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Rather than read what somebody think is a classic, why don't you strive to get a better understanding of the medium of comics in general? For that, there is no better resource than Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. It's not a book about comics, it is a comic about comics!

That being said, I haven't read any superhero stuff since I was 12, but in my ripe old age, I still enjoy Prince Valiant

Scot McCloud (the guy behind {Making,Understanding,Reinventing} Comics) already has Destroy!!.

Now all you have to do is to point the nearest Hollywood executive to this...

Nerds of many stripes can benefit from the book Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. It is required reading in many undergrad and masters programs (like HCI, Film, English, Interaction Design, etc). If you ever have the chance to see Scott give a talk, do yourself a favor and go.

If you aren't sure if comics are a legitimate art or communication medium, read the book. It uses comics as a platform for explaining how narrative works---and that's something that is useful to basically everybody.

I read McCloud's work at least 8 years ago, so I'm guessing it was published in the 90's. This book deserves a reference as a precedent work.

http://www.scottmccloud.com/store/books/uc.html

Quoted from the website:

Overview:

A 215-page comic book about comics that explains the inner workings of the medium and examines many aspects of visual communication along the way. Understanding Comics was a Harvey and Eisner winner, was praised in The New York Times, Publishers Weekly and Wired, and is in over 13 languages. A favorite of interface, game and Web designers despite the fact that it doesn't mention computers once!

(1993 in the comics market, 1994 in the book market). Quotes:

"If you've ever felt bad about wasting your life reading comics, then check out Scott McCloud's classic book immediately. You might still feel you've wasted your life, but you'll know why, and you'll be proud."
- Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons.

"In one lucid, well-designed chapter after another, [McCloud] guides us through the elements of comics style, and... how words combine with pictures to work their singular magic. When the 215-page journey is finally over, most readers will find it difficult to look at comics in quite the same way ever again."
- New York Times Review of Books review by Garry Trudeau

"BRAVO!! Your Understanding Comics is a landmark dissection and intellectual consideration of comics as a valid medium. Its employment of comic art as its vehicle is brilliant. Everyone...anyone interested in this literary form must read it. Every school teacher should have one."
- Will Eisner

"...one of the most insightful books about designing graphic user interfaces ever written, even though it never discusses the subject directly."
- Macintosh co-creator Andy Hertzfeld

"With Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics the dialogue on and about what comics are and, more importantly, what comics can be has begun. If you read, write, teach or draw comics; if you want to; or if you simply want to watch a master explainer at work, you must read this book."
- Neil Gaiman

"Cleverly disguised as an easy-to-read comic book, Scott McCloud's simple looking tome deconstructs the secret language of comics while casually revealing secrets of Time, Space, Art and the Cosmos! The most intelligent comics I've seen in a long time. Bravo."
- Art Spiegelman

"Understanding Comics is quite simply the best analysis of the medium that I have ever encountered. With this book Scott McCloud has taken breathtaking leaps towards establishing a critical language that the comic art form can work with and build upon in the future. Lucid and accessible, it is an astonishing feat of perception. Highly recommended."
- Alan Moore

"A must-read classic."
- Seybold Seminars Online

"The basic manual for introduction to the medium. Do not attempt to operate your comic without reading this first. "
- Warren Ellis

"HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. A superb book-length graphic essay... Fast becoming a classic in graphic communications..."
- Yale Center for Advanced Instructional Media

"It just might change the way you think about Web design."
- HotWired: WebMonkey Design Collection

"McCloud's Understanding Comics is a seminal work at the level of Edward Tufte's Envisioning Information..."
- Stewart Brand - Global Business Network

"Scott McCloud's book, Understanding Comics, is a must read for any true connoisseur of comics. Don't let its entertaining format fool you -- it's an in depth look at what makes the comics medium so great. If I knew half as much as Scott, this would be the book I'd write!"
- Jim Lee

"...a rare and exciting work that ingeniously uses comics to examine the medium itself."
- Publisher's Weekly

"...a brilliant comic book discussion of what makes comics work."
- L. A. Times

"[Understanding Comics] might well turn out to be the r

I'm going to suggest a book not about computers or software at all, but about visual communication: Understanding Comics. Jakob Nielsen endorses it (that might not be a positive recommendation for some of you..).

freechess.org:

Total time online: 99 days, 15 hrs, 20 mins
% of life online: 3.8 (since Mon Aug 9, 23:56 EDT 1999)

and some others are much worse.
hmm. Could Scott McCloud's classic chess comic be adapted for WoW subject matter?

...really isn't valid, from my point of view. You can download a stand-alone, complete song from iTMS for $0.99. Do most cartoonists who use micropayments give you the entire issue/volume/story for that price? I know McCloud sells the entirety of The Right Number (http://scottmccloud.com/comics/trn/intro.html) for $0.25, but I'm not sure about other artists. If they don't sell the entire issue for a small price, the analogy falls apart, since you're not getting something stand-alone for a micropayment. I also think the iTMS analogy is invalid in that music is not a niche market, while webcomics still are, for the most part. Personally (as a webcartoonist), I don't think micropayments are a viable means of "making a living", but some cash can be made. This reminds me of a quote, either by Jerry Holkins or Jon Rosenberg, that basically stated that if someone was willing to pay $0.15 for a comic, they'd pay $3.00.

In the same self-exemplifying lines, a fantastic piece of work is scott mcloud's understanding comics (the invisible art).
He explains why and how comics can be used to convey very rich messages, while using comics as his medium. The book itself proves his point magistrally. There are quite complicated and often abstract and philosophical issues in there, yet he manages to explain them in four frames, with a few words and very insightful yet simple drawings. They both melt into a message that would take a full page to explain if he used a regular book. It's totally amazing, and could be used in lots of places.
The catch is that there are probably very, very few people who can use the medium in the same way he does. It's an art in itself, and i'm pretty sure if other people tried to use his formula it would lead to stupid books where the message ends up being very weak.

Not only does he demean video games, but the author goes on to slander comic books.

A little off-topic, perhaps, but I always had a self-righteous distain for comic books (while simultaneously, and paradoxically, enjoying some newspaper comics, i.e. Bloom County, Calvin & Hobbes). I nurtured this snobbery in myself until I read Scott McCloud's excellent book, Understanding Comics.

It takes a highbrow view of a much disparaged art form. I highly recommend it to recovering snobs like me.

Ah, finally I get to share the wonder with the world. A friend of mine e-mailed this to me months ago, and I've shared it with a few friends, but now I hope Slashdot can enjoy.

An explanation of micropayments and how they can change the web for the better: http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/icst/icst-6/ics t-6-full.html

Seeings as I didn't see a link to scotts site Here it is. As to whether Scott is some poor bastard certain well know comic figures seem to think a little higher of his work. Neil Gaiman in Scott.

as Scott mc Loud would say 100x better, using symbols in drawing, or graphics allows the brain to treat the data it's presented in a totally different way than if the subject was looking a a detailled drawing. You instantly know when you look at a symbolic graphic that there's more to it that what you see.
Old games used symbols to display things on screen almost of the time, because the machines couldn't do more. But you didn't treat the things displayed on screen as if they were realistic drawings anyway, you knew they were just symbols which meant tree, kobold, or whatever and all the real action had to happen in your imagination.
So everyone in fact had a different, and extremly rich perception of the game.
Constrast that with 3D. The things you're looking at are generally not symbols, they're literally what you, or your character, see. That means your imagination can't interface with what is displayed. Those realistic, tangible objects aren't compatible with it.
That means that if the illusion isn't 100% perfect, the charm will be broken.
Now, you're just consuming a world someone as prepared for you, the same as everyone else. Before, your brain had to build it itself, but it was incomparable.

Who are these people who are saying "I'd pay, but I just don't know if this Stephen King fellow has what it takes to finish a book."?

The ones who were right, obviously.

It wasn't about whether King would just call it quits for no reason, it was over whether someone would pay $1 for the next chapter, only to find out that King was a dollar short, and called it quits.

That aside, at the time it was an almost unheard of idea if you weren't one of the astute intarweb users who had heard of "micropayments". It certainly wasn't something the masses of people King's print books typically reach would have even thought about.

You surely forgot something in your list... Money to BUY the things... if the copyright oponents do not give money to the copyright owners (i.e. do not buy) then it will be difficult for the owners to win...

Anyway, I just found this interesting page, and I think it is kind of on topic with this discussion:

Some thoughs about piracy. It is better than I state here, have a look

There's this theory that says that the closer the look gets to humans the lesser the real human-ness we feel. Which could explain why most of the cartoons involve talking animals

Rolling your own is begging to be owned.

Ignore people's unease, the real reason you don't want to go w/ paypal is the massive bite they take out of whatever people send you. You can't even ask people to donate a quarter because the entire quarter disappears.

Google for "amazon honor system" (minus quotes). I can't link you directly because it'll probably end up w/ a referral to me in the URL. ^^;; It might be what you're looking for.

Alternatively, for webcomic creators, Scott McCloud suggests trying BitPass, Yaga or Peppercoin...

...this yet?

The gaming industry is increasingly motivated by profits for major conglomerates (the EA sports deal comes to mind), not even just little publisher shops anymore. In an environment like that, you have to have companies that are willing to use the profits from a major hit series to fund development on more groundbreaking items. Better yet, support a studio with a history of groundbreaking games (Bungie anyone?) and let them keep doing what they do best. Even then, what the masses want is what's going to fill the shelves in most cases. We're lucky to see any creativity at all sometimes, and creativity in a sequel, well, that's just unheard of in many cases. Scott McCloud wrote about this in the context of comics. Penny Arcade covered some of this in a series a few years ago.

The gaming industry is increasingly motivated by profits for major conglomerates (the EA sports deal comes to mind), not even just little publisher shops anymore. In an environment like that, you have to have companies that are willing to use the profits from a major hit series to fund development on more groundbreaking items. Better yet, support a studio with a history of groundbreaking games (Bungie anyone?) and let them keep doing what they do best. Even then, what the masses want is what's going to fill the shelves in most cases. We're lucky to see any creativity at all sometimes, and creativity in a sequel, well, that's just unheard of in many cases. Scott McCloud wrote about this in the context of comics. Penny Arcade covered some of this in a series a few years ago.

Robots Love to Dance

"Public perception MATTERS. As long as the broader community assumes that comics, by their nature, are without social value and, by their nature, are suitable only for kids -- then charges of obscenity will always hit their mark." (p. 89)

Often times the suggestion of something is more emotionally powerful than the detailed representation of it. This is something Hitchcock used to great effect in his films, and is part of the reason why the most truly frightening movies are often the ones that don't show much gore.

Scott McCloud covered this one too; the more iconic a human figure is, the easier it is for the reader/viewer to identify with it. Conversely, it's possible to anthropomorphize even the most iconic images; the standout example that he gives in his book is an electrical socket that (in the right context) still clearly identifies as a face. If you're interested in the design aspects of this, check out Understanding Comics for more details.

Now you're just being an idiot.

Staying in a bad relationship makes you a 'darwin target' because you lack backbone and basic self-respect. Honestly, the world's probably better without you.

A piece of advice: if it's going nowhere, just do everyone a favour and end it.

Do you know any details on this? I've not heard of anyone being restricted from photographing these buildings and selling them or doing what they want to, as photos. I've seen lots of of photos made and sold of the Chrysler Building ever since its creation, with no restrictions. Scott McCloud even made a comic book supervillain in its image.

As for the Tranaamerica Pyramid, I could see someone getting in trouble for using it as their corporate logo.

Agreed, but that's clearly the intent. Pixar isn't aiming for photorealistic characters, only the environments (if at all). There's a big long discussion on why that's good for storytelling in a book by Scott McCloud which I won't bother linking to. I'm sure he's selling it from his website anyway, it's called "Understanding Comics" and it's worth reading if you enjoy sequential art of any kind.

Look for his dissertation on realistic versus iconic imagery.

Example: When McCloud's kids use KidPix, they co-opt the dynamite-style erase tool to make intersecting concentric circles.

One could argue that gaming the system is the soul of creativity, since the world is just the ultimate system. Foucault would agree that we're all remixers.

I know I'm drifting off-topic, but my point's that it's human nature to do something creative with someone else's creation. If no one had hacked rocks, we wouldn't have the wheel.

It's clear that we're never going to agree with each other on this issue. However, I will respond, if only for the silent listeners...

Your comment that working in a field is somehow more important that working in more abstract professional is just silly. And I'm not hellbent on creating that world - it already exists, and I quite enjoy the fact that we're not all hunter-gatherers.

I'm lucky. I'm able to make a full-time job out of my passion. However, I know a lot of musicians / artists / cartoonists / writers / designers / etc who are forced to work shitty jobs to survive, moonlighting on their real passions. I think that this is a bad thing, and I would like to see it changed. If you're situation isn't like that, then good for you.

There's no denying that creation has a lot of non-financial benefits - it's what many people live for. However, the people doing this need to live, and it would be nice for them to live at something greater than a subsistence level.

As for the comment about increasing output:

• You're the only one comparing yourself to a piece of machinery. Calm down.
• I was merely recounting, what others have said about their own work and the work of their friends

I too was convinced after reading Shirky's essay. Then I read Scott McCloud's rebuttal, and I have to say it is quite convincing.

Scott's blog mentions a fair few other comics using BitPass.

So, I read the Technology Review article which said that "The Right Number" was really good... and I navigated to The Right Number to check it out.

Frankly, $0.25 per comic seems a little high to me. After all, the dead-tree Boston Globe costs $0.50 and contains more than 25 comic strips (only $0.02 each), at least five of which I really like and read every day.

And I found out that I can't just buy $0.25 worth of BitPass, I need to commit to $3.00 worth. And I thought about it a little, and tried to decide what were the chances that I'd really use the full $3.00 worth, or whether it would end up being wasted. It's not that $3.00 isn't such a big deal, but it does exceed my personal threshold for buying without even thinking.

(And this is consistent with my behavior in other real-world activities. It's only when long-distance calls dropped to $0.05 per minute or less that I stopped thinking about whether or not I needed to make the call.)

It's not just the $3.00, it's also the business of yet another account to keep track of... and if it's a real-money-related account I try to keep track of these things fairly closely. I can't possibly use a unique password for everything, so I sort of categorize them.

There's a "practically-no-security" category that I use for things like New York Times article registration: the "I couldn't care less if someone else reads 'my' New York Times article" level. I don't quite want to publish that password on Slashdot, but as far as I know I could with no ill effects (other than helping identity thieves improve their social engineering).

There's another category for information that I don't really want people to know, but for which can't see any obvious possibility of financial damage if they did. I don't want strangers to view my membership in a certain fraternal organization and find out how many years I've been a member, but, hey. Maybe Ashcroft cares, maybe a con artist could use it... sure it's paranoia but I'm a little careful with these accounts.

There's another category for sites where stuff can be ordered but only sent to me, or where money can be transferred, but only between my own accounts.

Then there's the highest level of security, for what I call "real money" accounts. These are sites where an intruder with access could actually take money out of my account and end up with cash in their account. Or get high-value easily-resaleable goods shipped to them. These accounts get their own password, a written entry in a three-ring notebook, I give a copy to my wife, and check the accounts regularly to spot abuse.

Well, there's no getting around it--BitPass goes in that category. Even though it looks as if I could limit my exposure (e.g. to $3), and even though I don't think you can buy any high-value easily-resaleable goods with it yet, I'm still leery. I feel that I have to treat BitPass as a "real money, high risk, be careful" account.

So, before opening a BitPass account I thought I'd better check out "The Right Number" to see whether it's anything I really want to read.

What I saw was a free preview that used the most annoying Flash interface I've ever seen, and didn't show me enough to decide if I want to read even one of them.

The bottom line is that, for me this particular transaction did involve a significant "mental transaction cost," because of my concerns about opening another "it's-money-take-care-of-it" online account, and, even though I was willing to pay that cost, the final analysis was that the "micropayments" for this particular item were nowhere near micro enough to suit me.

For a view from the other-side (that of the independent content provider) check out Scott Mccloud's response to Shirky's latest essay.

• Augmented Reality. Quake2025 will be played outdoors.
• Robots take over Work. Marshall Brain talks a lot about this. So, when your job goes to the robots, what are you going to do while you retrain for one of the few jobs not done by robots? Would you rather give up the notion that you must work for money and housing, or would you have us place you in an enormous welfare dormatory? Something to think about, the next time you self-check-out at the grocery store.
• Community Networks. You and your neighbors are well connected. You've got your own currency, and you've got things you want to share (for a small exchange of some form currency) tagged with RFID, for easy registration on the local network. Does every single resident in an apartment really need to have their own vacuum cleaner? Does someone need a couch, when you're throwing yours away?
• Micropayments. I already use BitKeeper because I keep up with Scott McCloud and Patrick Farley. I will probably pay for some OpenSource dev's book one day for a quarter or two.
• Semantic Web. Your computer will have the intelligence of the Internet. When you read someone's review of a movie, your computer will be gathering local showtimes and listings. This is a major destabilizing technology. Markets will be cut and dry, not something that you have to deduce. It doesn't matter if you're a 16 year old that wants to cut lawns, or Sony- this will change your life.
• Genetic Engineering. This will take a little longer to figure out, but we'll get there. In response, humanity will fragment into hoards of species.
• Visual Language. Comics, notations, shorthands, schematics, visual explanation boxes. Write in one notation, read in another. You'll be able to learn two semesters of Chem in half a semester, with the properly coded books.
• Programming is Easy, incidentally. Programming gets easier and easier, every year, if you haven't noticed.
• Big Education Changes. Something big will happen in education, but I don't know what. I believe it will have to do with self-education, the certification process, and canonicalization. This is on top of the changes coming via Visual Language.

One of the most exciting things happening now is Aggregators. There was a slashdot story on them just a day ago. They really change everything about the web, wiki, etc.,. Everything becomes real-time.

Concentrating on the work of Scott McLoud it also mentions geek favourites Dilbert and The Matrix, among others.

Is this an unintentional spelling error of Scott's last name, or an intentional jab at what some people think of his ideals?

This is probably the most biased review I've ever read. Somebody should be ashamed to write it even in a press release. It is the most important book about commics just for the authors and their friends, or if you think Marvel is really important in comic book history.

In the realm of comic books, sequencial graphic storytelling, Marvel and DC just publish a very limited set of themes: collant-dressed-anabolised-fantastic-powers heros. Comic books are a much richer form of art than this, see Moebius, Alan Moore, Crumb, Will Eisner and a lot of others.

If you really want the best book ever written about comics, read Scott Mccloud seminal Understanding Comics.

This is probably the most biased review I've ever read. Somebody should be ashamed to write it even in a press release. It is the most important book about commics just for the authors and their friends, or if you think Marvel is really important in comic book history.

In the realm of comic books, sequencial graphic storytelling, Marvel and DC just publish a very limited set of themes: collant-dressed-anabolised-fantastic-powers heros. Comic books are a much richer form of art than this, see Moebius, Alan Moore, Crumb, Will Eisner and a lot of others.

If you really want the best book ever written about comics, read Scott Mccloud seminal Understanding Comics.

"an unbiased review of a the most important book ever to be written about the subject of comic books, or any subject for that matter."

The "most important book ever to be written about the subject of comic books" is Understanding Comics.

It's in comic book (more accurately, a graphic novel (even more accurately, graphic nonfiction)) form, which is the right medium to actually describe the craft.

I don't think we disagree all that much.

Nielsen's "Case For Micropayments" and Shirky's "Case Against Micropayments" both suffer, in my opinion, from a lack of perspective. They were so focused on the tiniest end of the micropayment phenomenon, they forgot that the majority of the value is found in the larger end -- in transactions between a dime and a dollar.

The line Nielsen is most famous for, "If a page is not worth a cent, then you should not download it in the first place," is, frankly, nuts. There's been a lot of good criticism leveled against this view, and rightly so. But this isn't my view of the micropayment future, and I don't think it's a view most micropayment advocates share anymore. Perhaps it's time for "The New Case For Micropayments"?

Payments of over a dollar have worked quite well on the web for a while, and payments of about $3 on up were working fine in several ways even before paypal.

But it's the payments under a dollar that I'm concerned about, because that's the range of value where most items of web content worth paying for are.

In talking about micropayments in this range, there are two issues involved -- one is implementation, and the other is profitability.

Let's take profitability first. Paypal charges a 30 cent fee + 2.2% of the transaction for every business transaction they make. Selling an online comic for 50 cents will net you only 19 cents profit. Selling an online comic for a quarter will cost you 31 cents. The gap between what it costs your users and what you make in profit has been large enough in the past to disincentivize micropayment content, and drive people to other business models. I think BitPass tightens that gap enough to make micropayment content finally make sense.

Second, I think BitPass has a nice implementation that is much more conducive to *using* micropayments than PayPal is. For instance, if you purchase Bitpass content, you can come back and view or download that content without being forced to repurchase it. Paypal doesn't offer this kind of service. There are other aspects of the BitPass implementation that I think are superior, too, but rather than commenting on all of them, I'll just say that implementation makes a difference, and sometimes it makes *all* the difference.

online payments for less than $.25 will never become wildly popular, or even marginally accepted.

Here's where we do disagree. I'd set the bar of unpopularity considerably lower than 25 cents. I think there's a vast amount of digital content out there that could be fairly valued at a quarter. Scott McCloud's online comic was a quarter, for instance, and I felt it was the right price.

And there may be special cases where even a cent is appropriate. Take McCloud's voting experiment, for example. He lets people vote for the title of the next cartoon he draws in his "Morning Improv" series by spending as little as a penny. One penny = one vote. By my rough count, he's made over 33 dollars so far on this little experiment, a small but not insubstantial amount.

Like I said, though, this is a special case. Scott can charge a penny per vote because of the relationship he's built with his readership. Corporations that try to charge a penny per page will find their users "breaking up" with them unceremoniously.

So yes, there are some successes, but I don't think anyone should say micropayments work everywhere just because the iTunes Music Store is making it work at $.99 a throw.

Nobody's saying micropayments work *everywhere*. They're just another payment option, one that can work with and even enhance previous payment options like subscriptions or advertising. Not sure if you want to subscribe to a given site? Paying for content ala carte might be the step that convinces you.

I think the momentum is becoming increasingly obvious -- micropayments are here to stay. I really do expect Shirky to back

Speculation, and I assert otherwise. Find a counter example.

Yup, it's speculation. It's too early to know yet how well some of the micropayment content sellers have done yet. We'll find out in a few weeks.

Sure, that $109.30 for U2 will really persuade them to go indie, and the $10 for Linkin Park shows just how much you wacky kids will pay for your college boy rawk.

Well, first, you're confusing donation systems with micropayment systems. Micropayments aren't about charity; they're about making a transaction.

Second, we do know that as of a couple weeks ago, at least one previously unknown musician has made over $100 selling his music online. Not bad, considering the small number of Bitpass users at this point. Feel free to disparage away, but it's proof that people will pay 50 cents for a song, even from an artist they don't know very well. And of course, iTunes Music Store has been successful doing the same thing, but with less of the money (about 7 cents a track) going to the artist.

Heh, how much have you paid?

I've paid a few bucks to BitPass, and bought a little music from Joshua Ellis, Scott McCloud's comic, and Jim Zubkavich's "Makeshift Miracle" comic, and I still have a buck and a quarter left. I've enjoyed my purchases, and I've enjoyed the feeling of supporting independent artists. I'm looking forward to more artists, bands, and writers coming on board.

...is right here.

But seriously, props to Scott McCloud.

It's a pisstake of Scott McCloud of Understanding Comics fame, for those who were wondering.

It's a pisstake of Scott McCloud of Understanding Comics fame, for those who were wondering.

A Man who's already covered the future of comics.

Suspension of disbelief is not the only effect of stylization. Stylization can also create a more universal identification with characters. Scott McCloud covers the topic well in his book Understanding comics.

I think Scott McCloud of Zot fame (http://www.scottmccloud.com) had probably the broadest definition of all - anything that doesn't involve survival or reproduction can potentially be defined as "art".

The whole point being that you can't just eat and/or have sex all day - you have to find other things to do to fill the time. Thus "art".

Let the arguements begin...

You're right on; the fee sends a very clear message to the end user by seeming like a prepayment for free downloads.

I'm a theoretical proponent of the micropayment system, run by something uncomplicated, such as PayPal.

Scott McCloud proposed micropayments for several art forms in his 2000 and 2001 graphics-based articles, specifically this and this. Clearly not the newest idea, but a sensible presentation of it.

You're right on; the fee sends a very clear message to the end user by seeming like a prepayment for free downloads.

I'm a theoretical proponent of the micropayment system, run by something uncomplicated, such as PayPal.

Scott McCloud proposed micropayments for several art forms in his 2000 and 2001 graphics-based articles, specifically this and this. Clearly not the newest idea, but a sensible presentation of it.

You're right on; the fee sends a very clear message to the end user by seeming like a prepayment for free downloads.

I'm a theoretical proponent of the micropayment system, run by something uncomplicated, such as PayPal.

Scott McCloud proposed micropayments for several art forms in his 2000 and 2001 graphics-based articles, specifically this and this. Clearly not the newest idea, but a sensible presentation of it.

From meempool
(I can heartily recommend Leisure Town, it's twisted.
I find the comment in the Forbes article about comic books not making a profit, and that the publishers treat them as R&D for ancillerary rights to be quite intriuging...)

Whatever happened to comic books? In the 1940s millions of Americans read comics not only for Superhero stories, but Romance, Cowboys, War, History, Literary Adaptations and more. Readers were lured away whenever another medium provided their "fix" cheaper, easier or better, beginning with television in the '50s. By the early '80s the only genre still dominated by comics was Superheroes, and 1989's hugely profitable Batman signaled the beginning of the superheroic exodus from comics to film. Since then comicbook sales have plummeted, from $850 million in 1993 to $275 million in 2000 and still falling fast. Leading publishers Marvel and DC Comics both now treat comics solely as Research and Development: they lose millions printing the comics, but earn far more selling licenses for movies, cartoons and toys. Comics' core audience, traditionally pre-teens, is now 18-30 and getting older every year. Is this the death of comics? Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics, plays Gandalf to an unofficial fellowship out to save comics by migrating to the Internet! Join the revolution with Justine Shaw's Nowhere Girl, Patrick Farley's Electric Sheep, Tristan Farnon's Leisure Town, Derek Kirk's Small Stories, Jenn Manley Lee's Dicebox, Cat Garza's Magic Inkwell and more!

From meempool
(I can heartily recommend Leisure Town, it's twisted.
I find the comment in the Forbes article about comic books not making a profit, and that the publishers treat them as R&D for ancillerary rights to be quite intriuging...)

Whatever happened to comic books? In the 1940s millions of Americans read comics not only for Superhero stories, but Romance, Cowboys, War, History, Literary Adaptations and more. Readers were lured away whenever another medium provided their "fix" cheaper, easier or better, beginning with television in the '50s. By the early '80s the only genre still dominated by comics was Superheroes, and 1989's hugely profitable Batman signaled the beginning of the superheroic exodus from comics to film. Since then comicbook sales have plummeted, from $850 million in 1993 to $275 million in 2000 and still falling fast. Leading publishers Marvel and DC Comics both now treat comics solely as Research and Development: they lose millions printing the comics, but earn far more selling licenses for movies, cartoons and toys. Comics' core audience, traditionally pre-teens, is now 18-30 and getting older every year. Is this the death of comics? Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics, plays Gandalf to an unofficial fellowship out to save comics by migrating to the Internet! Join the revolution with Justine Shaw's Nowhere Girl, Patrick Farley's Electric Sheep, Tristan Farnon's Leisure Town, Derek Kirk's Small Stories, Jenn Manley Lee's Dicebox, Cat Garza's Magic Inkwell and more!