Wizzywig Vol. 1: Phreak

In the last few years I have developed a love of comic books. As a kid a good chunk of my paper route money went to buying issues of Batman, Superman and Dark Rider. This was before I discovered video games and computers. My interest in comic books was rekindled a few years ago when I saw the movie American Splendor, the story of Harvey Pekar, a underground comic book writer.

As I started to look into comics, I quickly discovered that the target audience for modern comics is geeks my age. Over time I have become a regular reader of several books that I look forward to picking up every month. I have also developed a pretty impressive collection of trade paper backs (monthly issues collected into books) and graphic novels.

One of my first purchases was “Wizzywig Vol. 1: Phreak” written and illustrated by Ed Piskor. Piskor just happened to be one of the artists that worked on American Splendor. Wizzywig is a graphic novel that tells the tale of Kevin “BoingThump” Phenkil growing up in the early days of personal computers. Many of BoingThump’s adventures are based on stories of famous hackers and geeks of the day like Kevin Mitnick, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. I loved the book because it captured the feeling of excitement and adventure that I remember from growing up as me and my friends started to discover computers.

I am glad that this is one of the first books I picked up as it inspired me to dig into comics and led me to discover some of the great artists and writers working on comics today. I have since bought the second volume of Wizzywig and I am waiting patiently for the third volume which will be available in a few months. When I received volume 2, as a gift from my wife, I was thrilled to discover that Ed Piskor had drawn a personalized picture inside of the front cover. That made this book one of my prized possessions.

Rather than write a detailed review of the book myself, I thought I would post a video from iFanboy that does a good job of describing what it is all about.