📝This archived post is originally from my old comics focused Wordpress blog from 2011-2019. That site was a space to publicly commit to learning the art and craft of cartooning and self-publishing. These posts are full of a naive enthusiasm that though at times embarrassing, I'm proud of. I hope you find them useful in some way.❤️

As you might know, I’m an advocate for print. You might also know that when I’m trying to come up with new stories, the way in which I typically dive into the endeavor is to choose a form that I’d like to work in. Form always dictates a new story. If I’m unsure of whether or not the story works, I simply ask myself if  it feels right in the vessel that’s transmitting the story. More often than not, this is the reason why my stories don’t cross over too well on the digital landscape. Nevertheless, it’s a fluid creative process that avoids insurmountable creative blocks. In light of this process, I often times find myself thinking about the constant talk of the digital world supplanting the analogue. I feel that those kinds of conversations sensationalize the issues, imagining that we are humans that transmit stories perfectly as pure information.

We don’t and we can’t.

The specifics of the reading experience are integral to how we understand and contextualize a text. That’s why I think a lot about a text’s materiality.

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Aaron Kashtan recently uploaded a talk that he gave at Georgia Tech regarding the reasons why he teaches Materiality. If you’re interested in notions of bridging the analogue/ digital divide, I’d recommend reading the talk while looking at his presentation. If you’re into that, you should definitely delve deeper into his blog.

I use these sorts of texts in order to model the sort of thinking I want the students to engage in when they do their own writing, because my real goal is to get the students to understand writing as a material, embodied process. Again, our instinctive belief is that writing is all about the expression of ideas, the expression of semiotic content, and that the container in which those ideas are embodied is irrelevant. I want them to realize that that’s not the case, that writing is always an embodied and situated process and that it always results in the creation of some sort of material artifact.