On-line comics and the people who read them.

OK, so I'm not really gonna talk about the people other than me. Comics have been an important part of my life for a long time. I had an extensive collection of Peanuts books when I was a kid (although I do think that they should stop running reruns of Peanuts in papers today.) I subscribe to a paper not for the news, but for the comics. I may soon stop doing this. Nearly all of the comics I read are available on-line. I got into Comic Books for a bit, but they never really grabbed my attention because unless you really spend time and money on them it a very cyclic experience. Sure they last longer, but you only get your comic fix every so often. And, they're not (usually) funny, their more adventure oriented. They call newspaper comics "The Funnies" for a reason. (I skip over most of the 'serials' in the newspaper comics; who cares if Mary Worth's sister's husband is going trough a crisis or if Rex Morgan M.D. is hot on the trail of and anorexic beautician? That stuff is too serious for the comics.

The issue of convenience

When I read the comics from a newpaper, I can read them all at once (nearly) by turning to the appropriate page (usually at the back of the 'entertainment' section or near the editorials) and digging in. Yum! I get to read a mess of comics all at once! As an added bonus, you get to read them bigger and in color on Sunday! Ah. Sunday! ::drool drool::

On the other hand, on-line comics are spread hither and thither all over the net. Grouped in some sites you'll find the major distributors of the print comics like King Features Syndicate, United Media (the self proclaimed "Home of Comics on the Web"), and Universal Press. Between these three, you'll find most of the comics that you have in most newspapers. However, you have to hunt an peck to get to the comics you want to read. You get more choice, but with one pay service exception that I could find, you don't get to build your own page to curl up with and dive into.

There are a few paths and tools that are out there to make this easier. There are applications to view a bunch of comics, you can use an RSS Aggregator to view some comics via RSS (Rich Site Summary), or you can bookmark a bunch of sites and spring them all open in tabs on a modern browser.

Comictastic, iComic, and ComicViewer are examples of Mac OS X comic aggregators which allow you to view just the comics in a special application that acts as a viewer. The various Syndicates are not too happy with these as they basically go around and snarf the pictures off of their sites and leave the advertisements (that they make money from) behind. But they also work with on-line Comics. However, there is cost involved (Shareware) and some comics are not legally available in this fashion.

Rich Site Summary (RSS) is a good way to browse various streams of data from the Internet. Some good RSS readers for Mac OS X are NetNewsWire, iBlog and NewsMac. These readers allow you to subscribe to various feeds of information. These feed can include graphics and since comics are graphics... Tapestry has a list of comics available through and RSS feed. This by itself is enough to satisfy most people as the list includes some of the best from both newspaper and on-line comics.

Modern browsers that support tabs (Safari , Mozilla, Firebird , Camino, Netscape) open up the ability to open a mess of tabs all at once at the click of a button. I use Safari and have a Toolbar bookmark called "Comics". With one click opens a bunch of tabs in my browser that lets me see pages from various sites. Since the "current comic" is usually near the top of the web page, I can then read each comic, close the tab and read the next one.

The issue of availability

Reading comics in a newspaper is nice, but if the paper doesn't come or you don't have time to read it before leaving the house and your wife keeps it, you lose. Also, if you're visiting another town and get another paper one of two things happens, you're crushed because they don't carry the comics you are used to, or your crushed because there are more and/or better comics in their paper than in yours! Spend a week in a town whose paper carries two or three pages of comics and when you get home to your one measly page you suddenly feel like your town is illiterate.

This is accentuated when you take into account the internet. Not only are nearly all of the comics from newspapers (and many magazines) all over the country (and the world?) available, there are a bunch of comics that are only available on-line. Not only that, but many of them are in color 7 days a week!

Soon we might be able to say "Newsprint Comics are dead! Long Live Comics!"