So far, nobody's offered glob(), so I'll throw that in there. Unless you're expecting to load several thousand filenames every few seconds, avoid the extra hassle of a readdir() loop. Since you're not even trying to save memory in your code, you should see no obvious performance difference.

Replace:

opendir(THISDIR,"e:\\perl\\comics\\");
my @comics=readdir(THISDIR);
close(THISDIR);
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With:

my @comics = glob('e:/perl/comics/*');
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Many people work in the current directory, and specify specific wildcard masks. The "angle brackets" operator calls glob() for you (if it's not a bareword), so this might be even more readable.

my @comics = <*.png>;
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Oh, and there are a few cases where Windows still really requires backslashes, but most of the time, it accepts forward slashes, Unix-style. (This has been true since MS-DOS 2.0 when it introduced subdirectories.) I find them easier to type and read.