Robot Comics is proud to announce the launch of DSComics.com, a comics site for Nintendo DSi which includes the first comics ever produced for this platform.

Through DSComics.com, Nintendo DSi users will we able to read comics specifically designed and formatted for this console. The service is completely free and doesn’t require to download or install third-party components. Users just need to open the Nintendo DSi Browser and navigate to dscomics.com to start reading comics.

The launch includes 3 free titles (Thunder Road, Anda’s Game and Misery Depot), of which two are Creative Commons licensed, that in this case allows fans to share and remix the comics at their leisure.

“Our goal is proximity in the broadest sense of the word. We don’t want anything -distribution, hardware, even money and copyright-, to get in the way between comics and their potential readers. By releasing free comics for popular hand-helds we are reaching a brand new audience that was largely ignored by the comics industry.”, states Hermes Pique, Robot Comics’s Director.

Below is a rundown of the first titles that are already available in DSComics.com.

Thunder Road #1

A high-action, wide-sweeping episodic pulp adventure by writer Sean Demory and illustrator Steven Sanders (Five Fists of Science).

The bomb-ravaged American Heartland has been largely left out of the equation, falling prey to unchecked corporate land-barons and motorcycle-riding, nazidope-smoking MEF veterans ravaging the wastes. Some small towns have become fortresses, while others have followed the Soviet model and taken to the road, with clans roaming from one corp-compound to the next. Route 66, Interstate 70 and a dozen other superhighways have become the new frontier, where fortunes can be made with grit, cunning and a steady hand. Welcome to the Thunder Road.

Anda’s Game #1

An adaptation by Dara Naraghi (Terminator Salvation movie prequel) and Esteve Polls (Mega-City Noir) of the short story by Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing editor, Little Brother).

“[A] riff on the way that property-rights are coming to games, and on the bizarre spectacle of sweat-shops in which children are paid to play the game all day in order to generate eBay-able game-wealth. When I was a kid, there were arcade kings who would play up Gauntlet characters to maximum health and weapons and then sell their games to nearby players for a dollar or two — netting them about $0.02 an hour — but this is a very different proposition indeed.” -Cory Doctorow

Originally published in the Creative Commons comic Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now by IDW Publishing, Anda’s Game is remixed by Robot Comics to create a new version specifically designed for mobile devices.

Learn more about Anda’s Game.

Misery Depot

A mystery/science fiction one-shot drawn by Juan Romera (Zombie Highway: Directionless) and written by Hermes Pique, intended for mature audiences.

An anomaly causes an elderly mother to awake undressed inside a humid capsule. The voice of her daughter echoes in her memory, the intent of her words forgotten. Was she sharing the completeness of their unity, or hatefully wishing her mother’s demise?

A seemingly infinite corridor of capsules hosts hundreds of persons, calmly sleeping, miserable underneath. Yet, an old man shares the mother’s awareness, and is even certain of the nature of the place: a high-technology concentration camp; the second one for him to escape…

Learn more about Misery Depot.

About Robot Comics

Robot Comics publishes and produces digital comics for hand-helds, such as Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch, Google’s Android mobiles, Nintendo DSi, Amazon Kindle. We offer titles specifically designed and formatted to be read on e-devices.

Related posts:

1. Cory Doctorow’s Anda’s Game #2 for Nintendo DSi
2. Cory Doctorow’s Anda’s Game #1 for Nintendo DSi
3. Name our Nintendo DSi mascot

Below is a partial list of free CBZ and CBR comics ready to download from the web. We will publish a tutorial about CBR to CBZ conversion shortly. If you don’t know what’s a CBZ or CBR file, please check this brief introduction first.

Publishers

• FlashBack Universe (download page)
• Oni Press (download page)

Titles

• Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales Of The Here And Now (IDW Publishing, 2008) (download page)
• Misery Depot (Papyrus Comics, 2008) (official site)
• Tales from the Public Domain: Bound by Law? (Duke University, 2006) (download page)
• Therefore Repent! (Jim Munroe, Salgood Sam, 2008) (download page)

Some comics are offered directly in RAR or ZIP. If your comic book viewer does not support these extensions, simply rename the comic to CBR or CBZ respectively.

Criteria

The list doesn’t pretend to be complete. Only high-quality, popular or notable comics are included in the list.

Updates

If there is a free comic book that you think should be included in the list or if you found a dead link, please leave a comment below or let us know at contact@robotcomics.net.

Related posts:

1. What is a CBZ or CBR file?
2. Droid Comic Viewer v1.2.1: now with cbz support
3. Robot Comics launches standalone comic viewer

In this installment, Hermes Pique, writer of Misery Depot, provides a step by step tutorial on adapting a page of the original version of Misery Depot into various screens of its mobile version.

The page

I will be talking about adapting page 5 of Misery Depot, shown below. I chose this particular page because, unlike other pages whose adaptation consisted in simple creating a screen per panel, the result from adapting this page differs significantly from the source material.

Source material

We adapted Misery Depot from high-resolution originals without lettering. Working on non-lettered pages allowed us to resize the panels without worrying about the size of the fonts. Fortunately, we used digital lettering for Misery Depot and we didn’t have to tweak the originals to remove the lettering.

Concerning high-resolution, some panels -like panel 4 of page 5- may end up being larger in the mobile version than in the original version. A high-resolution source is needed to avoid quality loss. To avoid limiting options, the resolution of the image should be big enough so that any panel is larger than the size of the screen.

The source material for page 5 is shown below.

Screen 1

Our first instinct was to start the sequence with the first two panels as they appear in the source. It turned out that it was too much text for the screen, and that the transition from the previous sequence was too sudden. A screen flick is weaker than a page turn, so we decided we had to ease the transition between sequences. To achieve this we moved the first caption to a black screen that clearly indicates that a new scene begins.

Screen 2

To include all the art of the first two panels in a screen we had to fit their width to the width of the screen, reducing their size. The height of the resulting image was smaller than the height of the screen, giving us the opportunity to put the remaining caption without covering the art.

Screen 3

The third panel was the only one that was directly converted into a screen. Some steps of the process don’t require much thought.

Screen 4

A portrait panel followed by two landscape panels were left. Portrait panels are particularly challenging in landscape screens, because they leave most of the screen blank. In this case, we decided to move the caption of the next panel to the blank space of this screen. A fortunate decision because the caption fits this image better.

Screen 5

We conclude with the remaining two panels. The only change here is that we moved the last caption to the previous panel, ending the sequence with a panel that speaks for itself.

Conclusions

While we don’t proclaim that this is the best possible adaptation of this particular sequence, we felt that the result works in different ways than the original version. While adapting this page we learned or reinforced our belief that:

• A panel does not correspond to only one screen and one screen does not correspond to only one panel
• A screen flick is not equivalent to a page turn
• Blank spaces are opportunities to rethink the position of dialogue

We hope you found this tutorial helpful. Let us know what you think about it and feel free to ask any questions by leaving a comment below.

More about Misery Depot

Related posts:

1. Misery Depot definite
2. Misery Depot redux
3. Adapting Comics for the Amazon Kindle Part 1 – Optimizing Images