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Return Of Bloom County. Sorta
Slartibartfast writes "According to mycomicspage.com, the entirety of Bloom County will be re-published on their site, starting St. Paddy's day, and at a "highly accelerated" rate of one week every two days, until the entire strip is up. In addition -- an extra-special bonus for us Berke Breathed fans -- his college predecessor, Academic Waltz, will also be run. One caveat: it's subscription-based. However, for $10, I'd call it a huge bargain. I'm signing up."
Speaking of, what other strips would people like to see republished online?
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Strictly IMHO, but I believe that it's probably aged a lot better than other 'classic' comics (doonesbury comes to mind).
It's more dated than, say, 'peanuts'; but the quality is also better too. (again, IMHO).
I completely agree, however, that Calvin and Hobbes would be an even better choice.
Give Breathed and Larson credit for knowing when to hold, when to fold, and going out on top.
I asked him how everyone would have ended up, and he said that Wendell (the nerdy computer geek that Urkel was based on) would have ended up as a Linux kernel developer.
Cool stuff.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
If it started December 31, 1980 and ended January 1, 1995 that is closer to 14 years. In that case, All but a couple comics would fit in a four year subscription.
If it started early in 1980 and late in 1995, it would be closer to 16 years of comics.
I'd pay -- through the nose -- to see original strips like Blondie (back when it was a social mores shattering strip), Krazy Kat, etc. Comics back in the 30's, during the heyday, etc. These things can be found, piecemeal, in various anthologies. To have 'em all in one place for reference, well... not only would it be a terrific glimpse into Americana, it would be great fun to read, too!
They were lumped together in my mind too, but in the "infinitely re-readable" sense. While Calvin and Hobbes has aged somewhat better, you don't have to appreciate *who Ed Meese was* in order to be entertained by Opus' discussion of him. Often the Meadow Critters' understanding of the '80s politics was fairly superficial, which was okay.
It's a good recapitulation of history, especially to read about Cold-War era fears; "The Iron Giant" didn't lose any points from me for being about the '50s, nor "Cradle Will Rock" about the '30s.
But when I read Bloom County or Outland today, I find it even more compelling as a discussion of a political era that could shed some light on today's. With similar attitudes in the Bush Administration II and today's media about what it is to be God-Fearing and Rifle-Toting as in the 1980s, Opus and Milo and Binkley and Oliver... and even Bill... give us Berkeley Breathed's perspective as he was living through it, and we can get a sense of just how similar distant times can be.
I'd say it aged well.
Go buy the complete works, you can probably even find them used for less than cover price. Then you don't have to be in front of a tube to enjoy them, you aren't at the mercy of their business model, you've got higher resolution print copies, and you don't have to print and bind them yourself if you want all those advantages.
You sound like the old people who don't understand e-mail (and I'm 41, so when I say "old" it really means it). They think that they have to print out their e-mail, photos and all, in order to see it. I sent a color photo to an older relative and she asked me why I sent it to her when she doesn't have a color printer.
If you manage to locate and purchase all of Bloom County in book form, what do you do if you want to e-mail one of the cartoons to a friend. Tear out the page and scan it? How do you read the strips in chronological order? What do you do if you want to be able to see the comics at home and at work? Roll a handtruck of Bloom County books into and out of your office each day? Yeah, that'll impress the boss. While books are nice (I have a house full of them), they are not always ideal.
Just a quick FYI. You do not need to be a subscriber to get the C&H strips. They've been running for a copule of years now.
I'm getting the exact same thing now.
/.
Honestly it worked this morning. Their tech support must read
I've pulled the whole thing numerous times. Looks like I'll have to put up a mirror.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
One can be found on his official website.
And here's the other one (younger slashdot readers may not know about Reagan's infamous microphone test which probably inspired this strip).
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
So why can't he do that now? Couldn't BB get a deal with a monthly (Playboy, Popular Science, Ladies' Home Journal, whatever) and do four strips an issue?
It's too much to hope for Bloom County to return and snuff Cathy out of the dailies, yes?
Bloom County, Calvin and Hobbes, and The Far Side made the comics page a great place to visit every day. Nothing's come close to replacing them (sorry Zits and Bizarro).
Jack
Just how tedious is it to archive (locally) huge quantities of strips like this? I mean, using MyComicsPage, let's say I sign up for a year and wish to archive Calvin & Hobbes on my computer (so's I can view 'em offline). Is this so impractical as to be impossible?
Also, which comics do they have full archives of? Is it all of them, or just a select few?
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
Well, the way I see this it's not about MY price scheme at all. It's about the "value" of a song undergoing change.
This is really an interesting thing to watch happen because for the first time in my life I'm watching an industry fighting to keep their product from losing it's value while at the same time a huge number of people are using file sharing to redefine what that product is worth.
This is so much different than someone stealing cars and paying what they can afford for them. First of all a Dodge Viper (your example) is clearly worth vastly more $20. That's completely lopsided. At this point lets take a $15 CD (again your example) and then lets say it has 10 tracks to keep my math challenged brain from thinking too much so we're talking about a buck and a half a track. Good track, bad track, it all breaks down the same way.
Go back to your Dodge Viper and say for instance it's a $60,000 car. I admit to not having a clue what they get for a Dodge Viper so let's use that number for conversations sake. Now if the Dodge Neon also was priced at $60,000, and so was every other model of truck Dodge made then do you think many people would buy the Neon? Do you think many people would even buy Dodge products at all? Surely not enough of them to allow Dodge to keep charging such a ridiculous price for a Neon.
The thing is a lot of people will buy a Neon at a reasonable price. A lot of people will buy music at a reasonable price too. I'd be happy to pay the $1.50/track price I mentioned if I could buy three of the songs I like and pass on the crap. That's what it's going to be. If they don't like it their entire industry will slip out from under them.
Software is a completely different matter. OSS is going to do (and is doing) to retail software what file sharing is doing to record labels. It's going to take the field and level it, albeit without having to resort to obviously illegal means in order to do so.
In either case it's going to change. You can change with it or get run over by it but it's going to change.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
As far as leaving the original intact being justification, I'm not sure I agree. What would happen if this argument were used in other areas?
- Movies: (or even new albums). We've heard of people sneaking out digital copies of flicks/songs, and making them available on the net. In a perfect world of no-limit bandwidth, those songs could theoretically be available worldwide instantaneously. How long do you suppose people will keep putting out movies/songs if everyone had access to them before they even hit shelves/stores? If everyone thought $10 was too much for a movie, and felt they were 'harming nobody' by just downloading it...
- Drugs: Pfizer spends 10 years and $400 million finding the cure to AIDS. Your buddy works in the lab, takes home a copy of the magic formula, and soon everybody has it. Great, AIDS has been eradicated, but Pfizer soon goes out of business, and no further research is done, anywhere, because all companies have an 'information wants to be free!' guru.
- Software: Is $50 ridiculous for a game or program that took years and $millions to develop? See above movies argument. If lifting a program is made very easy and very quick; how much real advance will we see in the future? Not everyone can program fulltime just for fun and the knowledge that they are betting society from their efforts.
- How many other jobs/products/services could be lost under this justification? How many people would be out of work if everything were fair game?
I'm sure some will say that's the natural evolution of things, but I really don't think so. Someone has to spend their full time jobs creating, editing, performing, designing, programming, etc. When you, or anyone, lifts something by saying 'it's too expensive, PLUS it really isn't harming anything', I think the damage done is beyond estimation. How many people will just throw their hands in the air and say 'screw it' when they realize that they won't get paid for their work.
Would you work for free? At the end of the week, if your employer said, "well, chuck, you worked 40 hours, but I really only liked about 5 of them. Here's your check for five hours." Would you still work there? What if all companies did that? Their argument would still hold. "Hey, you're still intact! And you went bathroom SEVERAL times during the week, which we we're reimbursed for. So quit yer whining."
Mmmmm sacrilicious.
I don't care what you think about the good sense of copyright restrictions, but the fact is they do exist, and you're quite likely to have to agree to them to get access to this site. Legally speaking, you're not going to be authorized to make your own copy to read wherever you like, copies to send to your friends, or any of the rest of that. You seem hot to sign up, so if there is no such agreement, go sign up and tell me so already.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Interesting, that. A bunch of years ago I worked on a CD product called "The Doonesbury Anthology", which was a collection of all the Doonesbury strips, with historical context, games, animations, etc. We (i.e. some poor temp slobs) had to scan in all the damn things, many of which were only available from newspaper clippings. There were a few (mostly the early ones) that are missing, mainly like you said, having disappeared into the mists of time.
This was just before the Doonesbury site went up, so those are the same images. Let me tell you, *that* was a hellacious job. Half a dozen scanners going full time, always behind schedule, all on slowass Pentium 90s (this was mid-1995). We had to dig up the strips from a bunch of different places, mainly because, for tax purposes, Garry Trudeau doesn't keep the original drawings (can you imagine what an original Doonesbury is worth?)
It's a shame the company (since assimilated into nothingness) screwed the marketing up so bad - we did two other Doonesbury products that also went thud. Has anybody ever heard of the Doonesbury Screensaver or the Election Game? (Of course, there are good reasons, perhaps. The screensaver didn't work with Windows 95 and the election game was in Visual Basic. Ah well. The comics were cool.)
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?