Amid today’s dazzling digital options, woodcutting would seem to be as obsolete as the musket. Yet our oldest form of printing, which involves laboriously carving away at an object until there is a sharp enough relief image to be stamped on paper, is seeing a remarkable renaissance.

Small presses and magazines ranging from The Walrus to Harper’s use woodcuts to invoke old-fashioned values. Cartoonist Frank Miller employed clunky woodcut-style art to create a film noir atmosphere in his bestselling comic book series Sin City (later made into a film), while Newfoundland novelist Michael Winter wrote the historical romance The Big Why with a woodcut artist as its hero. Even at political protests and punk concerts, it’s the black-and-white starkness of woodcut imagery on signs and posters that perfectly demonstrates the polarized mood.