I have a serious addiction. And I’m not talking about comic books here… I have an addiction to those too but that is much more controlled. The serious addiction I’m referring to here is the online hunt for large digital images of comic art, wallpaper size and bigger.
See, I have a widescreen computer. I run at 1440 x 900 resolution. That means most desktop wallpaper found on the Internet doesn’t work me. I have to make my own. And to compensate for my 1440 width, I need images at least 1200 pixels wide or else the background looks like crap on my desktop.
Luckily, there are a couple sites that give me a frequent fix. By going straight to the source, I can get decently large wallpaper images from Marvel.com. They update frequently and they occasionally surprise me with an unseen piece of art (though their “First Look” wallpapers are rarely the first look).
I must follow this by saying that I like my large digital images unencumbered by watermarks and other horrid trappings. Marvel stamps these wallpapers with their ugly watermark and a title slug at the bottom. This means I have to crop each of them one by one to view the image clean and clear. It gets annoying.
But there’s an antidote. A Polish site that goes by the name of Avalon over at MarvelComics.pl. One or two times a day they post large scans of the cover and two interior pages of many popular Marvel titles. This site would strictly scan X-Men covers for years, but following Civil War they expanded to all of Marvel’s titles.
Depending on who scanned the comic on Avalon, it may look crisp or it may look grainy. But there are so many great choices that I don’t mind much when I get a grainy pic. They’ve been scanning at a width of 1280 on almost all titles lately, so I’m happy.
Other sites deliver the goods on a more sporadic basis. Avengers Forever will post many preview covers on their message boards, but only sometimes are the images of superior size. DC Comics has their own wallpaper section like Marvel, but their images tend to be ruined by excessively large logo text.
Better yet, some sites will feature an entire month’s worth of cover solicitations at high res sizes. This tends to be rare, and unfortunately there is no one site that always carries large versions of the pure cover art (minus logos and trade dress). This site has popped onto my radar recently. It carries covers and sometimes the links to interior pages work.
Having the right image as your desktop background sets an important subconscious tone. Personally, I love the hunt to find the best and biggest comic pics possible online. Google Image Search is always a great resource. And now that they’ve resurrected the “extra large” image filter, things are looking up for my addiction.
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