Added 1 new A* page:Holy time-waster, Batman! So I discovered today (from Wikipedia, naturally, as I was looking up a nutty old comic villain—"The Weeper"—who was appearing in an episode of "Batman: The Brave and the Bold" that I was watching on Netflix) that there's this web site called The Digital Comic Museum that is collecting and making available for free reading/download old comics that have fallen into the public domain. Most of these are comics from the era when comics were invented and thrived to a degree nearly unimaginable today: in "The Golden Age" of comics, from the late '30s to the early '50s, comics in just about any genre you can think of (and some you probably can't; heck, Gabby Hayes was practically a comic genre to himself! : o) and from many different publishers—almost all of them long since defunct—flourished, with the big ones like Donald Duck, Tarzan, and Captain Marvel selling upwards of one or two million copies of each issue! Compare that with today, where, with a population twice as big as the Golden Age's, the biggest-selling comic in the past ten years or so—the first issue of a Spider-Man reboot series that started a few months back—just managed to crack half-a-million copies sold.
So yes, comics were bigger then (usually with way more pages per issue, too!), and now I'm wondering why I've been so concerned about trying to follow modern comic happenings via Comixology preview pages when I could have been reading thousands of entire comics from the time when comics were much more of a vital force! The web-based reading experience at the DCM isn't so great—the pages don't scale to fit your screen nicely or anything like that, and all you can do is move one page at a time, forward or back (UPDATE: a friendly DCM admin kindly pointed out to me that clicking the down arrow widget at the top center of their preview pages will bring up a clickable thumbnail list of the current issue's pages!)—but where it really comes into its own is when you download issues you like, then load them up into the comic reader of your choice on the device of your choice; in my case it's the Android "Komik Reader" app on the hand-me-down Nook HD+ tablet an affluent technophile friend gave me a few weeks back—it's finally being put to good use perusing crazy comics like these (the other nice thing about these comics being public domain is that I can extract the graphics and do whatever I want with them : D):
     
Sweeeet.
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