Website Review - Digital Comic Museum
By RazzaTazz 0 Comments
I should admit something that some people already know about me, Despite them being anachronistic and a little misogynistic, I have a fascination with romance comics. The only problem with romance comics is that they are notoriously hard to track down. If you don't believe me, next time you are at your comic store look in the back issue bins for titles like Young Romance, Girls' Love Stories or Heart Throbs and see how many you turn up (or better yet ask the clerk if you want them to laugh at you.) As a part of comic history though, romance comics are pretty important, if not individually then as a whole to show a time in comics when heroes weren't popular and when war, western and romance comics dominated the medium. While being unable to acquire them in a consistent way (I find them sometimes at comic consolidators, or in comics bins in used book stores) I looked around the internet for suggestions on how to better find them. Surprisingly the advice was that I should download them, and also surprisingly the advice was that it was not illegal. This should be qualified in a sense though. What makes them legal to download and read is that they are public domain comics that companies no longer care about, mostly because the companies have ceased to exist. So while DC puts out a mostly pointless Valentines Day special called Young Romance to perpetuate the title, a lot of early romance titles are available for free download, as well as all kinds of other comics. Of course to be public domain these have to be old comics, I think 1960s is the most recent (there is a statute of 50 years for copyrights I believe.) The best of such sites which I have found is The Digital Comic Museum. Most likely fans of modern characters will find this resource somewhat useless as there are none to be found in there, but for those interested in the medium and not the characters so much (and especially comic history) this is a pretty amazing resource.
