Why Digital Comics Are the Only Way to Go
www.howtogeek.com
I now choose pixels over paper and ink.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/27615437

I developed a love for graphic novels around ten years ago. Back then, I lined a bookshelf with volumes. Now my comics are digital, and I’m enjoying them even more.

Back then, there was a larger gap between a digital comic and a physical one due primarily to the LCD screens that most of us had. Our phones didn’t have the pixel density that they do now, and our tablets had even less. It was perfectly fine and enjoyable, but I’m not sure I would call the experience better than print.

Display technology has come a long way since then. This is apparent when comparing the original Nintendo Switch released in 2017 with the Nintendo Switch 2 launching later this year. Even though they both use LCD panels, the difference is night and day. The Switch 2’s LCD is even a big upgrade over the Switch OLED.

I now read comics on a pixel-dense 7.6-inch OLED screen. The colors pop more than they do on the physical page. The contrast ratio is striking. There’s no counting pixels.

…

I only purchase DRM-free comics, buying from publishers that release their works without digital restrictions such as Image Comics, Iron Circus Comics, and Vault Comics.

Most of my collection has come though Humble Bundle. The site is usually offering at least one comic book bundle at any given moment in time. I purchase several bundles throughout the year, which each typically containing the entire run of multiple series.

This is an option that simply isn’t viable with physical books. Quite frankly, it would cost me hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars to acquire physical copies of the comics I get for under $20 from Humble Bundle, if physical editions can still be found at all.

…

In the US, if you have a library card, you can read many comics for even less—as in, for free—through Hoopla. I find that, at least for western comics, Hoopa tends to have what I’m looking for. I still buy comics anyway because I prefer to read them in a separate app, but I can only imagine how many comics I might have read if Hoopla were around back when I was a teenager.

…

Besides, there’s no reason you can’t mix and match. Put physical copies of your favorites up on a shelf and carry all the rest with you when you leave the house.

  • Jayjader@jlai.luEnglish
    3·
    5 days ago

    I was about to be sad that they’re giving up on “actually owning” their comic books, but then I read this part

    I only purchase DRM-free comics, buying from publishers that release their works without digital restrictions such as Image Comics, Iron Circus Comics, and Vault Comics.

    Bravo !

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    3·
    5 days ago

    Most of my collection has come though Humble Bundle.

    Wait, what? Comics?

    goes to look

    Huh. I haven’t been at Humble Bundle for ages. I had no idea that they’ve expanded from just video games and apparently morphed into a seller of comic books and apparently DRM-free ebooks and some other stuff.

    I may have to start paying attention to them again.

    EDIT: Though I just picked up their Hellboy collection to try it out, and I must say that the experience could use with a bit of polishing.

    • There doesn’t appear to be a download-everything-in-a-collection-in-a-single-archive option. One can trigger a download of everything, but that starts a number of downloads, each of which downloads individually and, at least in my browser, also comes up in a new browser tab. I’d rather just pull down an archive with the full collection and unpack it locally. On top of that, there appears to be a limited number of files that can be triggered to download. One really needs to manually download each item in a collection with many items.

    • Many of the comic books are available only in PDF, not some sort of raster image format like PNG, which is what I’d normally prefer, to feed into something like mcomix. In this case, use of PDF does appear to be justifiable, as looking at the first page of Crimson Lotus in xpdf at 1600% zoom, it does appear to contain some vector data, which will benefit from being able to zoom, though much of the page is raster. I suppose that I can always script up a bulk conversion to purely-raster data at a resolution that works for me, and end of the day, if there is vector data available, I’d rather have only that than a purely-raster option, so as to take advantage of future, high-resolution displays and zooming. However, I’d think that a lot of people might prefer to just have the option to get plain old raster images from the get-go.

    EDIT2: It does appear that a number of people have run into this themselves and written Humble Bundle downloaders of various sorts on GitHub, so as long as one can handle using those, one isn’t really forced to manually download things. Still, does seem like an option that Humble Bundle should have provided.

    EDIT3: This downloader appears to work for me, as long as one is willing to trust some random GitHub developer with tokens to a logged-in Humble Bundle session. It also has some features that I was wondering about, like remembering what things it’s already completed downloads of. However, from a usability standpoint, you’re talking about something like:

    • Create a directory for the Humble Bundle downloader.

    • Inside it, create a Python venv. ($ python -m venv venv)

    • Activate the venv in the current shell. ($ . venv/bin/activate)

    • Download the downloader into that using pip. ($ pip install humblebundle-downloader)

    • Find the binary name of the Humble Bundle downloader (hbd), looking in the binary directory in the venv.

    • In Firefox, authenticate to the Humble Bundle website.

    • From that Firefox page, Settings->More Tools->Web Developer Tools->Storage. Find and extract the value of the _simpleauth_sess cookie, which proves access to an authenticated session to Humble Bundle.

    • In the shell with the venv activated, run the downloader with the appropriate command-line options, quoting the cookie value, which contains shell metacharacters ($ hbd -s '<session-token>' -p ebook).

    I’m okay with that, as I’ve used Firefox’s development tools before and written software in Python, but I suspect that that’s not the smoothest user experience for the overwhelming majority of people who might just want to download a bunch of comics without a bunch of manual nursemaiding.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      11·
      5 days ago

      I can understand not having a local brick-and-mortar store, but I’d have thought that anywhere in the world could have comics shipped to them.