I have a few questions:
1. What is the best place to find comics on the web or on IRC (not counting Mobilism, obviously)? For example, I was looking for the early limited series of Gold Digger comics (FYI: the author has graciously posted the first 199 issues of the regular series for free reading and download:
http://antarcticpresslibrary.com/ ) and I didn't find anything in #ebooks on IRC Highway, even though I've seen several servers with lots of comics there. I searched TPB, and found a few torrents. Sadly, it appears the collection of Gold Digger comics here at Mobilism are all expired. I really miss Demonoid, as it had TONS of comic torrents, as well as hard to find ebooks, movies, tv shows, etc.
2. Which do you consider more important, the author or the illustrator (if different)? Is the author usually listed on the release thread titles? I am a science fiction/fantasy prose reader, and I am always interested in finding comic adaptions of novels (Discworld by Terry Pratchett, Shannara by Terry Brooks, works by Piers Anthony, etc.) I am also a manga reader, and in that instance I am used to a single 'mangaka' (author and illustrator) personally creating the series. When it comes to mainstream American comics, obviously that isn't the case, as you have a licensed property that changes whenever a new author or illustrator comes on board. I almost view much of the American mainstream comics as "work for hire" the way a TV series has multiple authors who follow a show 'bible.' Sure, there are the originators such as Bob Kane, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Todd McFarlane, etc. I know there's many other famous creators, I'm weak on comics.
3. What is a good way to store digital comics? I can load my .epubs up in Dropbox, I mostly have enough space (except for huge series like Star Trek.) However, I don't have the room for hundreds or thousands of comics at 5-50 megs each, either in Dropbox or on my laptop itself (my computer has about 10gig free.) I've had several catastrophic hard drive failures, including a 500GB drive. Since then, I've learned to back up the truly important stuff on Dropbox (my writings, personal lists, family photos, etc.) I could burn the comics to CD, but a house fire or tornado would destroy them along with the laptop. I guess I could upload them to another Dropbox-style cloud server like Google Drive or Amazon's cloud service. Of course, there I'd run into a little problem, I only have 33K-50K upload speed since I have the lowest cable modem service.
I'm almost ready to make my first uploads in the comics board, I've been going through some scanned online magazines that have some serialized comics in them, some of the magazines are 30 years old. I've had to use Google Chrome to view the magazine at Google books, and save the .jpg of the comic page from each issue. I'm sure the main comics that I'm scanning will be welcome, but I've also noticed the magazine has some classic literature in comic form (such as Treasure Island, The War of the Worlds, etc.) Would those be welcome as well?