is a blog about design, technology and culture written by Khoi Vinh, and has been more or less continuously published since December 2000 in New York City. Khoi is currently Principal Designer at Adobe. Previously, Khoi was co-founder and CEO of Mixel (acquired in 2013), Design Director of The New York Times Online, and co-founder of the design studio Behavior, LLC. He is the author of “How They Got There: Interviews with Digital Designers About Their Careers”and “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design,” and was named one of Fast Company’s “fifty most influential designers in America.” Khoi lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
An old interview with Alan Moore sent me running back to my old issues of his 12-part Watchmen series, probably the best comic books ever produced. To do this, I had to dig through three cardboard boxes of comics from the early 80s, a dusty, aging booty from my adolescence. In my mid-twenties I nearly threw them all out, not wanting to deal with the hassle of lugging them around as I moved from one apartment to another. Luckily they were stored at my father’s house and he didn’t have the heart to pitch them.So many of the comics I saved have not stood up to the test of time, and much of the comic art that I once admired, studied and plagiarized is revealed to be cheap and immature to me now. All the same, I found myself overcome with affection not only for some of the best written or illustrated comics I had, but also for some of the worst. These are mostly the ones that I bought when I was very, very young and with hard-earned allowance money, when an issue cost just forty cents, and before the medium became preoccupied with so-called adult themes.’ I really adored these cheap periodicals.
Maybe the best treasure I found in my old collection was this postcard, postmarked 19 Oct 1979 when I was just seven years old! It’s a consolation prize, of sorts, sent to thank me for a letter-to-the-editor that I must’ve sent in regarding, surely, an issue of Superman or DC Comics Presents. It’s a completely meaningless bit of ephemera, but I just find it remarkable that I still have it, that it was postmarked before Ronald Reagan took his oath of office, that it was hand-addressed to me and signed in blue ink by Carole Martin I have no idea who that is, but her signature meant a lot to me then. It does now, too. Thanks, Carole!
I turned eight on the day that was postmarked. That’s highly irrelevant, but kind of interesting in a highly irrelevant fashion.
I love DC!