Monday, September 25, 2017 • Afternoon Edition • "The CBR of comic book journalism."
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Review Group Week 330 - INSUFFERABLE WEEKS 1-6
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so yeah 10 |
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Yeah, that really doesn't make much sense. 
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The comic viewer was fine for a browser, fairly standard, but lackluster for a tablet. There was no full screen mode, and the pages were too tall to view fully in landscape mode, forcing me to view it in portrait mode with half my screen taken up by useless webpage junk. It seems to me that optimizing this for landscape view on a phone or tablet would be the obvious way to go here, but no attempt was made. It took so long to load up a page that I wasn't sure it was working on the first episode. After that it was just an annoyance. Navigation was clunky and not entirely reliable. Only the first episode contained navigation instructions. That aside, the story was good. It was engaging and paced very well for a weekly serialized story. I like Nocturnus and find Galahad annoying as intended (and recognize that from Galahad's point of view, his father is the insufferable one). I'm interested to see what happens next and will keep reading. The art is good but suffers from the design not taking advantage of a tablet screen. As a comic it was very well done, but as an innovation in the medium it stunk. I hope they continue to improve because there is a lot of potential in this project, but the execution is not there yet. For now, this might as well have been a printed comic which I could read a digitized version of. I'm gonna give it a 5, but as a printed comic it would be a solid 8. I'm just disappointed in the missed opportunity to innovate here. |
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I think it's formatted for iPads because people with iPads think iPads are the only tablet in existence. I have to adjust my settings to read the CBZ files with ComiCat on my Fire to the point it's easier to just read it on the website with a normal browser on my desktop or laptop. |
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How does designing your webcomic for one portable device a minority of people own make it any more accessible anyway? Not that I have an iPad, but I wouldn't waste the power it took to charge one to read Insufferable. This + the story content underscores my initial impression the whole thing is by aging Batman fanboys for aging Batman fanboys. And free means little if I need to spend $500 on an iPad and $50 a month for a data plan to read poorly designed webcomics on buses I don't take. |
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Well, while iPads are the majority of tablets and have a more square screen, most other tablets plus most modern smartphones all have the same "widescreen" screen ratio, I.E. if you turn them sideways into landscape mode, they are proportionally the same size (around 16:9, like an HD tv. So it would seem to make sense to format for this, as it would work well on phones, tablets, widescreen computer monitors, people viewing it on the browser on their playstation on their HD tv, etc. the iPad, for whatever reason, has a 4:3 screen, like an old school television. You could letterbox it on this and it would look fine. Or if you must design it for the iPad, then set up a mode that will letterbox it on other screens so that it is convenient to read. Tablets are great for reading comics in a well designed reading program. This is not one of those. The reason it would make sense to optimize it for these devices is because these devices are where people are purchasing apps that cost $1-$4 by the raping assload. Seems like the perfect place to sell digital comics. |
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Groan technobabble.  Let's just agree the site is poorly designed and clunky! I had this long-form review written about why everything is wrong with the new medium Waid and Quesada are so excited about (and erroneously assert is the same medium as print comics), and it was full of a lot of Marshall McLuhan and none of you would have wanted to read all that anyway. Suffice it to say, I found these new "innovations" to be cheap gimmicks, and I think they on some level incentivize clicking through the material quickly like the early video games that used the exact same model. The site itself is sort of obviously even to me not innovative, see: The Techno-Gospel According To Jude above. And if you want to capitalize on the digital medium and everything it is capable of, clunky motion comics ain't it. We have real animation now. But when it comes to comics, I'll stick with the medium I like and trust the long-term viability of (and profit from as well as enjoy). Now, the story itself. It's a What If Batman story to go with Waid's What If Superman story that recently wrapped up with a schmaltzy but undoubtedly heartfelt tribute to Siegel and Shuster, who the average non-Superman fan has probably never heard of. These deconstructions of superhero archetypes seem written exclusively for long-time comics readers to me, I can't imagine they would be likely to appeal to anyone outside that niche group. The same people who liked Irredeemable would like this if they read it, but how many people is that really? It all seemed pretty dull to me, and the artwork and color palettes were unsurprising and in the case of the background detail, underwhelming. Give us some depth! I think part of the reason it failed to truly provide an atmosphere for me as a reader though, other than the wide swaths of blue-green on either side of the screen often clashing with both the composition and the hues peripherally, is that contrary to what Waid promises with intent to Thrillbent, this just isn't a more-intimate or interactive way to read comics at all to me. It's distancing and too easy to become distracted from. The story so far is typical Mark Waid and caters to an ever-shrinking demographic, the new way to read comics is inferior to the old way in part because too much of modern daily life is already spent mindlessly clicking through things on the internet and the experience of reading comics shouldn't be equivalent to that. Unsure how to score this. I could score it on the story content alone or I could subtract points for the experience of reading it and end up in the negative numbers probably. Well, since it inspired me to read all my McLuhan again on the can.. 5 |
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However, IF it were done very well and worked well on devices so as to make the reading experience intuitive, then I think itcould enhance the overall experience. As presented here, it is simply an "oh look at that, isn't that neat" kind of thing that does more to pull you out of the story than draw you in. In other words, it's not enhancing the story (and I don't think that sort of thing ever will), so it should enhance the usability of the platform to make it more viable. Otherwise, what's the point? Parlor tricks. |
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It seems like we are in agreement there. But I don't think I called it animation in my review did I? I joked about it being animation done 1/10th of the way the other day, I think, but by that I meant this isn't really animated at all. As far as digital media experiences go, it's vastly inferior to animation or any number of other things one can do online because as you say the imagination (and pacing of a skilled writer) is superior to what this does--was what I was saying in my review. If it isn't significantly enhanced by the new medium the technology creates (the way animation has been enhanced by technology), it can't truly be innovative. |
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Well you said motion comics and contrasted it with real animation. But I agree and I don't think we need innovation in the way stories are told. I think we do need it in the way the content is delivered on these devices. |
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