Ever since Kevin Mitnick's notorious exploits of the early 1990s, commentary inspired by the dark-side hacker has proliferated like a well-crafted computer virus. There have been six books, one feature film, a documentary, and endless hagiography in the quarterly phreaker bible 2600. The latest entry in the canon: Wizzywig, a four-part graphic novel by Ed Piskor.
Why did Piskor—a 26-year-old Pittsburgh cartoonist best known for his work with cranky comic god Harvey Pekar—choose the greasy-fingered milieu of the computer underground for his solo debut? Certainly not out of technolust: He's a self-described semi-Luddite. Instead, he was seduced by the funky phreak culture. Over the course of 14 months, Piskor devoured the archives of 2600, Phrack, TAP/YIPL, and other tech prankster zines; read a shelf's worth of computer-crime tomes; and listened to the entire run (via podcast) of Off the Hook, a radio show hosted by 2600 editor Emmanuel Goldstein. In the process, he found not only a fascinating subculture but also himself. "Cartoonists have a lot in common with hackers," he says. "Both lead very solitary existences."
Wizzywig is a delight, wryly rendered and packed with dead-on details of the hacker life. Though the narrative of protagonist Kevin Phenicle tracks Mitnick's life and crimes, Phenicle (aka Boingthump) is a composite drawn not just from Mitnick but other geek malfeasants like Mark Abene (Phiber Optik) and Wired's own Kevin Poulsen (Dark Dante). Famous incidents and hacker luminaries also make Ragtime-style cameos: the 1971 Esquire article about phone phreaking, Captain Crunch's "war dialer" gizmo, and Robert Morris' 1988 Internet worm. Piskor even brings in Apple's cofounders (below), in a hilariously drawn depiction of the time the two Steves almost got busted selling blue boxes—devices that let phreakers make free long-distance calls. With the publication of volume 2, Hacker, late last year, Wizzywig is now half complete. Volume 3 (Fugitive) is pegged for late 2009.
Piskor is self-publishing Wizzywig and sells it at Edpiskor.com. He prints 100 copies at a time and spends his mornings processing orders and shipping. (It's also a kind of fitness routine: "A lot of cartoonists get really fat, so I walk to the post office every day.") By examining the PayPal paper trail, he has discovered that one of his customers is Mitnick's mother. So far, nothing from Mitnick himself. Better yet, no denial-of-service attacks on his site. The dark-siders must like him.
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