Ashcan Comic
by benbreen on 1/30/2026, 7:26:20 AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcan_comic
Comments
by: kennymeyers
Amazing to see this on Hacker News. I've recently begun a startup called Sweet Shop, meant to fill the hole that Comixology left when they sold out. Comics are amazing, and they continue to hold an important place in global culture. Ashcans are still called that and most publishers still distribute them at cons.<p>Comics or graphic novels or manga, or however you were introduced to them are becoming the defacto literature for good reason. People work hard to create them. Ashcans are a nice way to ease that burden of getting someone interested.<p>(<a href="https://sweetshop.app" rel="nofollow">https://sweetshop.app</a> if you're interested)
1/31/2026, 9:05:04 AM
by: komali2
I think it's a bit weird that our society is designed such that Palworld can be sued for making a game depicting Pokemon.<p>For about ten thousand years, humans invented and traded stories that often contained characters and environments they didn't invent. You've heard of some of these characters - Zeus, Persophone, Hades, all recurring characters in stories, mosaics, paintings, statues, carvings. Nobody got sued for it, these characters just functioned as analogues for emotions and elements and conditions, universally recognizable figures that didn't need introduction, they could just be used when you needed e.g. a horny character that liked to change people into animals and then have sex with them.<p>Just very, very recently we aren't allowed to do this anymore. Despite the fact that Pokemon are a shared cultural experience for millions of people from different countries and languages, an opportunity to have a universal symbolic story telling language across borders of nations and languages, we can't do it because that would harm the ability of a single corporate entity to extract value from it as it sees fit. Never mind that we have our own stories we might want to tell from this shared cultural heritage.<p>And do we ever have stories to tell! Look at any fan fiction site. Among all the smut you get gems like book 4 of the three body problem, written by a different author than the original. Look at the incredible art created from out of copyright works, like Lies of P for pinnochio or House MD for Sherlock Holmes. I want more of these, for things that were invented in my time!
1/31/2026, 7:38:23 AM