A digitally enhanced graphic novel featuring QR codes. Scanning on your smartphone takes you to videos and an interactive exploration of the airship.

The AIRSHIP

The Airship is a science fiction story and the first in a trilogy of planned letterpress graphic novels. Within its three-color, letterpress pages lies a literary analogy between the dichotomy of using modern-day digital design tools to create works that are produced on vintage analog equipment. In this story, one of the characters is transported to another dimension in space and time and his attempts to communicate across this gulf are indecipherable without access to a piece of advance technology. The reader must also bridge the gap between the era of the story and the equipment used to produce it by scanning QR codes in order to fully experience the book. Through digital enhancement, the story continues with video and interactivity on the viewers' smartphone. The story explores a government becoming a military-industrial complex that has echoes of past and current trends in this country.

In 2011, Todd Thyberg, owner of Angel Bomb, received an MCBA / Jerome Foundation Book Arts Fellowship to assist in creating The Airship. The second issue in the trilogy is currently being conceptualized.

The Airship was written about in How Magazine and on many design blogs including: The Minneapolis Egotist, BoingBoing, Cool Hunting, and Neenah Paper.