Why I Hate Saturn (and other Kyle Baker classic comics) free online

The astounding, amazing, brilliant comics creator Kyle Baker has thwacked a whack of his graphic novels onto the tubes, for free, including my all-time favorite Baker, "Why I Hate Saturn." Run, don't walk.

Why I Hate Saturn by Kyle Baker (via Making Light)

• [Missy Pants]

  BTW – download it if you can, the flash craps out on page 125. :)

• [Isaac Priestley]

  Such a great book. I remember being blown away the first time I read it, I had never seen a comic with such an assured, modern and savvy sense of humor. That and the almost-unique way Baker did the dialogue under the panels made this book really special for me.

• [Timothy Krause]

  Oh, wow, that takes me back. I had totally forgotten about this comic, thanks! 

• [gadgetphile]

  Not that I don’t trust anyone, but the file appears to be a self-extracting PDF. Personally, I don’t want to run any unknown .EXE file.

  Is there a way to open the contents of the file without running the executable?

  • [bazzargh]

    It’s not a self-extracting PDF, it’s a flash 10 swf wrapped as an exe. I can’t run it either – I don’t have any windows machines at all – but you can see the flash symbol table inside it easily enough. 

    Depending on how this was made, there are tools that can convert the exe back to a swf (which would at least make it easier to open cross platform) and from there there are other tools that can unpack the resources from the swf.Unfortunately, most of those are windows-only tools too.

    I’m wondering if it’s even worth it – if this is an exe of the same swf that’s on the website, would this not be missing the pages after 124 too?

    But never mind that – read ‘You Are Here’. The flash version on the site is complete, and excellent.

    • [DevinC]

      I liked it enough to take the risk and run it.  The .exe works, and the whole thing’s complete.

  • [howaboutthisdangit]

    This may be more than you want to know, but….

    As bazzargh said, it’s a “Flash Projector” file.  I’ve run it on Windows without any problems.

    I don’t know about automated tools, but if you are have a good hex editor (I used HxD under Windows for this) or other binary editor you can search the .exe file for the last instance of the three characters “CWS” (all uppercase) and lop off everything BEFORE that.

    The resulting data, beginning with that “CWS”, is a Flash file.  Save it to disk (let’s call it “saturn.swf”), then use ffmpeg to extract the frames to individual files: “ffmpeg -i saturn.swf saturnframe%04d.png”.  Change the “.png” extension if you would rather have a file type besides PNGs. (e.g. “.jpg” for JPEGs, “.gif” for GIFs, etc).

    Not as easy as point-and-click, but not hard if you’ve got the tools.

    That’s as far as I’ve gone with it, so I have no recommendations for reassembling the images into some other format.

• [$19428857]

  A friend loaned me her copy a couple of years after it first appeared, and was already out of print. Loved it so much when I first read it, I spent several years looking for a copy in the pre-Ebay, pre-Amazon days. Will re-read tonight.

• [duncancreamer]

  Is this anything to do with the Sumatra Fox song of the same name?

  http://emergencyumbrella.hasawebstore.com/product/INS57182/sumatrafox

  Also, is there a download? I can’t read the text on screen.

• [Pat L]

  Too bad it is too small to read….

• [OtherMichael]

  The Cowboy Wally Show has been one of favorite books (sans genre specification) since I found it in 1988. I like what Baker does with all of his different media, but I’d love to see him do some more black&white work.

• [Alan Wexelblat]

  I’m amused, but not entirely surprised to learn that you like this comic, too.  I remember many years ago Lew Shiner sat me down and said “you MUST read this.”  _Why I Hate Saturn_ contains my all-time favorite line about vegetarians, which I shall not spoil here for those who haven’t read it.