"I want to sell this," Mia said. "For a dollar."

He pulled out a tablet and showed her a graph. The line for "comic pdf entertainment content" was climbing like a rocket, while "interactive graphic novel" was plateauing.

And that, Elena thought, was the most radical media of all.

Elena laughed, a dry, tired sound. "So you want to buy my PDFs, put them in your app, and add your bells and whistles back in?"

Then she looked at Theo's tablet. For a moment, the graph wavered. She saw not data, but the faces of her customers: the grad student writing a thesis on Love and Rockets , the grandmother downloading Archie PDFs for her grandkid in a different state, the kid with dyslexia who could enlarge the font on his laptop.

But the world had moved on.