I do love when a story is predictive in the oddest way possible. The coincidental prediction—the idea that some aspect of a story would portend a greater aspect of society years later. In this case, it would be seven years to the month of the original publication. And the story aspect is the general population wearing masks for their own safety. This is The Private Eye by Brian K. Vaughn, Marcos Martin, and Muntsa Vicente.

Set in LA in 2076, The Private Eye envisions a world in which a large-scale, global event has necessitated that people wear masks to protect themselves. The event described here, though, is the bursting of the Cloud—the large database of everything everyone has ever done online from search histories to messages sent to websites visited. As a result, people now wear masks continually when outside their homes in order to hide their identities should any other privacy related disaster occur. This is where our titular private eye, P.I. as he’s known, comes in. Since the world wears masks all the time, people will pay well to know what’s hiding under them. And without the internet, as that was abolished due to the Cloud burst, this kind of information just isn’t out in the world anymore. But as much as people may try to hide every aspect of their lives, there’s still someone around to snoop and discover something darker hiding below the surface.

While The Private Eye on its own is a brilliant series from Vaughn, Martin, and Vicente that plays with questions of privacy and access as well the form of comics with its widescreen format, it was also the first comic published through Vaughn and Martin’s Panel Syndicate. At the time, it was one of the only places online to get digital, DRM-free comics that anyone could pay whatever price they wanted for them. Although Radiohead had done similar in 2007 with their album, In Rainbows, this was the first time it had really been attempted with comics. That I can write about them a full decade after launch, and have written about Friday from Ed Brubacker, Martin, and Vicente previously, only shows that this platform is something creators can really use to bring comics directly to their audience.

We can get out the cork board to pin The Private Eye to a variety of things: worldwide masking, digital comics, creator-owned series ubiquity, the idea of who gets to access what and when, etc. Although it’s a decade old it still feels like a watershed moment for digital comics and how they’ve come to shape much of how people get the comics they want to read. That it also predicted people wearing masks to protect themselves while in public is a weird coincidence, but that’s just how creators predict the future while making it. 

Get excited. Get access.

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Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.