While I hate being inconvenienced myself, I’m more than ready to inconvenience my friends who use Windows.

First, thanks for putting this “old news” back in the news.

Second, please don’t ascribe to any sense of planning (or malice, or a desire to make your lives difficult) what can be laid at the doorstep of the simple wish to have a comics reader experience available at all. Keep in mind that the Elfquest comics went online early in 2009, when for most of the world, Flash was What There Was. The entire Apple vs. Flash hooraw didn’t surface until over a year later.

Third, we are looking into making all that lovely content available to the iPad/iPod/iPhone audience even as I type these words.

Fourth, while I know there’s not a goddam thing I can do about it (in response to the crowing about a torrent being made available in “less than two minutes”), I’m still old-school enough to resent someone coming into our house and taking our stuff without so much as a by-your-leave. You’re talking about the work of over half of two lifetimes as if it was a post-it note.

For the record, I am not the RIAA-mindset, insisting that anyone should go through impossible hoops to access our work. If that was the case, I wouldn’t have put the stuff online in the first place. For free. (Or for a donation, thanks for the suggestion.) But geez, just a little respect, huh? Or is that unacceptably old-school?

Anyway, I wanted to weigh in from the source before this thread went spinning out into the IMOsphere. Thanks for reading.

If you want to curl up with a good comic, buy them. They still sell several back issues on their site. I sold most of my stuff when I needed some cash on e-bay a few years back. That included the German versions I picked up in Switzerland in the late 80s as well as most of the original black and white WaRP Graphics issues.

Or you could go to Amazon and order the large format anthologies, they make for good couch curling upping.

Or did you want the comics for free? Well in that case the Pinis are being quite stingy. Dang flash! Only one of the most pervasive formats out there. How dare they!?

I wish I could relax on my couch to read it.

Are there no more dead-tree copies? (Jeez, free stuff still isn’t good enough for people.)

Now, it’s possible (even likely) that the Pinis consider that lessened usefulness a feature, since it allows readers to get a taste of the work, while still providing a reason for many people to shell out for the physical books. (Like me! I find reading long works on my laptop painful. But not like me, because I’ve already got the old Donning/Starblaze editions of volumes 1-4, published back in the ’80s. But then maybe like me again, because there’s plenty of story after those volumes.)

But it’s hardly ridiculous that people are annoyed when artists say they’re putting up work for free, and then wrap it up in a crappy, battery-draining, proprietary format.

I know, how about you (yes you, for whom Flash is an abomination) volunteer your time, energy and resources to re-code it in the Format of Your Choice, and then gift that to the EQ site. You get what they want, they get free website work, everybody is happy.

Torrenting doesn’t count- that’s just making virtual photocopies and sending them out into the world with no ties to the original work.

Thank you so very much for ElfQuest!

Krom

ElfquestRAP, I look forward to reading the series, and look forward to hitting that payment button.

No sense of entitlement here. Just disappointment that the content has been provided in a way that does not afford me convenient access any place or time I’d want to access it. I mean, I’d LIKE to read it, I’m just not willing to sit at my desk for a zillion hours to do so, that turns it into work.

Anyway, the real point is that just because it’s free does not mean I should rearrange my life to accommodate its format limitations. Inconvenient is inconvenient.

“The smell of pulp and fresh rain enhance the experience.”

I generally only buy physical media for reference, or if it’s artwork that was specifically formatted/printed to be seen on a particularly interesting paper stock or whatever. Elfquest, and more generally, monthly comic books don’t fit that criteria for me. For that sort of disposable reading I’d rather kill a pixel than a tree.

Full disclosure here – I work in the comic industry and get a boatload of comps every month. Digital versions would sadly not be a viable replacement because I need to see how the comics look in print. These comics pile up fast (maybe 100 per month), and I try to avoid adding to this mammoth pile by buying as little extra physical product as possible.

Karza says use my laptop. My laptop is a 17″ monster, hooked up to a bunch of peripherals in my office. I can’t really lie on my couch and hold that thing up while lying on my back relaxing, which means that if I want to read a flash comic I have to sit at my office desk and stare at my computer screen.

I think it’s fantastic that the Pinis have put Elfquest up for people to read. I just wish there was some non-crappy way for me to read it.

I’m not sure why people are ok with media dictating how the user should consume it. If Flash is a good way for YOU to read this comic, great. But there are others for whom it’s not. Delivery methods of content, free or not, should not arbitrarily reduce audiences via inconvenience.

Free puppy= yay! Free puppy that can only walk north= no thanks.

It’s been a while since I’ve looked into CSS media selectors, but when I get a chance I’m going to see whether it might be possible to use those to torque the bare HTML into a more pleasant experience for desktop browsers and the iPad.

I know this corpus is simply enormous (that’s part of why it is such a wonderful thing!), but it would be utterly fantastic if there were a way for people to contribute bounding boxes for per-page panels and speech bubbles, and to augment those with transcriptions of the contents of those outlines. Resources like OhNoRobot are wonderful, and ones like the Sandman Annotations (http://www.arschkrebs.de/sandman/annotations/) are simply invaluable; wouldn’t it be grand to be able to grep the entirety of ElfQuest as well?

ElfquestRAP, I feel like I owe you an apology. My intention for posting my code snippet above was not disrespect; rather, I meant precisely the opposite. ElfQuest is one of those comic series which has been around for so long that I feel guilty for not yet having read it all. When I heard about the entire archive being online, I leapt at the opportunity to archive it locally – too often has sudden popularity caused treasure troves like this to be snowed under by sudden load spikes! My intent was respectful preservation, not inconsiderate freeloading.

The timing of documenting my methodology was not well chosen: I should have waited for the original traffic spike to subside first. It would also have been wise to craft my version to shuttle traffic through the Coral cache. Mea culpa.

Thanks again for the wonderful library. How should I reach out to you when (or rather, honestly, if) I come up with a useful static navigation structure? Should I put it up on Gitorious, or would you prefer something more private?

Man, less than 2 minutes!

Or is it there and I missed it?

As it is, their site costs them money to maintain – with no ads, no donation button, or anything – and the content available on it isn’t really very useful to me.

They obviously have their hearts in the right place, and there are lots of people that this delivery method works for. I just wish that it was accessible in more open ways and scored them money in the process. Win-win for everyone.

wget -qO- http://www.elfquest.com/gallery/OnlineComics3.html |
awk ‘match($0,/showComic\([^)]+\)/) {$0=substr($0,RSTART,RLENGTH); sub(/^showComic\(./,”"); sub(/.\)$/,”"); sub(/\047,\047/,”_”); gsub(/ /,”%20″); print “http://www.elfquest.com/comic_xml_zoom.php?fd=” $0}’ |
wget -i- -qO- |
awk ‘match($0,/source=”[^"]+”/) {print substr($0,RSTART+8,RLENGTH-9)}’ > elfquest-list.txt &&
time wget -cxi elfquest-list.txt

Some small effort was put into the above to limit the number of necessary HTTP connections, in order to reduce the load on the server.

The naming convention omits leading zeroes, so files sorted lexicographically rather than numerically will show up in the wrong order. Here’s one fix:

find . -name ‘*-?.jpg’ | sed ‘s/\(.*\)-\(.*\)/mv \1-\2 \1-0\2/’ | bash

From there, it’s very easy to pack the resulting directories into CBR or CBZ files, or whatever. For extra points, put up a simple page which hyperlinks into the archives; for extra bonus points, send that back to the folks running the archive with a very brief note about why a Flash-free interface is valuable.