Writing for Technology Review, Simson Garfinkel reads the funnies online and decides he doesn’t like the experience much:

A bigger disappointment is that getting the comics on a Web page has changed reading comics from a communal activity done with my wife and family around the breakfast table to a solitary activity that I do in front of the computer screen. Some days I will actually walk away from breakfast to “check my mail”–and read the comics.

Yet another problem is selection: there’s too much, and it’s not edited. Back when I was reading the comics page, I got a selection of the comics I liked and some others I didn’t care about. But every now and then one of the ones that I didn’t care about would catch my eye, and sooner or later I would get hooked. Today, I get the comics that I care about by e-mail, and I ignore the rest. If I ever decide to go looking for something new, I’m quickly overwhelmed by the selection.

While we’re wrestling over here about the era of digital comics, the good folks at Comics Crew shot right past us into the first of a multi-part discussion about an iTunes business model for comics. Keep reading here.

BTW, as much as I enjoyed watching the videos of Steve Hamaker coloring Jeff Smith’s awesome Captain Marvel work, I’ve had to proofread a graphic novel the last two springs via PDFs, and even the viewing/reading on a super LCD 20-inch iMac monitor was tedious at best.

For now, think I’ll stick to paper…

On his Marvel.com blog, Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada shows off a 3-D depiction of Doctor Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum, created by Jason Christensen and based on the illustration in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.

Good news for fans of cutting-edge manga. According to this story, the now defunct, influential avant-garde manga magazine Garo will be digitized for cell phones and the Internet:

We are digitalizing the comic strip Garo for distribution on the Internet, PDAs, mobile phones and other communications networks. Comic strips are attracting interest as a valuable resource in the broadband contents business but we were already experimenting with various attempts at the digital expression of paper-based comic strips five or six years ago.

For those who don’t know, Garo is, or was, a seminal monthly magazine focusing on underground and otherwise artsy-fartsy magna. Artists featured included Yoshihirio Tatsumi, Yoshiharu Tsuge and Kiriko Nananan.Wikipedia has more about the magazine here.

Via Brigid.

If you can stand seeing your beloved childhood icons mangled by modern technology, then perhaps you’d like to feast your eyes upon these monstrosities. A German telecommunications company named Combots is selling animated icons based on Charles Schulz’s masterpiece. They have icons of other cartoon characters — namely Garfield and Spongebob — but those don’t look nearly as bad. Maybe it’s just the idea of Charlie Brown giving me that odd hipster wink and thumbs up that turns my stomach.

Via Cartoon Brew

At the SLG Publishing blog, Jennifer de Guzman points to a good CNETTV.com video report from last weekend’s WonderCon about digital comics and how changing technology has affected the comics industry. Interviewed are DC Comics Executive Editor Dan DiDio, SLG Publisher Dan Vado, creators Phil Jimenez and Judd Winick, and a gaggle of fans.

On the eve of the release of 300, Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Frank Miller and Lynn Varley’s epic tale of the Battle of Thermopylae, I thought I’d collect links to what journalists, critics, experts and others are saying about the film:

As we reported on Monday, The New York Times looked at attempts to find a very contemporary political analogy in the work: In a modern context, is President Bush the Persian emperor Xerxes, or the Spartan king Leonidas?

In response to The Times article, comics creator Colleen Doran muses, “Knowing that Frank’s work is one long love poem to the defense of Western civilization, methinks that’s an easy question to answer.”

Entertainment Weekly speaks to the man himself — Miller, not Bush — but doesn’t ask the Xerxes or Leonidas question. Instead, the magazine wonders about how his bloodthirsty but idealistic Spartans compare to their historical counterparts:

(more…)

As I recover from a weekend of illness and kicking myself that I didn’t get a flu shot this year, Wired Magazine reminds me that at least I had the internet:

I recently took a vacation and, in a moment of deranged optimism, decided to take a vacation from the internet at the same time. I left my laptop behind and vowed not to access the web, my e-mail or any other facet of the Online Experience until I was back at home. The following is a diary of that experience, primitively scratched on a variety of wood pulp surfaces using graphite… Day 5: I’m so starved for information I actually read the copy of USA Today left outside my room. It was like salt water to a man on a desert island. Who made the first cartoon with a guy on a desert island, anyway? Was Cast Away nominated for any Oscars? How much would a fake Oscar statuette cost? Are they even legal? What countries have laws based on the Napoleonic Code? Does the “leon” in “Napoleon” have anything to do with lions? And how did people settle arguments before the internet? I can’t imagine how many marriages must have fallen apart just because the spouses couldn’t agree on whether people from Angola are called “Angolians” or “Angolese.” Data! I need data!

UK’s The Register reports that a 35-year-old Dutchman has thumbed his nose at new, and supposedly strict, rules about personal identification by painting his face like The Joker for his national ID card.

According to the website, laws instituted in August in The Netherlands prohibit grins, hats or sunglasses in passport photographs so as not to confuse facial-recognition scanners. However, the Dutchman who painted himself up like the Clown Prince of Crime had little difficulty skirting the rules. The only hiccup came when he was asked to remove his hat. When he insisted he wore it for religious purposes, he was allowed to keep it. You can see his photo at the link.

The Forbidden Planet International blog, where I found this item, notes the uproar that’s erupted because of the incident: “Dutch politicians are in a tizzy over the potential security implications — presumably they are worried Holland will become a haven for illegal supervillian refugees, or perhaps the losing side of Civil War will seek refuge in Holland.”

The Comics Weblog Update website may be gone, but it isn’t forgotten … Chris Mosby at Tales from the Longbox has reverse-engineered the code and set up a new comics weblog update page on his site:

In an effort to fill the void that was left when the Comic Weblog Updates page stopped working I made something similar here. This page doesn’t go as far back as the other page did, but it will update properly.

The difference with my new page is that you don’t have to sign up with Blo.gs, or anything like that.

People that want to have their blog added to the list can e-mail weblogs@talesfromthelongbox.com with the subject of “Please add my Blog to the Comic Weblog Page”, and send me their info.

The Sci Fi Channel has launched a great email campaign to help spread the word about Battlestar Galactica. The mailer — that’s an example on the right — sends recipients to “The Story So Far,” a web page the provides both three- and 44-minute recaps of the series, primers for the first two seasons and, my favorite, a glossary that includes an entry for “frak.”

I wish Marvel, DC and other publishers of longer-form comics would do something like this. Not so much the grass roots-ish email campaign — we get one of those every time a series teeters on the brink of cancellation, when it’s usually too late — but a clearing house, of sorts, that brings new and lapsed readers up to date.

Oh, I know the DC Comics website has mega-condensed origins, taken from the pages of 52, and Marvel has its more comprehensive wiki. But those are geared toward their core fanbases who want to know things like how the Wall-Punch Heard ‘Round the World affected certain characters, or if Iron Man ever teamed up with Frankenstein’s Monster (the answer, apparently, is yes). And then there are the “previously in …”-style pages at the beginning of most Marvel comics, instituted during Bill Jemas’ tenure; however, those seem more like memory-joggers than anything else.

Several publishers have begun to trot out Flash-generated trailers teasing the launch of a new series, or the start of the next Big Event. Unfortunately, though, they tend to be light on content, usually consisting of dramatic music, slow pans of a handful of panels and a fade out to the company logo.

Why not put that Flash know-how to good, or at least better, use creating “story so far” trailers/recaps for ongoing series that link back to even more content, like preview pages or full-issue samples, character biographies and the like?

(Yeah, I’m apparently in one of those annoying “Why don’t they …?” moods today, so watch out.)

All the elements are already in place, if scattered, separately, across different websites and companies: full-issue samples, PDF previews, Flash trailers/recaps, wikis, biographies, mailing lists, podcasts. They just need to be brought together, and put to good, and focused, use behind ongoing titles, or series of miniseries (Dark Horse’s B.P.R.D., for example).

Are there publishers or creators already doing this, and I just haven’t seen them? If so, someone kindly point me in their direction; I’ll link to them here.

(On a strictly Battlestar Galactica-related note, did anyone watch last night’s episode? After a couple of so-so offerings, it was nice to see a return to form, even if the ending was a bit convenient and rushed.)

(Sci Fi link via Pop Candy)

Last month there was a lot of talk about the cameo appearance by Peter Parker’s lil’ spider in Spider-Man: Reign #1. This week, thanks to the ever-vigilant folks at Ain’t It Cool, we’ve moved on to bigger things — namely Silver Surfer’s chrome-plated junk, which apparently has a supporting role in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

By conducting a frame-by-frame search of the QuickTime HD trailer, the Ain’t It Cool gang finds a rather clear view of Norrin Radd’s nads around 1:02 and 1:04, as Johnny Storm chases the Herald of Galactus through a tunnel.

Silver Surfer’s platinum package doesn’t seem to appear anywhere else in the sequence, leading AIC’s Merrick to speculate that this is an animator joke, akin to the infamous Jessica Rabbit frames in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

(Link via GayGamer)

In its January issue, Wired uses “highly scientific methodology” to find the country’s top geek meccas. That “geek cred” criteria includes the number of comic book stores per capita.

The winner? Seattle, I think. Despite referring to its list as “the top 10 places to get your geek on,” Wired doesn’t actually number the entries.

According to the magazine, the Emerald City has seven comic stores per capita, six tech jobs, per capita, on Dice, and nine attendees at local meetings of dorkbot.

Yeah, I don’t know either.

Comic stores also pop up in the ratings for Orlando (9), and Pittsburgh (10). I had no idea the Burgh was such a haven for comic readers.

On Gearlog, a gadget blog, poster Andre Bermudez celebrates receiving a Superman alarm clock for Christmas:

Getting out of bed in the morning is no easy feat for me, but now I wake up refreshed to the Superman theme song. The inspirational John Williams score plays loudly on my new AM/FM clock radio and if I feel I need more rest before I head out into Metropolis I can just smack the giant “S” symbol that doubles as the snooze button. Of course, it also comes with a traditional alarm sound if epic theme music isn’t your cup of tea in the morning. The Superman alarm clock can also project the time and Superman symbol onto the wall or ceiling (I had fun teasing my cat with this feature). It takes a 9V battery for backup purposes as well.

So what comic-related gifts did you get this year?

Dirk Deppey gets to the bottom of what’s happened to the invaluable Comic Weblog Updates page, which has been out of service for more than a week now. It seems Yahoo!, which owns the blog-tracking Blo.gs, has changed how that site functions.

I don’t pretend understand the ins and outs of it, but judging from what Deppey’s learned, it looks like the Updates page — and others like it — has gone the way of the dodo, at least for now. Dirk has a fuller, and more informed, explanation.

The Comic Weblog Updates page has been an important part of the comics blogosphere for more than three years now, and is at least partly responsible for its growth, as it allowed readers and other bloggers to discover new sites and, obviously, see when those sites have been updated.

I wonder how the Updates page’s absence has affected traffic for those blogs listed? I finally shifted to Bloglines a month or so ago, so I don’t use the page like I used to, but I imagine its absence has left more than a few readers adrift, or at least inconvenienced.

No, really:

After a long and arduous development process, we’ve released our first gadget for Google Desktop! Now you can see this week’s comic book releases right in Google sidebar.

You can download it here, where the official blurb says:

Never miss an issue with this gallery of the week’s hottest covers from Marvel Comics. Click on a cover to see a description of that issue and click through to Marvel.com to view the full details about this book.

Technology is advertising’s friend, apparently.

Not really comics, but as someone puts it at The Comics Journal, “What will comics collections look like in the future?” Like this, perhaps?:

In one of the first digital publishing initiatives of its kind, we are proud to announce the release of The New Yorker’s entire archive, February, 1925 – April, 2006, on a palm-sized portable hard drive… Over 4,000 issues of your favorite magazine now sit, ready for you to search and savor, on an 80G incredibly light-weight and travel-friendly drive. This high-performance, brushed-aluminum hard drive measures only 3″ x 5″ and can easily fit inside a purse or briefcase, so it’s a cinch to show off to your tech-savvy friends and co-workers. Plus, there is plenty of extra room on the drive for future updates.

Because, sometimes, you want to pay almost $300 for 81 years worth of print.

Jason Snell with MacWorld talks about digital comics, from the Marvel DVD collections of Amazing Spider-Man and Uncanny X-Men to downloads to directions for reading comics on your Mac:

So here’s the big question that remains about this entire endeavor: are people really ready to read comic books on a computer screen? And I can see that for a lot of comic fans, the answer is going to be a rousing “no!” And that’s okay. I’ve read a few comics on my giant 23-inch Apple Cinema Display, and let me tell you, it’s a pretty darned good experience. But it’s still me sitting in an office chair staring at a computer screen — not exactly leaning back and relaxing with a mug of tea and my favorite graphic novel.

However, this is not to say that I haven’t also enjoyed digital comics in a more relaxed setting. You see, these digital comics readers include a very handy feature that can rotate images in 90 degree increments. And I own a MacBook. So I’ve taken to loading up a digital comic, rotating it 90 degrees counterclockwise, turning my MacBook on end, and reading the comic at full size on my MacBook’s display, tilted into portrait orientation.

It sounds a little awkward, but it’s actually pretty comfortable. On its side, the MacBook’s display is roughly the size of a comic book page. Pressing the space bar to turn the page is pretty easy. It’s not ideal, but it’s good, and it points the way toward a future where I’ll be able to keep up on modern comic books without filling my garage with a whole new era’s worth of paper comic books.

So is it too much for me to hope that comic books will be the next addition to iTunes? Maybe so. But iTunes’ success has shown that companies can make money by Internet distribution of their content. And let me tell you, the stuff I’ve found out there on the BitTorrent highways has made it clear that comic book fans are interested in digital comics, even if there’s a strong whiff of piracy at the same time.

Although there’s been talk that Marvel’s Invisible Woman might represent the most plausible example of how invisibility could work, researchers at Duke University have shown the answer lies with Harry Potter — or, perhaps, Dungeons & Dragons.

The Los Angeles Times reports that researchers at Duke University have developed an “invisibility cloak” that hides objects by “bending electromagnetic waves so that they flow around the object like water around a rock.”

Because none of the waves are reflected back at the observer, the object seems invisible.

Their device, reported today in the online version of the journal Science, works only with microwave radiation — not visible light waves — and only in two dimensions. And it does not yet provide complete invisibility; it produces a small shadow that can be detected.

Scientists say the cloak is a rudimentary device they rushed to create to demonstrate their ideas. “We did this work very quickly … and that led to a cloak that is not optimal,” team leader David R. Smith told The Times. “We know how to make a much better one.”

The Duke researchers aren’t the only ones who’ve been tinkering with invisibility devices, but I don’t know what separates their work from, say, the coat developed in 2003 by a professor at Tokyo University. I’m guessing the Duke team’s cloak is entirely see-through, while the coat was more translucent.

Related: Howstuffworks on “How Invisibility Cloaks Work”

FLOG! points us to a line of iPod skins by MacSkinz that feature artwork by artists such as Steve Rude, Clive Barker, Tony Millionaire and Jordan Crane, among many others.

Unfortunately the skins aren’t available for purchase right now, but keep checking the site for availability.