Hippasus Gurgles: Citizen Engineer
Michael Carlisle examines the world “outside” sequential art to find… more sequential art.
Hey, it’s been a while.
Before I head off to HAR 2009, return to NYC, and become wedged uncomfortably between Thesisland and Teachingville, I want to share one short thing. I’ve stated that comics are remarkably good at instruction. When I attended The Last HOPE this past July, I saw the first release of Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone‘s project Citizen Engineer. What a great setup: provide free hacking videos, then sell the parts to build stuff. Recently, they’ve done one better.
Citizen Engineer Volume 01: SIM Card Hacking, the video, has been adapted into a comic. It looks to have been constructed with Comic Life (a for-pay not-too-shabby Mac comic layout program, although COMIC SANS ARGH), and is available for free download in 72dpi and 300dpi versions, as well as sold on paper with a SIM card reader kit (through none other than their Adafruit Industries).
They’re keenly aware of one of the key notions of the open-source, open-content movement: data (content) is often free (gratis, and often also libre) now, but (physical) stuff still costs. If you want a comic, you want to read the comic. You may or may not want to feel the physical comic in your hands. However, content is best under an open license (like, for example, the Creative Commons Atribution Share-Alike 3.0). Citizen Engineer Volume 01 the comic is released under this license.
Learning something as hands-on-yet-cerebral as tooling with microelectronics requires a multimedia approach; using video and comics (with other online text and image support) as instructional tools is essential for the DIY/hacking/maker community to thrive online. I’m glad we have people like Limor and Phil out there, making their brilliance accessible to the world. While this comic may not have a great storyline or extraordinary drawing skills behind it, it’s sequential art all the same – showing how people can make cool things, one step at a time, and allowing us all to share and remix it.
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Michael Carlisle is a mathematics Ph.D. candidate at the City University of New York, where he earned a certificate in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. When not teaching or researching probability or rambling about dystopian films and surrealist animation, he volunteers with the Sequential Art Collective and New York Center for Independent Publishing.
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