Thanks for all the comments and the mails about the last post, great to have a sounding board for tricky decisions, next time we'll be voting on my breakfast, Aldi Sugarpuffs or stealing someone's crackers in the canteen.

I missed out on the whole Napster thing a few years ago. Had no pc or net connection and enviously listened to friends boasting about how their minidisc (remember those things?) is full of downloaded music. It's only a year since I've had access to the internerd at home and at work after years of sponging a few minutes on dial up here and there and going to that shitty 'web cafe' over in Springfield. Heh, that place used to be a laundrette and web cafe and was ran by a Pakistani gentleman with poor English and he was constantly bombarded with angry customers unhappy with their washing, mostly Travellers complaining about how Josie's communion dress was ruined and the like it, it was funny shit.



I've been a big collector of audio and video nonsense for years and when I finally got into the peer to peer file sharing it was like being in nerd's heaven, films, albums, flarn and the occaisional comic saved as a pdf. At the tremendous rate that all this shit is advancing I was still shocked to find about the wholesale piracy of mainstream comics, scanned by volunteers and made freely available by the dozen.

All you need is the CDisplay Sequential image viewer installed and then just search for 'dcp' on your prefered p2p network thing. DCP stands for Digital Comic Preservation. Usually the weeks releases will be saved 'DCP ww-mm-yy' and contain 20-60 issues. It's great just to see what's being published and some of the utter shit that the kids are buying. Is it harming the comics industry? Not in my experience, as a snob who poo poo's most comics because of the bad production (when you're a hack like me, seeing other hacks make shortcuts is annoying) or high cover price, it has been a habit changing experience to get my jaded paws on 50 new comics a week. As a result of skimming through comics I've found some gems and now buy comics again.

I used to love all the crappy superhero stuff churned out by Image, Marvel and DC but something went sour and I stopped buying them. My opinion of comics remained unchanged for about 6 years even though I was spending most of my spare time making then. In 2002 I bought no comics at all and didn't even bother visiting any comic shops that year.

You can also get some rarities and shit that you'd never could afford too plus you can be brutally honest with what you're reading since you didn't pay for it. So give it a go, stick with it and you'll find something you'll love. And if you love it, go out and buy the comic.

yeah, it's illegal but what isn't these days? Smoking in pubs, setting a spy cam up in the girl's toilet in work etc.

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