Like the headline says. After 49 days, just when we least expected its triumphant return, Panel Syndicate’s The Private Eye has surfaced on this, the internet.
You can now enjoy the second chapter in Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin’s paint-splattered future-noir for the low, low price of whatever the hell you want.
Here’s what I wrote of that previous installment back in March:
It’s 2076, America’s 300th birthday. Fittingly, this neo-noir zeroes in on both old and new, with a melting pot approach to progress as richly seasoned as the country itself. The social commentary simmers too, as hearty and scalding a broth as Terry Gilliam ladled out in 1985′s Brazil. In Vaughan and Martin’s vision of the not so far-flung future however, faces like Katherine Helmond’s aren’t stretched out with absurd machinery; they’re hidden under holographic displays. Rather than assuming the role of a fish-faced MMORPG avatar in a virtual realm, you become that avatar in the real world. It’s a system much like the one employed recently by indentured staff in McCann & Lee’s Lost Vegas. It’s all part and parcel with a vision of tomorrow where information and secrecy have wound up in a tailspin. As always, this future’s most frightening aspect is its plausibility. It might not even take us 60 years to catch up. Except, can you imagine a world without an internet?
And from Conor’s Pick of the Week review:
There’s been a lot of talk about Brian K. Vaughan’s world building ability and oh mama, is that on full display here. One of the best things about this issue is that while there is so much going on in world of The Private Eye, so many rules to learn and customs and norms to suss out, very little of it is actually explained. Save for one brief scene—where the main character provides a bit of exposition explaining that some time in his past/our future, the internet broke open and spilled out everyone’s deepest darkest secrets to everyone else which is why there is no more internet and why privacy is at a super premium—everything else about this world we have to glean from the context of the story and the characters. Why does the press now act like the police? Why does everyone walk around in a superhero-esque disguise? Why is there what appears to be a robust system of commuter trains in Los Angeles? While we don’t know all the answers yet, there are context clues for everything (except the trains; we may never know the answer to that) and I think that’s wonderful. Clearly this world that has been created is deep and interesting and I love that Vaughan and company give the reader enough credit to not hand everything to us on a silver platter.
Go. Buy it now.
And don’t forget to add it to your pull list!
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Sweet! Was beginning to get worried.
Damn this is good. Very hard to top.
Oh happy days, oh happy days!
Vicente’s colors in these previews look incredible – really makes Martin’s art pop!
Can’t wait!
Will Thrillbent’s (Mark Waid’s project, where insufferable is being published) digital comics ever make it to the pull-list? Or Monkeybrain’s for that matter?
Probably not any time soon. THE PRIVATE EYE is a special case.
What makes it so special? I’m not being contentious, just curious.
@Anville: Brian K. Vaughan.
That’s not really… a reason.
If you need a list of digital new releases from across the internet to add to the data base, I’m sure someone can help you out.
@TheAdventurer: That it’s being done by one of the biggest and best comic book writers in western comics is indeed the reason that this book is a special case.
So Waid isn’t one of the biggest and best? I love BKV, but it does seem like a bit of preferential treatment.
I wonder if we could peek behind the curtain and see what the process of populating This Week’s Comics involves, it might make perfect sense. I would assume the process would be different to add all of the various digital-only comics that don’t have Diamond’s solicitation info. I have no idea obviously. At the end of the day, the site belongs to 3 certain dudes who can make these decisions based on some hard-and-fast rule, on a whim, or somewhere in-between.
If you’ve ever seen Monsters, Inc. it’s a lot like that.
The mazes of aerial conveyors part, or the bottling of children’s screams part?
I’m really not trying to be a jerk either. I’m glad The Private Eye is there, I just wish Insufferable and the like could get in on the party too.
And Weekly Shonen Jump, and 2000 AD, and
I still haven’t read the first issue yet. Something about reading a comic in PDF form just leaves me cold, and I don’t have any e-reader or anything. I just never got around to reading it – it’s just not the same. I love BKV and Martin, though.
I’m sure they appreciate your boundless affection.
Ha!
I’m just saying that if it was in print, I would gladly buy it and read it. But instead, I downloaded it for free and never bothered to read it. When print is dead, I guess my love of comics will be, too?
Now I’m going to have to read it just so I can respond more knowledgeably to your snarky remark.
Im guessing that only BKV’s Mom and Wife have “boundless affection” for him. I love wheelhands Batman beating off pick.. how did he find that gem.
Okay, I read the first issue, really liked it, went back and gave them some money and picked up issue 2. Everybody happy know?
My only problem with The Private Eye is marketing. Since they put issues up the moment they’re done there isn’t really anyway to know when they’re up. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d love if there was an official Panel Syndicate Twitter so they could give us updates. Great issue though!
A Twitter account doesn’t seem too much to ask, no. BKV is apparently quite resistant to all that though. Too bad.
Considering that you’re posting this on a article about the book in question, a few hours after it became available, i think the community generated marketing angle is working just fine:)
their friends and fans spread the word for them. Its incredibly authentic viral marketing. I saw tons of tweets this morning.
Ye its a beautiful thing. I think the team are doing exactly what they set out to do and more.
Kind of weird that BKV has enthusiastically embraced the technological advance of digital only comics but fights the obvious free marketing advance of twitter. Anyone know why this is?
They do have an RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/panelsyndicate?format=xml
Cool thanks.
If you told me a year ago that BKV would write something I’d enjoy more than “Saga” I would have called you a damn liar. Yet here we are.
More than Saga? Really? I mean, it’s good, but I’ve yet to have that “Rocketship Forest” moment.
Thanks for the heads up. I downloaded and read it right away. Didn’t love this one as much as the first to be honest. Here is not the place to go into details, so maybe I’ll write a review when that becomes an option on Wed.
BKV is probably my most favorite writer of all time. In my early 30’s reading Y The Last Man single handedly restored my interest in comics. Ex Machina taught me that stories told in the funny books don’t even need to be about anything I would otherwise find interesting prior and yet I could still enjoy. Pride Of Baghdad, the most recently read book for me, as I had the LCS order it last month, showed me that even in a few short minutes of reading a comic (30-45 minutes) I could fall absolutely in love and feel totally upset about a characters plight.
This series so far has been beyond good, I NEED to know what happens next. While waiting I found that Google keeps track of how many times you visit a site after going to Panel Syndicate 2 or 3 times a day every single day since the last one was released. It keeps track until a certain point, at which point it just says “You’ve visited this site many times”. As if it is trying to tell me I have a problem, and that is BKV books lol
I read issue 2 & it built up to the conclusion masterfully — BAM, BAM!, BAM!!! like an action/spy movie in a comic wrapped up w/ a twist. I delighted in seeing more characters in this world & more of the futuristic landscape that Martin still is in top form. I eagerly await issue #3 & now time to read even more comics like Detective Comics 19 80 pager.
Matthew
This is a mini right?
Nevermind…just went to download this and saw it’s planned for 10 issues.
I’m not much of a digital reader. Anyone have a preference of format? PDF, CBR, CBZ? Any major differences?
PDF works great for me on a PC. When it opens in your browser after you purchase it, right click on it to “Save As” somewhere on your computer. When you read it in Adobe Reader go to the View menu option and choose Full Screen Mode. Use your mouse buttons or keyboard arrows to advance pages. Hit the Esc key to get out of full screen. (You may know some or most of this already, but thought I’d be thorough).
The nice thing about PDF is that it’s a standard format and viewable on pretty much any computer, tablet, or smartphone. Save it to Google Drive, Dropbox, or Evernote and then you can access the file pretty much anywhere.
@icn1983: I go with PDF for that reason. Looks great on my iPad.
Thanks guys. Went with PDF and both issues look great!
Spanish drawing is the best there is. If the plot is right. Here you are a MMMMMMMMMMAASTER PIECE.
congratulations to the creators on this fine ‘opus magnifica’