Idea Tree

Scott McCloud's online comix WebTake

Brenda Laurel's book Utopian Entrepreneur is the delightful flagship title of the Mediawork Pamphlet series. The five responses you're about to read aren't so much a review of the book as a series of five short visual improvisations on the themes presented in Laurel's text. I've tried to echo the personal testimonial quality of Utopian Entrepreneur with elements of my own experiences. Like Brenda Laurel, I'm an optimist working in a time of cynicism, a creative worker who doesn't see art and technology as adversaries and, as it happens, I'm also the parent of two daughters! At these intersection points, I've planted just a few seeds to see how they'd grow, and the resultant saplings are what you're about to read.

Peter Lunenfeld and Denise Gonzales Crisp (Utopian Entrepreneur 's editor and designer respectively) have both cited a debt to the work of Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, whose flamboyantly designed books like The Medium is the Massage inspired many to adopt radical new strategies for combining text and images in print. Gonzales Crisp has shown the good taste and restraint not to let her designs overwhelm Laurel's thoughtful and moving prose, but I have no such scruples when dealing with my own words, so brace yourselves for some Big Loud Pixels in support of my brief, but hopefully interesting words.

My thanks to Laurel, Lunenfeld, Gonzales Crisp, Art Center College and the MIT Press for this weird and wonderful assignment.

– Scott McCloud