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June 24, 2008 - Tuesday
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Big News from WOWIO!
We are retooling the site and content agreements to achieve WOWIO's founding mission: to increase free access to books worldwide! The changes and updates will take a few weeks, but we will be back online in mid-July. Existing account holders will be notified automatically when the global WOWIO site goes live. If you are not a WOWIO account holder but would still like to be notified, go to wowio.com to sign up.
5:00 AM
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May 13, 2008 - Tuesday
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Nexus: The Origin
Three-time Eisner Award winner Nexus: The Origin (Best Writer/Artist Team Mike Baron and Steve Rude, Best Penciller Steve Rude and Best Single Issue) is available as a free download on WOWIO!
Download this modern classic…
6:21 PM
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April 16, 2008 - Wednesday
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Atlantis Rising Heads for the Big Screen
DreamWorks Studios today announced that it has optioned the rights to make a feature film from Platinum Studios' sci-fi comic book miniseries Atlantis Rising. "No sea horses or tridents here," said producers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (writers and producers of the upcoming film Star Trek and the hit TV series Alias). "The comic brings a fresh, techno-thriller approach to a story that holds all the tenets of a classic us-versus-them alien invasion movie." The first four of five titles in the series are available on WOWIO now!
1:06 PM
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April 15, 2008 - Tuesday
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Supreme Named to CSBG All-Time Top 100
Alan Moore's Supreme — reissued by Checker on WOWIO — is voted among the Top 100 Comic Book Runs by Comics Should Be Good readers at leading online comics magazine CBR. Twenty-five Supreme and other titles by comics legend Alan Moore — creator of other classics such as Watchmen and V for Vendetta — are available. Check out Supreme now!
11:34 PM
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April 8, 2008 - Tuesday
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February 12, 2008 - Tuesday
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Alan Moore’s Supreme
The acclaimed Alan Moore's groundbreaking The Story of the Year arc is available in ebook format exclusively on WOWIO!
Checker adds a never before published Alex Ross cover, and each issue has a special Alex Ross sketch page or two for the Ross fans out there.
Moore (Watchmen, From Hell) is widely acclaimed as the best writer in comics, and his superior talent and imagination are on full display in his work on Awesome Entertainment's Supreme.
Go to WOWIO to download these classics, free!
2:47 PM
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January 29, 2008 - Tuesday
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Give the Gift of a Comic Ebook!
WOWIO is pleased to introduce a new feature that enables registered users to quickly and easily personalize ebooks and then send them to friends and family as gifts. Whether for birthdays, holidays, or just because, a WOWIO ebook is a personalized gift your friends and family can appreciate... and they can receive it instantly. Click here for more information or find a title to send as a gift now!
11:23 PM
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November 3, 2007 - Saturday
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Gumby, the Eisner Award winner by Bob Burden
 Bob Burden brings back Gumby, complete with dancing sombreros, bunuelo-loving superheroes and evil clowns.
Get this Eisner Award-winning book complete and for free, at WOWIO Comics. Click here to get your free download!
4:02 PM
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October 31, 2007 - Wednesday
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October 25, 2007 - Thursday
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October 5, 2007 - Friday
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Comics on the iPhone
 Cover art (above) displays beautifully, but text in the interior pages (below) is illegible without zooming. 
After some extended use, I've found that the iPhone has the potential to be a surprisingly good ebook reader. This is true for immersive text reading, such as fiction… but how about comics and graphic novels? The demo photos looked good, but how is it in real life?
To test this out, I loaded the comic A Bit of Madness (which, as an aside, has some of the most gorgeous comic art I've seen, and a richly-textured story to match) on my iPhone. Well… attempted to load would be more accurate, because Mobile Safari was unable to display the graphics-heavy 25MB PDF (the largest file I've been able to open is 7MB). The file was too large for email, so the backup plan of using Mail's PDF viewer was out, as well.
Assuming that Apple or a third party will someday develop a true PDF reader that can handle the complete book, I decided to use a smaller 2MB excerpt just to test the display hardware and interface.
The results are beautiful to behold. When viewed in portrait orientation, the entire comic page can be shown and the iPhone's sharp, rich-color display shows off the art beautifully… with one significant problem. The text is simply too small to read. The infinitely variable zooming allows it to be made legible, but actual reading requires a fair amount of scrolling. While the fingertip motion is very natural, it's impossible to get a sense of the whole page and the integrated, flowing nature of the book's layout is lost.
Switching to landscape orientation helps legibility, but again, the visual flow is definitely compromised.
On the other hand, a more sequential, panel-oriented comic like retro superhero Pistolfist (below) is much more amenable to the iPhone display's limitations.
The iPhone's limitations with storing and displaying documents continue to be a problem, but these are fixable in future software upgrades. However, the reader experience with page-oriented comics is hurt by the small physical size of the display, which can't legibly display text in a full-page view. Unless your comic reading is limited to panel-oriented titles, you'll definitely want to consider a larger-screened alternative or wait for Apple to release an iPhone-like device with a bigger screen.
Originally posted in The Reader.
9:27 AM
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October 1, 2007 - Monday
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A Flood of New Titles!
We have so many new titles that I can't keep up! So I'm going to do a catch-up round here and hit a bunch of the new stuff in one post. I won't go into a bunch of description here, just click on the covers that look interesting to you and read all about that title. And, as always, every one of these is free at WOWIO Comics!
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September 24, 2007 - Monday
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A Bit of Madness: Igguk
 A Bit of Madness, from the bande dessinée master Emmanuel Civiello, features a rich narrative and some of the most beautiful comic art I've seen.
These were originally featured in serial form in Heavy Metal magazine, now collected and released in digital form at WOWIO Comics...
... and it's a free download, as always.
12:16 PM
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September 21, 2007 - Friday
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Star Trek Comics = Retro Geek Fun
 If you're a geek of a certain vintage like me, the otherworldly strains of the original Star Trek theme song can send little tingles up your spine — even 30+ years after those rapt childhood evenings watching the UHF-rerun adventures of Kirk, Spock and the starship Enterprise. For better or worse, those shows helped to define me. It's no coincidence that I spent my first eight years after college working as an engineer on the Space Shuttle program.
When I spotted 60s-70s-era Star Trek comics on the WOWIO New Releases feed this morning (free downloads), I was there in a click. Back in the day, I watched the original series and the animated show, but I had never seen this comic.
The writing in the first book is a bit odd with, for example, Spock's speech laden with uncharacteristic emotion and far too many exclamation points. Then again, the writers didn't have the prism of decades of pop culture character development on which to base the dialogue. This settles down in the later books, though exclamation points don't ever seem to really go away in comic-speak.
Bottom line: seeing Shatner and crew rendered in that now-retro comic book style is pure nostalgia.
Originally posted on The Reader.
6:14 AM
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September 17, 2007 - Monday
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RSS for New Comics
WOWIO Comics has been adding new titles on a daily basis — it's getting hard to keep up! So we've added a new RSS feed that lists all of the new titles, updated every day as new books goes up.
Be the first to download the new stuff — all free, as always! Point your RSS reader to
 http://feeds.wowio.com/WOWIO_New_Comics
4:56 PM
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