Comic Book Confidentialby Ron MannSealed Collectible CD-Rom Rare OOP from original Voyager Production Release
Multi Media CD-Rom Software
Produced in the Mid-1990s by the Original Voyager Company
One of the best developers of multimedia CD-ROMs that ever existed, Voyager Company, released dozens of high-quality educational CD-ROMs between 1993 and 2000 before being bought out by Learn Technologies, which then quietly went out of business sometime in 2002. This is one of their interactive CD-Roms for PC/Windows or MAC.
Ron Mann\'s Comic Book Confidential, from Voyager combines interviews, historical footage, animation, and montages to trace the development of the comic book from the very first (Funnies on Parade) in 1933, through \'60s counterculture favorites like The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, to the 1980s revival, as exemplified by Batman (The Dark Knight Returns). This witty, incisive movie features interviews with influential authors of commercial, alternative, and underground comics, such as William Gaines, Sue Coe, Art Spiegelman, Al Feldstein, Lynda Barry, Will Eisner, Shary Flenniken, Frank Miller, Dan O\'Neill, and R. Crumb, with many of the artists reading from their own works. Stan Lee brings Spiderman\'s money worries to life, Charles Burns becomes Big Baby, Jack Kirby reenacts the birth of Captain America, and more. The only comprehensive documentary on the subject ever made, Comic Book Confidential contains rare historic footage: Congressional hearings from the \'50s \"proving\" the link between comic books and juvenile delinquency, expert testimony from anti-comic book advocate Dr. Fredric Wertham, and reformed youths gleefully getting ready for a (comic) book-burning. Ron Mann\'s Comic Book Confidential also showcases over 120 pages of comics by the film\'s featured artists, plus their biographies and publishing histories.
Technical requirements for Voyager\'s CD-Roms
Windows: 486SX-33 or higher processor; 640 x 480, 256 color display; 8 MB RAM MPC2-compatible CD-ROM drive and sound card with speakers or headphones; Microsoft Windows 3.1 (TM); MS-DOS 5.0 or higher.
Macintosh: Any Macintosh (25-MHz 68030 processor or better); System 7 or higher; 5,000K of available RAM; 13\" color monitor; double-speed CD-ROM drive.
The Voyager collection of CD-ROMs represents an era that is fading into oblivion.Due to a lack of computer systems still capable of executing this software, Voyager products that are still available in the original sealed packaging have significant historical value for collectors only.
The following discussion of CD-ROM technology and its preservation is found inThe International Journal of Digital Curation;Volume 7, Issue 2 | 2012:
Virtual CD-ROM Collections
Although the Voyager CD-ROMs have substantial historical significance, they, and most other published CD-ROMs, are destined to have a dwindling user base whose expertise in the systems required to use them is in sharp decline. The physical machines required to execute them have already disappeared from most educational institutions and even the operating systems are increasingly hard to find; at Indiana University, which once had many hundreds of “classic macs”, only one person within our University IT Services had distribution disks of the corresponding operating system software. The physical copies of these CD-ROMs are disappearing from library shelves. In seeking examples for this paper we made extensive use of interlibrary loan and we found that many cataloged copies of Voyager CD-ROMs are either missing or damaged.
The long-term probability for individual libraries providing physical access to the Voyager and other published CD-ROMs is nearly nil. The user base is dwindling, the existing hardware and softwaresupport disappearing, and the physical mediadegrading. While we believe these materials have substantial historicalsignificance, their ultimate survival depends upon spreading the preservationburden across many institutions through a virtual collection that enablesnetworked access for a sparsely distributed base of patrons using modernwork-stations.
