"Tell me about Sandbenders," Masahiko said, putting the control-face away and buttoning his tunic.

"It started with a woman who was an interface designer," Chia said, glad to change the subject." Her husband was a jeweller, and he'd died of that nerve-attenuation thing, before they saw how to fix it. But he'd been a big green, too, and he hated the way consumer electronics were made, a coule of little chips and boards inside these plastic shells. The shells were just point-of-purchase eye-candy, he said, made to wind up in the landfill if nobody recycled it, and usually nobody did. So, before he got sick, he used to tear up her hardware, the designer's, and put the real parts into cases he'd make in his shop. Say he'd make a solid bronze case for a minidisk unit, ebony inlays, carve the control surfaces out of fossil ivory, turquoise, rock crystal. It weighed more, sure, but it turned out a lot of people liked that, like they had their music or their memory, whatever, in something that felt like it was there. . . . And people liked touching all that stuff: metal, a smooth stone. . . . And once you had the case, when the manufacturer brough out a new model, well, if the electronics were any better, you just pulled the old ones out and put the new ones in your case. So you still had the same object, just with better functions. . . .

"And it turned out some people liked that, too, liked it a lot. He started getting commissions to make these things. One of the first was for a keyboard, and the keys were cut from the keys of an old piano, with the numbers and letters in silver. But then he got sick. . . .

"So after he was dead, the software designer started thinking about all that, and how she wanted to do something that took what he'd been doing into something else. So she cashed out her stock in all the companies she'd worked for, and she bought some land on the coast, in Oregon--"

And the train pulled into Shinjuku, and everyone stood up, heading for the doors, the businessman closing his breast-bondage comic and tucking it beneath his arm.

--William Gibson, Idoru, 1996

I read this passage over lunch today, and thought that it seemed to fit in very well with sort of issues BetaBits addresses. It's a different approach, likely a better one, but not so much fodder for a humorous comic-strip. It was written over a decade ago, and I don't remember the "point-of-purchase eye-candy" being nearly as big a deal as it is now. Electronic things were either black or silver (if they were stereos), black or black with wood inlay (television sets), or beige (computers). I was a senior in high school when Apple released the Bondi-blue iMac (10.17.1998, according to http://support.apple.com/specs/index_3.html), which seemed to set off a revolution in electronics designed to look like candy. (Amusingly, I remember seeing these iMacs on college campuses during visits and thinking the fish screen-saver was cute. I wonder how many of those were destined to become MacQuaria?) I guess Gibson is a visionary like that. I wonder if a Sandbenders-like project would work nowadays? Would people respond to it as they have done in Idoru, or would they be uninterested in owning non-"disposable" consumer electronics? Would such a project come as needed relief from the pressure to own the latest style in electronics shells?

As far as BetaBits goes, I'm still trying to decide on a style. While I love the art in Questionable Content, I don't think I want mine to be nearly as realistic. Lately, I've been reading a lot of Astérix, and, being a longtime fan of the artwork, am trying to figure out why I like it so much, and perhaps how I can emulate and adapt that style to my own work. Two things stand out to me. One is that the people are based more on general geometric shapes, and not so much on skeletal structures (or stick-figures, what-have-you). The other is that the people are generally "short." Their heads are much too large for their bodies, but it works out well nonetheless (likely due to my first observation). This contradicts what I learned from a book I got in high-school about drawing Marvel characters, which makes sense since that book was dedicated to creating the large, tall, muscular powerhouses that are American Superheroes. According to that book (if I remember it right), heads are supposed to be only 1/8 or 1/9 the total body height, otherwise the figure may look too "wimpy." Uderzo's "tallest" figures are only about 5 times the height of their heads, which probably lends a humorous sensibility to the comics. With that in mind, I made up this quick sketch of Plum:
Sure, it's not nearly as elegant as an earlier iteration of Plum (above), but it might work out better. Either way, I have to keep at sketching until I find what I really want--and soon. Q is even more difficult. I had a hard time drawing boys when I was young, and apparently the problem persists. I'll get there, though.

Speaking of Astérix, I finally made the following pressing and necessary modifications to my map of Boston: