The Ephemerist

Together with K/O, comics maverick Paul Pope created When Worlds Collide, a nice tie-in for the upcoming Star Trek movie for Wired Magazine, featuring Spock reflecting on his life as a half-human, half-vulcan.  It’s a very nice little comic that recaptures what I’ve always liked about Trek : not the countless alien races or the battles, but the philosophical reflections on the implications of all these different elements.

But what’s with content owners and Flash these days ?  Who was the genius that gave the job for creating this profanity of an interface to “Holl Liou and Viciousesque ” ?  I don’t want a custom interface that allows me to “zoom in” or “pan” or “browse” through the different images – I want a comic that’s created for a garden-variety monitor, and that can be read on one.   Just take a look at what DC is doing with Zuda, or Dark Horse on MySpace : either adapt your pages to screen dimensions, or use the browser’s default scrolling mechanisms to present your pages.  Or, preferably, do something intelligent with the infinite canvas, but I understand that may be a little daunting…

And please, dear publishers, trust me on this : Flash does not protect against copying.  It only takes one single visitor with a lot of dedication to create screenshots of the different parts of the pages, stitch them together in a graphics program, zip them in a .cbr and release the result as a perfectly readable digital comic on dc++ or another network.  Deal with it.  Either charge for your content or release it for free, but don’t insult our intelligence with these half-assed flash-based solutions.

(comic © 2009 Condé Nast Digital. All rights reserved.)