AWKWARD ZOMBIE

I’ve noticed a random scattering of old comics have taken a hit in quality so bad that you can’t read any of the text. Also the normally-transparent outer edges have become an opaque white, which should make spotting these particular examples easier.

Here are a couple examples: http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f278/ ... mic267.png

http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f278/ ... 8a16f5.png

...those are 100% absolutely legible and fine? What in the world device are you viewing them on

Seems you had the right idea. I tried viewing them on desktop and they look fine, but viewing them on mobile forces the low-resolution version. This is... strange.

Yeah, for whatever reason opening them on my phone has them showing in incredibly low resolution. The text is entirely unreadable. This all may just be photobucket screwing with things as they've cracked down on hotlinking/hosting.

I saw this problem way back in the early days of the internet. A couple ISP's offered some sort of "speed boost" option that would actually take things like images and recompress them into a smaller file size before sending them to your computer so that it would download faster. All images turned into jpg's and looked like garbage; it was most noticeable with webcomics, most of which were gif's so the text would be clear. (It got in the way of my reading Bob and George.)
Eventually they stopped running that gimmick because people didn't think it was worth the slight change in speed.

I imagine something like that is going on with your phone; it's recompressing the image into smaller files so as not to use up as much data. I would ask your phone provider if this is something they are doing.

If you're on Android, ticking the "Desktop site" box causes it to display at full resolution.