Comics / Spotlight

Wizzywig Volume 1: Phreak.

By Beth Davies-Stofka
March 10, 2008 - 22:25

Wizzywig Volume 1: Phreak.  2008.  Self-published, www.edpiskor.com, $15.00.

It was clear from reading Harvey Pekar's Macedonia that artist Ed Piskor was worth watching.  The first volume of Piskor's self-published Wizzywig hints that just a little more waiting could pay off, big time.

Wizzywig is the biography of a fictional character named Kevin Phenicle, a computer hacker and phone phreak who uses the alias "Boingthump."  Volume 1 of the comic, Phreak, tells the story of Kevin's childhood, roughly occurring in the late 70s and early 80s, just before the 1984 break-up of the Bell System into regional companies.  In those days, when "Ma Bell had you by the calls," so-called "phone phreaks" began finding ways to circumvent the Bell System's monopoly over local phone service by hacking the system in order to make calls for free.  

In Phreak, Piskor shows Kevin as a young boy, developing the core skills of hackers: spoofing, social engineering, and dumpster diving.  Parts of the story of Kevin Phenicle are drawn from the stories of a few famous hackers, most notably Kevin Mitnick and Kevin Poulsen.  Piskor also gives Phenicle a whole lot of added qualities to fill him out and make him interesting and multidimensional.  We feel sympathy for the boy, an orphan (with Little Orphan Annie's characteristic blank eyes), relentlessly bullied at school, and completely lacking the social skills that might have helped him overcome his loneliness and isolation.  



Phreak is 116 pages, including two pages of footnotes.  The entire story is told with black-and-white regularity in four equal panels per page, providing excellent support to the pseudo-documentary style of the comic.  The art is wonderful and technically accomplished.  Each panel is detailed, interesting, and realistic, able to stand alone as well as move the story along.  Despite his disconcertingly blank eyes, Kevin Phenicle is demonstrative and expressive, taking us with him through his dreams and triumphs, and his ordinary childhood woes.

Although there are a variety of definitions of hacking, in Wizzywig it is the unauthorized and secret invasion of computers or networks.  A clearly illegal activity, hacking is at its very best ethically questionable, something Piskor acknowledges right out of the gate with a series of panels in which different regular folks express a range of opinions about Kevin Phenicle's notorious exploits.  These panels are showpieces of Piskor's talents.  Each individual is boldly rendered, square and solid and unique, rather like something Rick Geary might have done.

We like Kevin, loving how he outwits the grownups around him while masking his talents.  Where vanity might be another's downfall, Kevin is content to achieve his goals in secret.  In the most satisfying scene in the book, he has his main tormentor removed from school.  He alters the bully's family phone bill, causing the bully's father to send the creep away to military school.  

Imagine that.  Little Kevin Phenicle knows so much about how the phone company works that he can manipulate real-world events – and people – to create a reality more satisfying for himself.  While you cheer Kevin on for using his wits to torment his tormentor, you have to worry just a bit, too.  Can you afford to be at the mercy of hackers?  On page 112, Piskor writes that "the true motivations of hacking are simply to explore, discover, and occasionally have some fun though they may get into trouble from time to time."  This could be true, unless your credit rating or your reputation have been destroyed.  Then you might see it a little differently.



This moral ambiguity arouses a lot of curiosity about what is to come in the next three volumes in Piskor's projected four-volume series.  While Piskor creates an image in this first book of the hacker as an ethically sensitive explorer, the reality is somewhat different.  As long as we use computers to store and communicate sensitive information, there will be hackers.  These hackers might use their skills to protect citizens from the prying eyes of government, or to liberate consumers from the price-gouging of telecommunications and software giants.  Or they might use their skills to steal identities and ruin people's lives.  There are many uses of hacking, from embarrassing the military, to spying for hostile governments, to obtaining lists of social security and credit card numbers.  Hacking can be highly profitable, and not all hackers have the scruples that Piskor ascribes to them in volume 1 of Wizzywig.

So I'm a little worried about the romantic picture Piskor paints of these guys.  They are fascinating individuals with dynamite stories, and the comics medium is a great choice for telling their stories.  But despite their days of genius and conspiracy, now notorious hackers like Poulsen and Mitnick are establishment guys, marketing their skills to make legitimate money.  That's why I suggest waiting a bit, perhaps till Volume 2: Hacker, becomes available.  We need to see more than volume 1 before we can decide whether this is a naïve story, or the groundbreaking product of research and reflection that it could easily become.

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12