This article was taken from the April 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

In Warren Ellis's latest story, you can read the characters' minds -- by shining UV light at them

Why should superheroes have all the fun? In SVK, a new one-shot comic by Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan) and Matt Brooker (2000 AD), you get a power of your own: mind-reading.


Shine the special torch (bundled with the book) on the page and you reveal the characters' thoughts, printed in UV ink.

Produced by east London consultancy BERG, the noir tale follows a detective who must retrieve a technology called SVK (Special Viewing Kit). When the sleuth discovers its telepathic functions, the reader learns how to brain-snoop too. "You use the torch to unlock another player of the story," says Matt Jones, 38, a principal designer at BERG. "A bit like how life works," adds Matt Webb, the firm's 33-year-old CEO. "Everyone's talked to a person at a party and then someone tells you something about them. Next time, you see them through that lens."

The company is small, so it had to slash distribution costs. But how? The team used alibaba.com to bulk-buy the special torches, shopify.com for its ecommerce and shipwire.com for storage and packing. "Instead of services to the cloud, it's a service to the bricks," says Jones. The designers hope to sell at least 3,000 copies of SVK. Call us psychic, but we don't think that they will have a problem. £10