Books, Funny Books: ‘Net Devours All

By Neal 

LA Times reporter Michelle Kellerinvestigates the online comics-swapping suubculture, where it’s said that some fans are scanning their favorite comics page by page, putting them on peer-to-peer networks, and letting other fans download them for free. The story’s a bit alarmist, but it sticks strictly to the impact on the superhero genre…when there’s arguably a more interesting story about pirated comics to be found among the denizens of “Scanlation Nation,” the wave of amateur manga translators who take Japanese comics that haven’t been licensed to American publishers and come up with their own English-language adaptations.