My apologies for veering from daily blogging more than once recently. Lots of holiday-related travel this year. I'll try to still end the year with 365 blog posts, hopefully with a minimum level of "oh, hey, check out this cool link" themes.

That said, Tom Spurgeon recently published a couple of upbeat posts about comics and the economy. While they're definitely interesting reading in general, I would like to point out that I found the following passage particularly clever: "When it comes to the North American comics industry there are a lot more t-shirts than ties, a lot more Keepers of the Flame than holder of MBAs, and a lot more personal loans than revolving lines of credit." Go read post one and post two

Today's Moderately Confused...
You laugh, but I actually DO have an RSS feed for my wish list...

One of the comics I regularly read these days is Chris Harding's We The Robots. I generally find his work enjoyable, as he often provides absurdly cynical social commentary in an intelligently simple, metaphoric manner. But his last comic from Tuesday has been bothering me, and I'm writing about it here in the hopes to provide a sort of catharsis for me.

First, here's the comic in question...
In terms of the style and type of humor, it's about on par with his other comics. I'm not overly prone to bodily function gags, as a rule, but the vomiting here doesn't bother me. It's a route to his point, not the joke in and of itself.

I'm actually bothered by the set-up in the first two panels. It makes perfect sense for the message of the strip and works well from a critical perspective. But it also shoots right to the darkest depths of my subconscious, and grabs hold of one of my life-motivating fears: willfully losing my self-control.

(This is where I get into all sorts of fun personal insights about me, and starts shying away from actual comics discussion. You've been warned.)

I firmly believe in free will. I believe that I, and I alone, choose what decisions I make and what actions I take. I, and I alone, am wholly responsible for my actions at all times and under all circumstances. I made a conscious and deliberate decision when I was still in my teens that I would not partake in alcohol precisely because I do not want to lose any of my cognitive judgment capabilities in any capacity for any period of time. In fact, I'm such a strong believer in free will that I can't logically reconcile that belief at all with any sort of divine entity. And that means that a lot that goes on in this world is entirely out of anyone's control, and all I can do is act/react the best that I can to whatever situations get thrown at me. Which reinforces a need for me to be in control of what I do actually have control over: myself.

Let me make a distinction here. I'm not a control-freak and feel the need to direct everything that my life touches. The only control that I'm concerned about is what I say or do. There will always be parts of my life that I will never have full control over. My employer, through no fault of my own, could go belly up. Some idiot could get drunk and plow his car into my living room. A cougar could get loose from the local zoo and kill my dog while he's in the back yard. Those are the types of things that Life throws at people from time to time, and I can't really do anything about that but try to continue on with my life.

But that notion of losing self-control scares the crap out of me. Of being unable to stop myself from doing something that I recognize I shouldn't be doing. Of being unable to take responsibility for my own actions. I find that prospect absolutely terrifying at very primal level.

And that's what those first two panels of We The Robots speaks to. He clearly recognizes that he's full and should stop eating, but doesn't have the willpower to be able to. He's succumbing to his gluttony over his rational thought. He's checked his responsibility at the door, and has willingly given up his self-control.

That control, in my mind, is all we really have in life. Without it, we're nothing more than zombies. Whether it's the way he actually intended it or not, it's how I interpret Jack Kirby's Anti-Life Equation. Going through the motions of living without actually doing so.

I fully realize -- and accept -- that it is a deep fear of mine. And fear, by it's very nature, is very irrational. But I know that and take the fear with me as a subconscious motivator. I try to use it to my advantage, by working harder to continually improve myself and have more control over my words and actions. For example, it's actually made me, I think, a much better writer than I might otherwise be because I'm more conscious of what I write, of which words I choose, of how I portray myself linguistically. I'm a better writer because I've trained myself to be in command of the English language. I'm a better drummer than I might otherwise be because I'm very conscious of what my limbs are doing while I'm playing, of what sounds and rhythms I'm trying to produce and how best to produce them. So, despite this irrational fear, I don't let it's inherent irrationality hamper my rational decision-making abilities.

Now, did Harding intend for his comic to be an emotional dredger, giving his readers an opportunity for root-level self-reflection? I'm pretty sure he didn't. And I'm pretty sure most people didn't have quite the same deeply seated, almost pathological reaction to it.

But, when confronted with any piece of art that elicits such a visceral reaction, I think it's important to really examine the piece of art, as well as yourself, to understand why you reacted the way you did. I've done plenty of naval-gazing in the past, so it didn't take me long to understand what was going on when I read Harding's strip the other day, but the emotions it touches on are so much a part of who I am that I felt the need to address it more directly and openly than usual here.

Recently, Tim Callahan wrote this piece on why he prefers pamphlet comics over trade paperbacks. He talks about how he likes that Green Lantern and Ghost Rider are rolling around in his head a little more than Fables because he reads the former on a monthly basis and the latter in the decidedly less-frequent TPB format. Green Lantern is more top-of-mind because of the greater frequency.

He also notes that because of that, he's able to get into those stories more. They're more visceral. He feels as if he's exploring the world with Hal Jordan, whereas Fables has more of a flies-in-amber feel to him. That world, for him, is already over and done, and he just happens to be reading about it after the fact.

It's an interesting way of looking at his format preference, but he's wrong.

Well, to put it more accurately, he's not exactly right. He's connected enough of the dots to get a sense of what the picture is, but he's missing some crucial details.

"Kind of presumptuous to claim that a guy you've never met doesn't know his own opinions, don't you think, Sean?"

Oh, I'm sure he's fully sincere about preferring pamphlets to trades, and I've got no reason to doubt him on that. But he's wrong about why he's more in tune with Green Lantern than Fables.

The frequency of pamphlet books over trades DOES have an impact, to be sure. But, more significantly, fans TALK about the issues between releases. The latest issue isn't more visceral because it's any more current than a TPB, it's more visceral because, after you read the issue, you spend the next couple of weeks talking about it with everybody else who read it. As part of the Wednesday crowd, he's taking part in a community event. A shared experience.

New comics come out on Wednesday, right? A good percentage of comic fans dutifully stop by their Local Comic Shop on that day, pick up their favorite comics, and read them (or, at least, many of them) that day. At some point in the evening, or perhaps early the next day, they're online talking about all of the relevant story points. It's a visceral experience because it lasts considerably longer than the actual reading of the comic.

You read the comic. It rolls around in your head for anywhere from a few hours to a day, and you post your thoughts online. Soon afterwards, somebody else posts their thoughts. And somebody ELSE responds to your thoughts with new thoughts of their own. And so on. You're participating in an active community, discussing the life -- indeed, the whole universe -- of Green Lantern. There's a very active and social engagement there.

When you read a trade, though, it takes longer because, there's more pages there. You might not finish it the day it comes out. It might be reprinting material that was already published months, if not years, earlier. When you do go online to discuss it, your peers aren't necessarily going to be joining you on the same page. Maybe they read the pamphlet issues as they came out. Maybe they stayed up all night reading the TPB a week ago when it came out. Maybe they read the pamphlet issues, but missed one somewhere in the middle. It might be fresh and top-of-mind for you right then and there, but not necessarily for everyone else. So the discussion is slower. It's not as energized, as people struggle to recall specifics. Your interaction with them is less exciting as a result, and it becomes less of a salon and more of a soapbox.

"Hmm? Oh, yeah. Death of Jason Todd, I remember that. I think I phoned in to let him live. Or did I only mean to do that?"

It's not the immediacy in and of itself. It's the sense of community that you're a part of. It's the sense of belonging. It's the sense that, in this whole fucked-up mudball we call Earth, you're part of something that many people finding meaning in. That you're not alone shouting in the darkness.

Me? Not my bag. As much as I like engaging in discussions of comic books, I've had a long tendency of inadvertently stopping them cold. No real agreements or disagreements, just crickets chirping. I've long since come to accept that, though, and so when I read comics, I tend to focus on the craft of the comic itself. The messages it conveys and whether or not it does a good job of transporting me to that world for the duration of the story. The social aspect outside the comic never really worked for me, so I don't have a particular preference for the pamphlet format.

But for many people, the comic is absolutely MORE than the 22 page story they read every month. It's a 22 page story that they share with dozens, if not hundreds, of other people. And, although the publishers often do, it's not something to be taken lightly.

In the past few months, we've seen Wizard lay off a good chunk of its staff and Comic Foundry announce it's winding down. Today, we get word that WriteNow! will bow out with issue #20. Although no reason is cited, I would guess that it's NOT a financial decision. At least, not exclusively. TwoMorrows sales numbers are closely guarded, but I've gotten the impression that WriteNow! does reasonably well compared to, say, Draw! or Back Issue.

On the plus side, Jack Kirby Collector continues onward with an incredibly well-written and insightful column by some chap named Kleefeld! Issue #51 (where I discuss the Simon/Kirby Sandman) came out about a month ago, and #52 (where I take a look at Kirby vampires) is slated for late February.

"Hey! How did a 'deathwatch' turn into a self-promotional plug?"

Despite the recent Presidential election results, people aren't generally too keen to accept change, much less embrace it. It usually boils down to "fear of the unknown" and going beyond one's established comfort zone. It's all a matter of perspective, of course, and I'm generally of the opinion that there's always room for improvement and that can't be achieved if you don't change. Change isn't always a good thing, of course, and change should have meaning and at least make an attempt to improve on what had been the status quo. But many people often don't/won't/can't see that.

Case in point...

I went to the comics page I have set up in my iGoogle last night to find that one of the comics gadgets I subscribed to was behaving differently. Instead of pulling in my comics and displaying them at the very bottom of the page, it was now asking for me to reselect which comics I wanted to view to display them in with the rest of my content. And when I did so, it now began placing the comics within the context of my page, instead of at the very bottom like it had before. Since there was no announcement per se, it did take a few moments to understand what had happened, but it also took me very little time to see how this was an improvement.

First, it allows users to place their selected comics where they might best enjoy them, instead of forcing everyone to view them in the same place. The programmer had also re-written some of the code to adjust the width of each comic to fit whatever space it was put within, a very useful feature for especially wide comics. (Which, I might add, comes in doubly-usefully in the wake of last week's sudden change over at comics.com whereby any single panel cartoons are now twice as large as they used to be. While I appreciate being able to see more detail, it did cause some significant layout problems on my comics page.)

Now, the changes this programmer put in place aren't perfect. There's some comments about problems in certain versions of Internet Explorer, and there are some usability issues that could stand to be addressed in my opinion. But, his previous version of the gadget wasn't perfect either. And, rather than trying to fix a bunch of minor problems, he gave the whole thing an overhaul.

Comments about it over the past couple of days include...

...Please give us back the old style...

...The comics displayed better the old way...

...I don't like this one...

...Please change your gadget back to the way it was a week ago. Please! Please...

...It's Terrible...

...Change it back...

...Nope. Don't like it all....

...WTF???

Now, granted, some people were complaining because they were running into specific problems with IE. But most seemed to be irritated that things were different. "It's not what I'm used to!" I think I was the only one who left an even remotely positive comment.

Or how about the fact that no traditional comic publish has done more than tip their toe into the webcomic waters?

Or how about the whole "Spider-Man no longer married to MJ" business?

Like I said, not all change is good. But when it does happen, take a step back and see what opportunities the changes provides for you. Doing it the old way just because it's how you've always done it is why buggy whip manufacturers are few and far between any more.

"Alright, so what's the deal with these different file formats for digital comics? I just want to read comics -- I don't really care about what file type it is!"

Fortunately for you, I happen to be a bit of a computer geek who also deals with varying art file formats in my day job, so I'm here to explain things for everyone!

First, let's look at the two basic models for content delivery: downloadable versus reading it online exclusively. The two approaches come mainly from differing business models. With a downloadable version of the file, you're able to hold on to the file and keep it on any drive you might choose, but reading it online means that you have to look at the file via a live internet connection. The original concern for users here was that, in having to read it online, they had to essentially download a new copy every time they wanted to read it, and that could be time-consuming on slower internet connections. And you weren't exactly guaranteed to be able to get to the internet in the first place, depending on where you were. But download speeds have improved markedly over the past few years, and connectivity is almost ubiquitous. The two issues that remain outstanding in favor of downloads (from a user perspective) are 1) that users are not dependent on the whims of the content publisher to continue sharing the files, and 2) that they are able to centralize/aggregate the issues they want in a manner that makes sense to them.

For example, on my hard drive, I have a directory called "Comics." Within that are a series of folders labeled by publisher. Each publisher folder has a number of folders within it, each labeled with a comic's title. And each title folder has the issue files within that, titled with simply a three-digit issue number (such as 001.cbr or 023.pdf). That makes sense for me. I can quickly and easily find any issue in my digital collection. But that might not make sense to somebody else who, for example, only collects books from one publisher. Or is trying to organize their books chronologically. If the user is limited to how the content publisher organizes their selections, they're forced to follow that format -- which might be different from publisher to publisher.

Online read-only comics are typically delivered using Flash, an interactive OS-independent development system currently owned by Adobe. Flash is designed to create open-ended files, so navigation must be built into the final file. (That's why you see so many different treatments in how these types of comics are displayed. Each creator has their own idea on what works best.) These files COULD be developed as completely stand-alone, downloadable files but it would be a bit cumbersome since the navigation would need to be built in each comic file AND because Flash is not very good at optimizing rasterized graphics that are used in comic pages.

"Wait -- what does rasterized mean?"

Digital graphics can be saved in one of two ways: vector or raster. A vector image is one that is saved mathematically. A saved file will say something to the effect of, "Place one circle in the middle of the page, with a radius of 3 inches. Color the interior with 100% cyan, and give the edge a 5 point stroke, colored with 100% black." A raster image is one in which each pixel is defined independently. "The pixel in location 1, 200 is black; the pixel in location 1, 201 is black; the pixel in location 1, 202 is black; the pixel in location 2, 199 is black; the pixel in location 2, 200 is black..." It shouldn't take much to realize that file sizes can vary quite a bit between raster and vector images!

Another benefit of vector images is that, since they're mathematically based, there's no file resolution to worry about. You can infinitely scale the artwork up or down with no image degradation. But when you scale up a raster image, the individual pixels become larger and more noticeable. This is the source of pixelization that you see when you try to zoom in too much on a raster image...
(Enlargement from Sunday's Sinfest.)

Flash does a good job of handling vector images. It's a mathematically oriented program. Web browsers and most paint programs are better suited to reading raster images -- there's no real math to figure out. But where Flash runs into problems is that when you tell it to render a raster image, it has to, in effect, translate the raster image into a mathematical formula before displaying it. That takes more time and resources, and the program simply isn't designed to render that type of image AND compress it to a reasonable file size.

I should point out, too, that vector and raster are NOT file formats in an of themselves. They're both broad categorizations of file formats. If you think of individual file formats (HTM, DOC, BMP, etc.) as languages (English, Spanish, Japanese, etc.) then think of raster and vector files as "Romance and Germanic languages." Broad categories than encompass multiple languages.

Now, looking at downloadable comics, there are few prevalent forms out there and, interestingly, the technology end of the argument is pretty similar.

The main two forms are PostScript and Joint Photographic Experts Group, more commonly known by their abbreviations: PS and JPG. The JPG format you're likely familiar with, as it's often used on the web. It's a raster style file format that's particularly well suited to compressing images. PostScript is the format that your PC uses when it talks to a printer. Like Flash, it converts your file (whatever it's native format) to a specific mathematical language. Also like Flash, it's not particularly conducive to compressing images -- that's why it takes so long to send a photo to your printer, but pages of text run so quickly.

"But, I've never seen downloadable comics in either PS or JPG forms!"

Ah, but you HAVE seen PDFs and CBRs, no doubt!

PDF stands for "Portable Document Format" and was created by Adobe. For all practical purposes, it's the same as a PS file. it's kind of like the difference between English spoken by East and West Coast Americans -- it's the same, except for a handful of words and a slight change of inflection. PDFs work in much the same ways as PS files do. And, more significantly, they have the same limitations. They work really well with vector graphics that are mathematically based, but start to run into issues with raster images. Given that most comics are still drawn on paper with pencil and ink, and are then scanned into a computer, that means PDF is not an ideal format for most comics.

CBR (and close cousin CBZ) is actually something of a non-format. CBRs are actually nothing more than a RAR file and CBZ is just a ZIP. Exactly the same.

"Well, I've heard of ZIP, but isn't that just a compression format?"

Yes, both RAR and ZIP are file compression formats. RAR does a little better job at the actual compression but, for practical purposes, it's the same as a ZIP. (Indeed, many compression/decompression software utilities handle both formats.) All that CBR and CBZ are, are renamed RAR and ZIP files that contain a series of JPG scans of comic book pages. Each page is scanned individually, saved as a JPG, and numbered in sequential order. Programs that read CBR and CBZ files are really nothing more than image display programs that are designed to decompress RAR and ZIP files on the fly, one or two pages at a time. (You can see in the screen shot that, despite having opened "Pirates_Comics_001.cbz", my computer is displaying the image called "PiratesComics01 04.jpg".)

Quick experiment: try changing one of your CBR files to a RAR by altering the three-letter extension. Now open that file in whatever you use to decompress RAR and ZIP files. You'll see each of the pages as a separate JPGs that you can copy wherever you like and edit in your favorite paint program.

Logically, this all means that CBR makes the most sense as a file format for serving most comics. It's got the best compression (meaning the smallest file sizes), is the most versatile, and is very easy to create. It does require a specialized reader, but so do PDFs and Flash-based comics, and the only disadvantage in that respect is that most computers come with Adobe readers pre-installed on them any more.

However, it's rare that logic actually dictates winning technology wars, and Adobe is the 800-pound gorilla in this debate. And you know how much comics love their primates!