Digital comics updates and experiments

The Z-Cult FM story continues, with the site receiving and complying with requests from DC Comics and Top Cow to remove all trackers to scans of their comics.

Top Cow comics have been available for legal download at Direct2Drive for a while now, while it’s safe to assume some kind of service for DC’s print comics will be coming at some point.

But it’s interesting to watch this blow up now, as the timing is strangely random. Glenn Hauman over at ComicMix talks about meeting with execs at DC about 2½ years ago in which he laid out an online strateg for the company. The result is telling:

They thanked me for my time, but suggested that a certain higher-up at DC would never go for it-- even though there would have been more than enough support from the online advertising market and from their corporate parents, and even though it would have been an obvious source of revenue that would have benefitted DC's bottom line and supported all sorts of new comic initiatives.

He also recalls meeting with Marvel more than six years ago to discuss building an infrastructure for managing the company’s assets, both digital and not.

Meanwhile, “High Moon” won the first competition at Zuda Comics, which is currently “between competitions.”

Artist Colleen Doran writes about her experience trying to get Marvel’s new Digital Comics Unlimited service to work after signing up for it.

After poking around on the site at a few of the free samples on the site this morning, I was intrigued enough to give it a shot for a month or two to see if I will actually read a lot of comics in this format. While Doran had trouble, I had a surprisingly nice experience reading through a few comics such as The New Mutants Special Edition #1 (one of my all-time favorite superhero comics), the Ed Brubaker-Steve Epting Captain America #1 and Fantastic Four #251.

After a bit of experimenting, I found the “Smart Panel” mode was the easiest way to move quickly through the book, though there were some issues that I hope will be addressed: For some reason, the bottom of the page was sometimes cut off by the frame in the browser, forcing me to switch to another mode to read some balloons in this part of the page. There also were some strange zooms, especially on pages with large vertical panels. In some instances, I could click on part of the panel and the browser would zoom in, making the text easy to read and the art nice and big; but sometimes it didn’t and there wasn’t an easy work around aside from switching to another reading mode. (It’ll be interesting to see if Marvel will adapt the way it makes print comics to make them work more easily in digital formats.)

The comics themselves looked very nice and the way the browser zooms in on the art displays it at a much larger size than you see in the print version. In some instances, it gave otherwise small panels more of an impact and got me to see things I hadn’t seen in print. The art on the older books was sharp looking, keeping the classic color scheme of the era.

So far, I’m pretty happy with it. As long as it always works at least this easily, it’s definitely preferable to the experience of using a reader to look at cbr or cbz files, which usually require tons of scrolling and zooming to get through a page. My few attempts to try to read something in thsi format were frustrating enough for me to just drop the idea of reading books that way. I look forward to experimenting further and seeing if my interest in reading comics this way will hold up after the novelty wears off a bit.