Accounts Deceivable CD
Story:
Art:

Written by Doug Miers
Pencils by John Bosco, Don Walker & Carlos Paul
Inks by Tie Alexander, Rob Lean, Sam Fonsecsa, Jason Maranto & Randy Carmine
Lettered by Michael David Thomas & Jason Maranto

Published by Comics Conspiracy
Price: $19.95

My Verdict: Different.

Three stories span a few generations of mayhem in this CD that collects Comics Conspiracy's Operator 99, Taxman, and The Exec. It's hard to discuss the setups for the last two titles since it concerns the events that take place at the end of the first and that might offend my non-spoiler sensibilities, but I can tell you this: it involves the phone company, the tax code of the future, brutal corporate takeovers and a very healthy dose of automatic weapons fire.

Let me state this out of the starting gate. It takes a great deal of testicular fortitude to be an independent comics publisher these days. It takes even more to actually say, "I know, let's publish our stuff on a CD-ROM!" Looking this over, it's not necessarily a bad idea on the surface. You do get three full-length comic stories. They're certainly not lacking in decent storytelling and artwork, but what commends the stories themselves is that they're based on original, interesting ideas. The concepts enclosed therein are fresh, so in this day and age that earns major points.

The books are presented in a format that pops up in your browser of choice, with page selections along the bottom for navigation. Flash allows you to view the artwork with and without word balloons, which is a rather tasty concept. Along with the three stories, you also get a few bonus bits that could not, obviously, be brought to you in the regular pamphlet versions. First, there are eight MP3 bonus songs provided by DJ Legionnaire, and they don't suck. Next you have bios on all the characters with a timeline of how they interact. Next, a screensaver that is eminently forgettable as it has stagnant images of the CC characters moving up and down a street. Finally, there's some alternate and other artwork for the three series.

Now, the bottom line when you get to something expensive like this is price. All together, looking at the CC website, you're talking $11 for all three comics. What do you get for the additional $9 for this CD? Well, depending on how fast your CD spins, you're looking at brief delays when changing panels. Also, you can only get a few panels on the screen at a time, so in some cases you're looking at sixty-two mouse clicks as opposed to half that number of page turns. And although it's nice to have extras (I'm a big fan of such things), those included don't add up to $9 worth of additional content in my book.

The good news is that the stories are available in regular comic form, and as nifty an idea as the CD is, I would point you back to the books. And that really is based on price more than anything else. For $20 you can get a rather sizable trade paperback of comics that contains more than three issues of content. And these days, that's a concern. But do check out the books themselves. It's always nice to read something that is definitely new.