A MESSAGE FROM THE PUBLISHER

When I created The Zoom Comics Group in 1997, the World Wide Web was less than a decade old. Personal computers were also fairly new to the scene, with the famous 1984 Apple Superbowl TV commercial just 13 years before. A lot has changed since then. In 1997, the most common browser resolution on a user's computer was 800 x 600, and most websites were designed to be backwards compatible to the previous, most commonly used resolution of 640 x 480. Of course, in this day and age, monitors are fast becoming akin to flat screen TVs, and browser resolution has marched steadily upward over the last decade. My monitor is set to 1600 x 1024, more than double the screen space of 1997. But 640 x 480 was once the standard, and this was the world of personal computing and the Internet that The Zoom Comics Group was born into.

The Zoom Comics Group was initially developed to be compatible with the 640 x 480 browser resolution, and at that resolution, the pages of our comics would fill such a screen entirely, with no scrolling necessary. We were striving for a pure "click-through" experience (I don't know about you, but i don't like scrolling comics pages). Our comics were designed for the World Wide Web, not for print, and all of our size specifications were designed for that experience rather than merely drawing comics at the standard 2 x 3 page ratio. The goal was to leave the printed comic book behind, and tailor the pages specifically to the computer screen. The pages of Johnny Zoom #1 would fill the screen entirely, and on an 800 x 600 resolution monitor, there would be neglible white space around each page. In 1997, that was perfectly fine.

As the years went by, we stuck to our initial specifications, but slowly and surely, monitors started to get bigger. The most common monitor resolution used for websites today is 1024 x 768, and many browsers are much larger than that. Eventually, higher and higher browser resolution was shrinking our comics pages until on most browsers today, they fill a small portion of the screen. If you've read our comics recently, you probably have wondered why they seem to fill such a small portion of the screen. Because we have been publishing since 1997, our initial standards have become antiquated.

Which brings us to today, the glorious year of 2008. It is at this time that we begin making a major change in The Zoom Comics Group, one that is long overdue, but will require some time and many resources. Our latest comic, Rule The World Comics #4, is breaking the decade-long convention of 640 x 480 backwards compatibility. We are now adopting 1024 x 768 as our new comics page standard, and as you can see if you've read the new issue, the results are dramatic. Once again the pages fill much of the monitor window, and as an added bonus, we can now feature our comics in the standard format of averaging six panels to a page, although, as we continue to develop strictly for monitors rather than printed pages, we still feature the "landscape" format to avoid scrolling and retaining the "cick through" experience.

We hope you enjoy our latest comic in its new spacious monitor resolution, but this now presents us with the task of reverse engineering all of our previous titles to this new resolution. We are slowly but surely remastering every Zoom Comics Group title to fit this new resolution for improved readability into the future. All currently published issues will be revamped, in some cases returning to original scans of the artwork to retain as much detail as possible, and reformatted to display in a 1024 x 768 resolution. And as we reopen this door to the past, we are confronted with a couple of major revisions to some of our existing comic books.

For example, Zoom Graphics Comics & Stories is a collection of previously published material from the earliest days of The Zoom Comics Group, most notably Rule The World Comics #1 and #2, along with some other filler material. The original 2 issues of Rule The World Comics were nothing more than scanned artwork presented online in glorious black and white. When we published Johnny Zoom #1 in full color, it was decided to remove these comics and repackage the material, with full coloring, in Zoom Graphics Comics & Stories #1 and #2, with added material that had not been published. As we remaster these early comics, we have decided to republish the material in its original titles, as Rule The World Comics #1 and #2, in the new improved 1024 x 768 browser resolution, in full color. The leftover stories that were not part of these two comic books will likely be published as a Zoom Comics special. This change will take place slowly, and we eventually hope to have all previously published material revamped into this new standard.

This is not to say that we are not working on new material as well. The long-awaited Johnny Zoom #6 is completely pencilled and much of the inking has been completed. We are hoping to have the completed issue online this year, and I don't think I am exaggerating when I say that this particular issue of Johnny Zoom will represent a further evolution of The Zoom Comics Group, and of online comics in general. Johnny Zoom #6 will be unlike anything we have yet published. I don't want to give away too much, but it will be the first comic book from The Zoom Comics Group to be published using Adobe's Flash program.

In any case, you can expect major revisions to our existing comics and new standards for our future comics as we move forward together into the future. Of course, a decade from now we may be looking at the comics we are producing now and revamp them once again for a new generation of browsers and/or computer systems. The World Wide Web keeps evolving, and we will do our very best to keep our comics relevant, engaging, and as always, fun to read!

Onward and Upward!