit card information being entered onto the World Wide Web via some dark portal known as panelsyndicate.com, then do what I did and walk to your local public library for the wide-screen hardcover version.
It's 50 years in the future (2076) and the only Millennial we see in the entire story is now a living anachronism, constantly asking his grandson for help getting his smartphone or massively multiplayer online first person shooter game to connect. Apparently, his generation took so much Adderol etc. that he's forgotten how the world changed: There is no Internet.
After everyone's most vulnerable, private Internet searches, naked selfies, and everything else bursts into the public from the Cloud, privacy becomes the nation's (world's?) number one value.
Every citizen who can afford it wears a full costume/disguise in public, trades in pseudonyms, and trusts in the Fourth Estate to serve and protect the truth. Journalists have taken the role of the police. And one illegal paparazzo who is known only as P.I. is being drawn into an important homicide investigation.
This was apparently released online-only (at a name-your-own-price rate!), as sort of a joke and an experiment playing with the content and realistic fears within the story. BKV, Marcos Martin, and Muntsa Vicente were apparently putting this together even before Sony's major e-mail leak, before Samsung started selling Smart TVs with the user advisory "Do not talk about or reveal private information in front of your TV [because it is literally watching you now]."
The story doesn't get lost in the world-building, but makes perfect use of it, showing us the day-to-day technologies that have resurfaced: payphones, cassette tapes, pneumatic tubes transmitting freshly-printed information. But there are also various technologies that were developed during the significantly accelerated period of five years before the Cloud burst. So, hovercars, hologram-projecting cowls, etc.
I'm not working through the bonus "leaked" e-mails showing the initial proposals and dialogue as the creators worked out this masterpiece.
It's no surprise to learn this won both the Harvey AND Eisner awards for best Web/digital comic in 2015. But if you don't trust your credit card information being entered onto the World Wide Web via some dark portal known as panelsyndicate.com, then do what I did and walk to your local public library for the wide-screen hardcover version.