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Underground > Comic Books >

Bittorrent Busted!

  
 
Grady Hendrix
16:23 / 21.11.07
A few weeks ago, Demonoid, a popular comic book bittorrent site was shut down, mostly because of illegal music downloads. Yesterday, Z-Cult, another popular comic book bittorrent site was also shut down against its will. Details aren't forthcoming, but since Z-Cult only offered comics for download I have to assume that pressure was being applied by one of the big two comics distributors.

I know discussing illegally downloading here is frowned upon, but in light of Marvel's third, and much bally-hooed digital venture I wonder if I could be allowed a moment to talk about my experience with downloading illegal comics since I have a feeling that it reflects the experience of a lot of other downloaders.

I read comics as a kid, stopped reading them for years, and then occasionally picked up a graphic novel in Barnes and Noble and browsed it to kill time a few years ago. So, in effect, I got back into comics by illegally downloading that content while sitting in the B&N. I had been into Grant Morrison and Alan Moore earlier and after reading some of their new collections I started buying their trades: Watchmen, From Hell, the Doom Patrol trades, the Filth.

I also, god help me, liked the Ultimates from Mark Millar, and bought the hardcover trade of vol. 1. Then I heard about downloading comics and after spending two days hunting down the sites, learning to use bittorrent and downloading a comic book reader (I'm an idiot, apparently) I started downloading new issues of the Ultimates. When they were late to the torrent, or didn't show up in the first batch of new releases, I began to buy the floppies. While reading the big batches of new releases a few other titles caught my eye: Runaways, the Walking Dead, Powers. I started picking up the floppies of these to keep up with the stories from time to time, but I preferred to buy the trades.

Gradually, I settled into a pattern: read everything on a download, and if I liked it enough pick up a trade. Floppies were an impulse buy: I couldn't wait until the next issue to show up on the torrent, I really liked the creator and wanted to support him or her, or I needed to kill some time somewhere and grabbed one to read and then throw away. I was buying probably 1-2 trades a month and 4-5 floppies each month for a little over a year.

If I hadn't been downloading I never would have tried Garth Ennis' Punisher, I would have missed Seven Soldiers, We3, Seaguy, Grant Morrison's Superman. All of those are comics I either followed by downloading or caught up on after missing them and then either picked up the trade later, or wound up buying floppies of as it came out. And reading some comics made me read more comics: I got into Scott Pilgrim and bought the Absolute Sandman volumes, as well as a couple of DC Essentials for the nostalgia kick. It also saved me from feeling burned. Thanks to downloading I was able to check out The Other Side which I hated (Sorry: I thought the art was fantastic but the story wasn't very interesting to me), Countdown (which I had hopes for but which I stopped following after 2 issues), Grant Morrison's Batman (a few issues were fun, but I found it pretty easy to ignore after that) and I was able to monitor the fact that I didn't need to go back to following the Walking Dead after I stopped picking up the floppies. This probably sounds like heresy to any of the creators out there but there's really not much of a way to preview a new comic series rather than reading an issue, and if I spend the money and wind up disliking it as much as I disliked the titles listed above, then I'm going to feel grumpy and burned and then I'll go online and cry like a baby. I check out an issue for free, don't like it, and more often than not I figure "no harm, no foul" and just move along.

The point here is that reading some comics for free got me back into buying trades and floppies on the direct market. It grew the direct market audience, at least by a factor of one person, and while that's probably not good news for creators or independent comics, it's exactly what Marvel and DC are supposedly committed to doing. Marvel and DC are the companies that mostly have their material torrented, and they have the most to gain by allowing that to continue, or even supporting it. Now that I have no torrents, I'm not so interested. I'll probably wait for the trade on a lot of the ongoing series - storing floppies just isn't something I'm interested in - and either read it in a Barnes and Noble the next time I'm in there or, if I really love it, pick it up. I may pick up the next All-Star Superman, a Seaguy 2, maybe even the last issue or so of Punisher from Ennis, but other than that, if it's not easy for me to read 'em then I don't really need it.

Anyways, I started checking out manga scanlations recently and right now what I really want to buy copies of are Yotsuba & ! and Drifting Classroom.
 
 
Axl Rose
02:05 / 30.11.07
It may go beyond the Bittorrent communities, unfortunately. Scuttlebutt has it that DCP is on hiatus as of this week due to one of the members getting a cease-and-desist order over recent usenet postings. I hope this rumor is false, because the digital comics scene-- like the actual comics market-- is small enough that losing a single key player has some pretty dramatic effects.

To respond to your larger comment, my comics buying habits have definitely changed as a result of the ready availability of scans. Like you, I now only buy what I already like. And I spend more money on comics-- I spend somewhere around $40 a month on comics now, whereas I was spending about $20 a month back when I had to buy everything I wanted to read.

One part of this change, though, I think is definitely regrettable: I buy almost no floppies. For the most part, I buy trades. I always hated the actual comic book format. I know that for many comics fans, this is a sort of heresy. But I never liked comics as physical artifacts, only as content. The paper is flimsy, the printing is slipshod, the ink rubs off on your fingers, the comics are full of ad pages, the floppies can't really be shelved in any sort of pleasing manner, and you have to choose between, on the one hand, accepting that the physical copies you have will degrade swiftly and, on the other hand, going through the whole plastic-wrap-and-backing-board rigamarole, which I can't bring myself to do. So now, I read all the comics I like as they come out, and each month pick a few of my favorite recent comics to pick up in book format, which is ad-free, which is nicely-bound, which looks good on my bookshelves, etc. Now, there is obviously a problem with this, which is that trades are a secondary market in comics, which by extension means that I don't end up supporting some of the creators who I should, by all means, be supporting the most: those with small print runs, those creating new and experimental works. I try to address this by picking up a floppy or two a month, but I would be lying if I didn't acknowledge that digital comics have shifted my purchasing power towards already-popular series by already-established creators for already-powerful publishers.

I'm not sure how to resolve my feelings about that.

And I'm not sure whether comics sharing does, in an actual sense, hurt DC and Marvel's revenue. On a personal level, I think digital comics sharing is pretty awesome, though. I might have quit reading comics altogether by now if my tastes hadn't been refreshed by discovering so many new great comics through illegal sharing; I probably would have kept up with the comics I already liked, but my subscriptions would have dwindled as series ended or were taken over by creative teams I didn't like. And I can't imagine that I would have ever impulse-bought any of my current favorite comics.

I will say, too, that for all the complaints that have been leveled against the digital comics scene, it has a strength which is impossible to gloss over: it makes old comics available. Remember the old days, where catching up on the complete history of a character you enjoyed would have cost you thousands of dollars and months of work in tracking down hard-to-find back issues? Or when it was a matter of tremendous patience and energy and finances to collect the final, hard-to-find old gems from your favorite creator? And remember how none of that money and time you were putting in helped the original creators or publishers in any way, whatsoever? I finally got to read early comics about my favorite characters only when digital comics sharing caught on. And I'm honestly disappointed in the major companies for not finding good, inexpensive ways to release, if not their entire back catalogues, at least the sorts of issues and story arcs that they must already know they will never, ever put in the investment to republish in hard copy?
 
  
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