Work Begins on new RF Anthology!

Where in the World
is Biff Humble?
Uploaded by James Hitchcock

Dear Readers,
While we search for Biff, our editorial director has offered to step into Biff's shoes, and do some of the marketing and promotions for our next publication. Pencils are beginning to come back from the artists working on Red Flags Anthology (Watch for upcoming announcements on our new collaborators) so James dug through Biff's desk, and found the following notes on the project that Biff had scribbled on a series of cocktail napkins:

A new Anthology
From Red Flag Publishing!

The book employs a variety of genre to explore Druckerian cautionary tales in comics format, borrowing heavily from the vintage EC Comics storytelling style.

For anyone not familiar, economist Peter Drucker described human progress not as a linear upward trajectory, but instead, a series of steep upward slopes toward plateaus, each ending at a wall that demarcated some limit in social or technological knowledge.

A wall-shattering discovery, Drucker said, brings about societal and technological progress on a cataclysmic scale, so completely changing the world that the generation at the beginning can no more imagine what life will be like for the next generation than the next generation can imagine what life was like for the previous.

Indeed, the shattering of the wall leaves far behind those who did not recognize or heed the RED FLAGS of the impending change.

So, what is to become of those of us who are born within the period of the current cataclysmic shift in the dissemination of knowledge? How are we to discern the RED FLAGS indicating there is a freight train bearing down upon us? And, even if we see the train coming, to which side of the tracks do we step? Can we look to where we have stepped before to avoid danger?

Drucker argues that the changes he describes are so complete and world-altering, that looking to the past for solutions is futile.

So, does that mean the old axiom, "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it" is no longer valid?

Or was it ever? It assumes that everyone learns the same lesson from history - the one WE want them to learn. Yet, time and again, those who've studied what are accepted as the facts of history have come away with vastly different lessons from it.

A cocktail napkin
found in Biff's blazer

What about the effect of Point of View on our understanding of what truly are the facts? As they say, "History is written by the victors."

And finally, what happens when the facts no longer exist in tangible form? We are rapidly approaching a time when our collections of facts are stored as a string of ones and zeros, rather than on countless pieces of paper bound into millions of books. Will that allow the victors to constantly rewrite history?

I see some big friggin' RED FLAGS out there, waving like crazy.

I'm not sure I can figure out what to do about them.