Mycomics.com Is Taking Away My Comics Email

Mycomics.com is taking away my comics email.

They’re not taking it away, really. They just expect me to pay for it now. Darn. There go the free comics.

Ucomics.com went to a pay system last year, offering either all your comics in one big email or on one special webpage. They still offered the option of getting one comic for free, knowing that someone who’s just getting Adam or Foxtrot or For Better or For Worse wouldn’t pay for a service that was supposed to be a convenience to the people getting twenty comics a day.

I really wanted Foxtrot and Adam (my local paper gets FBOFW) so I did this: I signed up with two different email addresses.

It worked well enough.

Well, I’ve checked and there’s no such loophole for mycomics.com. It’s too bad, too. I have my own webspace and unlimited aliases to my POP accounts. I could get one comic sent to an infinite number of aliases that would actually all go to the same account, maintaining my comics the way they were before. Too bad they probably thought of this.

But what if I sucked it up and paid? It’s $7.95 USD (being Canadian, that’s $10.89) for a year of unlimited comics in one email, including Sundays, which they didn’t deliver before. I’m not saying its expensive, but paying for what’s essentially an email list seems ridiculous. I can’t think it’s something worthwhile. As much as I love getting Get Fuzzy, Betty, Luann, and Pickles delivered to my doorstep everyday, I think I might still be better served writing constantly to one of the local papers and whining until they drop Garfield and Beetle Bailey and replace them with Betty and Luann. The paper already has Get Fuzzy. I think Pickles might be out of the question since a syndicated strip named Ben, also about an older couple and their kids, is actually local.

Instead of paying $10.98 for the internet comics, which I’d have to print out on paper and ink I pay for to put them up on my bulletin board, I could get the paper (a little more than $100 a year delivered to my door) and all the extras. The news, for one thing. And I could clip funny strips and put them on my fridge to my hearts content.

I’m all for paying for things on the net. I have PayPal. I even tried BitPass to buy Scott McCloud’s latest comic (which cost me $0.34 CAD). But paying for a newspaper comic strip seems ridiculous, perhaps because I’m used to just picking up the newspaper and seeing the strip. All the ones I subscribed to through mycomics.com were ones I used to read in print. The comics I read online – be they the latest Scott McCloud, or Modern Tales or Serializer strips – are only available online. Since there’s no other way to get them, and I know I’m supporting a small industry, I don’t mind paying.

Paying into the comic strip syndicates seems, well, like giving money to someone who’s already getting some from my newspaper subscription. And since I know newspapers are struggling, I’d rather throw my support to the paper instead of directly to the syndicated comic. So, in this case, I’ll stick to the old fashioned way of reading those strips and try to get them all in the newspaper. At least that way I’m getting the movie listings too.

Illustration by Bill Duncan.