The strangeness of advertising in comics by Matt Patterson

I’ve been building for the web for over 10 years, doing everything from web design and front-end development all the way through to back-end development.

I’ve worked with Javascript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, various XML technologies. In my day-to-day work I mainly work with Ruby, Rails, HTML/CSS, and Javascript. I’ve been exploring various kinds of data storage techniques for years, trying everything from RDF stores, through conventional SQL RDBMS, KV stores and Document databases, and I was one of the organisers of the 2010 NoSQL Europe conference. Last year I organised the first History Hack Day.

Along the way I’ve co-written a book on CSS (Friends of Ed’s Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation), which is currently in its second edition and has been translated into Italian and Spanish, led a software team at the BBC, and spent five of the last ten years running design- and development-focussed consultancies. Recently, I was part of the small development team which built the Alpha prototype of the UK Government’s landmark http://www.gov.uk/ project.

I’ve also been collecting comics for about 15-20 years, and marvelling at the weird disconnect between what’s in them, how they’re perceived, and what on earth the people who make ads for comic books are thinking. Fortunately for you, I’ll be talking about comics and not that software stuff.