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Unfortunately, this new comics system is far from perfect.For starters, the comics don't look as good on my computer screen as they did in print-they aren't presented at a very high resolution.
The screen just isn't as good a medium for distribution as paper is.
Perhaps the new iPhone will fix this, with its 200-dots-per-inch screen, but I'm not holding my breath.
A bigger disappointment is that getting the comics on a Web page has changed reading comics from a communal activity done with my wife and family around the breakfast table to a solitary activity that I do in front of the computer screen.
Some days I will actually walk away from breakfast to "check my mail"-and read the comics.
Yet another problem is selection: there's too much, and it's not edited.
Back when I was reading the comics page, I got a selection of the comics I liked and some others I didn't care about.
But every now and then one of the ones that I didn't care about would catch my eye, and sooner or later I would get hooked.
Today, I get the comics that I care about by e-mail, and I ignore the rest.
If I ever decide to go looking for something new, I'm quickly overwhelmed by the selection.
Back when I was a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, we used to theorize about the "newspaper of the future" and the problems that it might have.
One of the ideas floated for the comics was that people would have high-resolution color printers in their homes, and the daily comics would be printed every...
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