This isn’t technically a recommendation, I guess, but the new Brian K Vaughn/Marcos Martin/Muntsa Vicente project, Barrier, has started on Panel Syndicate. I absolutely adored Private Eye, so I’m giving this as close to a recommendation as I can without knowing anything else about it.
I added some stuff from the sale (the Mass Effect foundation stuff, Fuse, and some others).
On free comic book day my teenage son & I went to 4 different stores that day. I picked up Invisible Republic trade/vol. 1 at Alley Cat Comics. We both really liked the book and the store. Got America’s Got Powers trade at Third Coast Comics. I enjoyed the book but it wasn’t subtle in some of its stuff, the store was smaller but friendly; my son’s teacher knows the owner so we talked to him for a while. Graham Crackers Comics was not a pleasant experience, they yelled at my son for reading comics as he was waiting for me to pick some stuff out, we didnt buy anything. At Dark Tower, i think my son picked up the Mad Max graphic novel, haven’t read that one yet. The store is the closet to my place so we have been there a few times.
The star of this one is a full run of Irredeemable at the max $15 tier. This is a great “what if Supreman went bad” story from Mark Waid (who is doing some great work lately with the Archie reboot and Autumnlands).
Also a lot of licenced books (Robocop, Sons of Anarchy, Hellraiser, Steed and Mrs Peel, Bill & Ted). And some books from their younger-aimed line, Bee and Puppycat, Bravest Warriors (Pendleton Ward book, is this also a TV show?), and Lumberjanes. A HELL of a lot of reading for $15 with more to come.
I picked up that bundle last night. I want to get into these comic bundles, but the reading mechanics are so far outside of my comfort zone. I just don’t want to manage some colossal blob of PDFs any more. I wish I could “import” these into Comixology somehow, like they do with Steam keys.
What platform are you reading on? Each of them has solid, free options.
Also, pdf is a clunky format for comics, cbr/cbz (which is just individual page images in a rar/zip file) is much better.
You can import them into, eg Comic Flow.
So here are the elements that make the HB downloadble comics a hassle for me:
- I run my iOS devices wireless. iTunes is not a part of my pipeline. The times when I try to go back on this and plug in, iTunes mucks up everything on my devices.
- While I have an iPad, I use it rarely. Virtually all of my comic reading is on my phone, where I have become dependent on Comixology’s guided view, which shows one panel at a time.
2 is really the big stickler for me. I’m really not a fan of manually panning around on the comic page for reading (pinch and zoom).
Last night I tried out iVerse’s Comics Plus app which is said to be sassy to CBZ import via iCloud Drive. Unfortunately, that appears to be just a lie.
I don’t see a “Comic Flow” on the app store.
ComicRack is what I use, I think, and it supports Dropbox syncing and such, pretty sure. I don’t ever use that functionality, so I can’t speak to how well it works. (I will check the name when I get home).
Ow. Not giving those spash pages a lot of room to breathe, are ya? : )
I’ve tried phone, iPad, PC (including a monitor in portrait mode), and ended up settling on a 12.2" 16:10 Android tablet that’s probably as close as I’ll ever get to a 1:1 comic book page.
I’d recommend trying out Chunky Comic Reader on iPad for cbr/cbz and pdf files, it has broad cloud storage support and nice built-in indexing. That will let you read pages in landscape with only one swipe to go from the top part of the page to the bottom. That was a pretty decent tablet solution for me for a while.
Correction: Autumnlands is Kurt Busiek’s book. But it’s still good.
I was wrong, the app I was thinking of was ComicGlass. But it’s a very functional reader with a lot of options that’s treated me well so far. I do mostly use CBR/CBZ, though.
It may be iPad only. I don’t see it on my iPod.
Has anyone switched their Comixology account to Amazon? Amazon appears to be pushing the switch to one account but the problem is that you will be stuck to iOS 9 devices. Apparently once you make the switch you can no longer use the old account on older iOS devices.
A part of me would like to have only one account but i like being having the choice to use older iPads.
I had no idea this was an option. FWIW, the only iPad locked out of iOS 9 is the original. I upgraded my 2 to iOS 9 and was pleasantly surprised with the performance improvements over version 8, which had basically crippled the device and made it no fun to use.
We have three iPads in the family; the original, iPad 3, and an iPad Air 2. The original can at least play Netflix and browse. I will probably make the switch as I assume that Amazon will force that through one day in any case.
I do wish they would allow my Comixology purchases to work on the kindle but right now it seems to be a one way street. Kindle purchases will be able to use the Comixology reading interface whereas you can not view your Comixology purchases on a Kindle. Hopefully they will work on that aspect in the future.
I don’t know why you would read comics on a Kindle. It’s a notably worse experience. There’s often some missing lines from the page. It doesn’t handle rotation. The active position tracking is just ineffective if you read a book more than once. There’s no awareness of the relationship between books in a series…
That said, I have merged my accounts. The books I bought via Kindle showed up in my Comixology account with no problem. I even have a special something attached to my Comixology account through work, and that carried over as well.
The one quirk I have seen since the merge is that I got pushed into paying for books via Amazon payment, where I was using PayPal before.
They are stating that combining the two accounts will allow one to use their kindle to view comics in a guided style. Not sure if that means only the Kindle Fire.
If I merge my accounts will they finally integrate Pull List with the main Comixology service?
I do not see anything about this specifically but they are stating that new features will be forthcoming and only available to those who have merged their accounts.
I am not sure where to look for a pull list? Is it separate from the Comixology account used to buy digital comics?
I saw this on Comixology when looking over the sales:
I used to read Archie all the time when I was about 10. Never in my wildest imagination would I have thought to see something like that. I may have te purchase this…