Opinions on Online Digital Comics, Free or otherwise.

Bistoman

I have come across a lot of .cbr versions of comics all over the internet.
How do You feel about downloading Complete collections, and full graphic novels from filesharing sites?

Some of the Stuff out there is Top notch, If You don't have €230000 for a DC 29
or Action Comics No1, is it OK to download for Free?

ztoical

Bistoman wrote: »

If You don't have €230000 for a DC 29
or Action Comics No1, is it OK to download for Free?

If by ok do you mean is it legal then no. With regards to comics such as Action Comics no. 1, it's very easy to pick up a reprint of that and other popular collector comics for a fraction of the price or as part of a trade collection. It's only the first print run editions of those types of comics that are worth anything due to the collectable nature of the item. Both Marvel and DC are still developing their online/download comic business at this time and not all of their back issues are currently released as digital downloads but with the ipad and digital readers gaining in popularity they are focusing more on that market and as such there will be a crack down much as we've seen with the Anime and Manga markets on digital downloads.

Plenty of smaller publisher such as Mirage offer large chunks of their comics via their websites for free . You could get the whole first run of the TMNT via the Mirage site at one point.

The moral question then is do you think it's ok to download comics illegal if the publishers offered them as downloads at a reasonable price?

Bistoman

ztoical wrote: »

The moral question then is do you think it's ok to download comics illegal if the publishers offered them as downloads at a reasonable price?

Good point, Marvel Charge the same for Digital as paper, This will encourage the Illegal copying. Last Year they had a week of free downloading, But to get the Free copy's, You had to register and subscribe to the full Years run.
Some times it seems more easy to obtain an illegal copy than wait for DC UK to sell the latest Batman serious.

ztoical

Bistoman wrote: »

Good point, Marvel Charge the same for Digital as paper, This will encourage the Illegal copying. Last Year they had a week of free downloading, But to get the Free copy's, You had to register and subscribe to the full Years run.

Like I said in other post both DC and Marvel are still in a development stage when it comes to digital downloads much the same way the music industry was for several years as it tried to develop a solution for music downloads that suited both the artists and the company.

For the creative people working on titles for Marvel and DC they have contracts that give them royality payments based on sales of the comics. The vary for each company and on each title [Marvel and DC have different policies when it comes to overseas sales, reprints etc etc] In order for digital downloads to be cheaper the cost needs to be cheaper but as they are currently the exact same as the print edition the cost remains the same. They either have to make choice to move the monthly books to download only and focus on the collected trades for print which could kill the local comic shop scene or alter their contracts with regards to royalities for the creativies. As most comic book creativies are freelance and there is no union for the companies to deal with it is a very slow process.

It's similar to what we saw with the writiers strike several years ago where the writier saw they were losing a lot of royalty payments from DVD and download sales as when they created the standard contracts used for writers people were still using VHS and no one could see a future were people would pay the entire run of one show in a single box set.

I'm not saying the likes of Marvel or DC won't over charge for their service but it's not 100% greedy money related. And it's all well and good saying you'll just download illegally but again as I said in my other post we've seen a massive crack down on Anime and manga sites in the last year as the Japanese publishers and licence holders become more strict. Both Marvel and DC are owned by very large companies [Disney and Time Warner] who are already cracking down on downloads of their movies and tv shows and the more they focus on their digital download departments the more heavy they will come down on the illeagal downloads.

Fysh

The thing with digital content distribution is that, by definition, it makes piracy copyright infringement a whole lot easier.

Now, it's not helped by comics publishers as a whole being somewhat slow (to say the least) at providing their products in a form and on a schedule that their customers want, and there have been arguments about whether piracy copyright infringement where no legitimate offering is available is really piracy copyright infringement.

However, as it stands there are legitimate ways of paying the publishers for digital copies of the material they publish. I don't like the pricing on them (Marvel's same-price-as-a-paper copy idea would have me annoyed if I was actually interested in buying anything they publish) and I don't like the release dates (I still can't believe that most digital comics from Marvel & DC aren't published on the same day as the paper copies), and I don't like the patchy approach to making older content available, and I don't like the thus-far-DRMd software/fileformats being used by publishers.

But they're better than they were a decade ago, when "digital comics" meant "a few webcomics" and reading a recent comic on your computer meant buying the issue and scanning it yourself. They will, in all probability, continue to get better. Just like the music industry eventually did with the rise to prominence of digital music.

The thing about downloading a comic is that you're separated from the impact your actions have - if you download, say, something that's out of print for the last 10 years, the impact of this is different to downloading every new comic out this week. The former has, at best, no impact (though I'm sure the creators and the publisher would like to know if their older material is still in demand, since this is what drives the choice to do a new print run) - but the latter approach means that publishers panic about dwindling sales (because readership numbers are going to be higher than buyer numbers), and as a result we get more safe, boring "event" comics that are perceived, by publishers, to be guaranteed sellers as they get the collectors out in droves.

Bistoman

Marvel are the biggest prosecutors for Illegal downloading, More than all the Music and Movie industry combined.
I had the misfortune of coming under the Marvel radar last month when I used some of their work on a Youtube video.
Funny enough , although I uploaded 8 videos, they only removed 7. I guess they liked Me giving them free advertisements.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj3Pxvl1AEE

ztoical

Bistoman wrote: »

Marvel are the biggest prosecutors for Illegal downloading.

Marvel are owned by Disney who are very well known for their love of sueing the pants off people over copyright.

karma_

I'm going to come at this from a slightly different angle. Firstly I don't care much for American comics (other than a select few vertigo titles) so this post is aimed squarely at British comics.

I love the comics I grew up with the old British anthology weeklies, and I have a ton of them from that time I never could throw away. However, the vast majority of these comics will never ever see the light of day ever again and that is a complete travesty.

Right now there are some scanning groups working to preserve these comics from the 60's, 70's & 80's and to be quite honest I'm 100% behind them. There would be a market out there if companies like DCT & IPC would release these digitally but like another poster says the comic industry is so far behind the curve it's unreal.

Moose Harris runs a couple of great sites dedicated to the old Action & Battle titles, he scanned the pre-ban run of action and it's available freely on the sevenpennynightmare site, I urge anyone who has an interest in British comics to support him, Garth Ennis has already lent his support and Moose has already managed to get Johnny Red and some of the Battle stories scanned and printed by Titan, Falcon Squadron is already for sale on Amazon.

http://www.sevenpennynightmare.co.uk/

http://www.falconsquadron.sevenpennynightmare.co.uk/

Scanning and releasing these comics is in no way a bad thing and they deserve to be preserved.

ztoical

karma_ wrote: »

Scanning and releasing these comics is in no way a bad thing and they deserve to be preserved.

I totally agree but there is a difference between projects like this and people wishing to download a comic that has just been printed this week. I support scanlations of non-english comics even though technically it is illegal, most scanlation groups are very well organised and will quickly remove any comic that has been licensed for english translation. There are of course the few groups that ruin it for everyone hence the recent crack down on the manga scanlation and fan sub groups.

There are also sites like Comix Influx who offer english scripts of mainly French comics so people would buy the french language version and have the script in english when reading it.

Fysh

What ztoical said, basically - digital preservation efforts concerning public domain/out-of-print comics that cannot be found elsewhere are laudable and deserve support (and I'm delighted that Titan are working with Harris to reprint some of the old Battle comics, for example).

That's nothing to do with the crowd who torrent every single new comic the day it's published.

The former are making a solid contribution to the medium of comics by helping ensure that older works remain accessible. The latter are being thieving toerags and actively damaging the medium by making it less feasible for publishers and creators to publish quality comics.

Bistoman

Fantastic Four #588 Sold Out.
Marvel short printing Or Genuine Sales?
A part of me thinks its a stunt it increase sales on the reprint next April. Now the only way fans who missed this print can read it is download it, and You know that the fans will also buy the reprint when it comes out.
This is ripping off the people who pay every month, Who keep the industry going. maybe Marvel will allow a free download of this Single Issue, But I dont think they will.

Manach

So offhand (I'm an occasional buyer) - it would not be worth pruchasing Kindle format comics but to its inks black and white nature?

Bistoman

Manach wrote: »

So offhand (I'm an occasional buyer) - it would not be worth pruchasing Kindle format comics but to its inks black and white nature?

I'm Sorry, I don't understand the question.

ztoical

Manach wrote: »

So offhand (I'm an occasional buyer) - it would not be worth pruchasing Kindle format comics but to its inks black and white nature?

Do you mean is it worth buying a kindle for reading comics because it is black and white? It pops up on several forums about a colour kindle being released but there is no word on it and cost wise it most likely would end being around the same as an Ipad or other similar graphic tablets. Also alot of the comic publishers are looking to develop apps for their comics. More likely your better looking for a cheaper graphic tablet that runs android if you don't want to spend the $$$ for the ipad.

I know few web comic artists that have formatted their work for the kindle but you'd want to be looking the XL model for comic reading if you do get one as I found it annoying to read comics on the smaller model.

Ridley

Webcomics aside, I don't much care for digital comics. Just can't get comfortable to read off a monitor and my experience of players like Marvel's are the equivalent of pulling the book back and forth in front of my face to see the panel.

So I wouldn't get comics from a filesharing site free or otherwise.

Bistoman on youtube wrote:

No infringement was intended

Fysh

Bistoman wrote: »

Fantastic Four #588 Sold Out.
Marvel short printing Or Genuine Sales?
A part of me thinks its a stunt it increase sales on the reprint next April. Now the only way fans who missed this print can read it is download it, and You know that the fans will also buy the reprint when it comes out.
This is ripping off the people who pay every month, Who keep the industry going. maybe Marvel will allow a free download of this Single Issue, But I dont think they will.

It's well-known that Marvel generally tailor the size of their print run to be a bit larger than the initial order number through Diamond; they'll occasionally do sizeable overprints if they anticipate significant media interest or demand. Not to mention that when Marvel crows about something being "sold out", they always mean "sold out at distributor level", which says nothing about whether any of those issues sell through to readers. (And why should Marvel care? The comic shops are their customers, not the readers who actually buy individual comics.)

I'm not sure what "right" you think fans have to read the material. Nobody's forced to buy any given title or to read any given title, much less to spend stupid amounts of money on variant covers. Marvel offer product for sale to retailers, retailers offer it to punters on the street, and those punters have a choice on whether to buy it or not.

Not being able to buy the variant cover you've decided you want isn't "being ripped off", it's something that'll occasionally happen in a marketplace focused significantly on a collector mentality.

niall mc cann

I have much-treasured digital copies of Miracleman on this very PC, but if anyone wants to reprint those books, I'll take the hand and all off them, so I feel pretty justified about that.

I've read some pirated stuff before, mostly just to see if it's something I'd like. I've gone out to bookshops to buy some of that stuff, also. Alan Davis's FF:The End I found that way, likewise Morrison's Batman stuff. I own both of those in proper paper copies too, and I wouldn't part with them. Great stuff. Getting cheap, easily available digital copies out there is a great way to get people to buy your book, imo.

Or at least, that's what I'm hoping! Click the link in my sig!

Uncle Spunk

I wasn't a fan of the Marvel app for ipad when I first got it but now I'm buying at least one book a week on it. Same price as a print comic but it's instant and legal.

eco2live

As more readers with full color eink screens come along it will make a huge difference. Reading off a monitor is crap. The ipad looks great at first but is tiring to read off a backlit screen.

Noting like a well printed graphic novel/comic to date. They are all too dear at the mo.