FOURTH & FINAL PART OF WHIZZER & CHIPS #7...

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With these pages, you now have the complete issue of WHIZZER & CHIPS comic #7 - or do you?  What you have are scans of the contents of the comic, not the comic itself.  "Wait a minute," you say.  "I can see it and read it, so in all practical ways, I have the comic, do I not?"   No, you have scans of the comic, which is not quite the same thing.

It's a difficult one, I confess.  In this case, the comic is the carton and the content at one and the same time, but if you only have access to the content, then you don't have the carton.  One could argue that though you don't have the original carton, you have a different form of carton, which surely qualifies as a comic given the content.  Although, does comic strip content automatically define an alternate carton as a comic?  It doesn't qualify books or newspapers as comics (which remain what they are) if they contain comic strips, so why should it with anything else?

And even if there were some validity to the above argument, I'd still maintain that a distinction should be made between an actual published periodical (as defined and accepted for decades) and a digital presentation of the same material.  One you can touch, smell, pick up whenever you want and experience in a different, far more satisfying way than reading it on a computer screen.  But the real difference is this:

If you ever run out of loo roll, you can't take your laptop, tablet, iPad or smartphone into the toilet with you and wipe your @rse with it then flush it away.  That must surely count for something?!  (Yes, yes, I know;  to wipe your bum with a REG PARLETT or TERRY BAVE page would be tantamount to sacrilege.)