Looking up Takin' a Ride led me to Heavy Metal. I used to subscribe to the magazine when I was back in college, but shortly after I graduated they went off into some kind of noveau art phase and I lost interest. Or maybe since I had a job I could afford my own plutonium nyborg, and I didn't need to subsist on someone else's stories about it. Whatever.
I'm looking at their website and I see they have a full length graphic novel you can read online or even download. Cool. Except that in order to read the text easily, I need to blow up the images 200%, which means that not even a quarter of a two page spread will fit on my monitor. Okay, it's not the biggest monitor in the world, but it's not the smallest either. We've got 1600 x 1200 pixel resolution. So I can download the pics, and blow them up on the screen, but I have to pan and scroll to see everything, which kind of spoils the experience. Do you think those critters swinging those swords around are having to pan and scroll to find the next fiend to disembowel? The answer is no, they do not.
Today I go the doctor's office (yes, another one. This one is an allergist. I need another bottle of magic jungle juice.) and I'm reading a Time magazine and I come across this picture.
I've seen a bunch of pictures form Kiev recently, but this one I thought was pretty stunning. I have to give the photographer credit for the composition, but I also have to give credit to Time for printing such a large image. You would need a monitor that was 50,000 pixels across to show all the detail you can see in the original printed version.
So while newspapers made be fading and pop culture is moving en bloc to the digital world, there is still a place for printing on paper. Will the digital world ever completely usurp paper and ink? I hope not.
The upshot is that I ordered a one year subscription to Heavy Metal. If I can't get any plutonium nyborg anymore, at least I can still read about it.
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