Okay, so: digital comics! I think I’ve established that I’m not really a fan of the concept of digital comics. I like my weekly Wednesday trip to my local comics store, where my local comic store owner, who knows me by name and asks me if I’ve ever been told that pants are an always choice, hands me my books and recommends new ones for me.
However, Marvel was good enough to give those of us who bought Avenging Spider-Man #1 last week a code we could use to redeem for a free digital copy of the book. And as much as I like my stack of books every week, if I’m honest with myself, I’ve always considered myself an early adopter. And while I might be lurching into middle age, I like to believe it’s not so far in that I’m unwilling to try new things. Because if I am, it’s time to scratch “threesome” off my list and tag the list’s title with “bucket.”
So let’s download us a comic!
Okay: The instructions on how to get the book say I need to read it with the Marvel Digital Comics app. I’m not all that interested in reading a comic book off of my computer screen, so I started by checking the app store in my Nook Color ereader to see if the app’s been made available. After all, the Nook is built on Android, and Marvel recently released an Android version of the app, so it would seem to be a natural offering, right?
Nope. Not available as of this writing. Maybe sometime after the Marvel / Barnes & Noble graphic novel offerings kick in, but for now, if I want to install the app on my Nook, I need to jailbreak it, and while I am technically savvy, I am disinterested in voiding the warranty on a $250 gadget in order to read a four-dollar comic that I already own and only kind of liked. To me, that’s like disabling the thermostat on your toaster to get a really crisp bagel pizza when you live next door to a gourmet pie joint – high risk, low reward.
So right out of the gate, I can’t get this comic on the platform that I want, and it took me ten minutes to do a thorough search to be sure of it. So I guess I have to read this on my computer. Sure, I could download the app onto my Android phone, but I figure trying to read a comic on the screen of a cell phone is a zero-sum competition with getting shitfaced and running with scissors in the BB gun factory, and would only mean that my next phone would have to be one of those with the big-assed buttons you can read from space.
So I guess I’m left with reading my digital comic sitting in front of my computer. So I dialed up the Marvel Store because it was the first thing I saw on the page telling me how to get the book, because if I wanted to sift through a big block of text I wouldn’t have bought a fucking comic book. And here’s the first thing I see:
Really? You want me to modify my $1,000 computer’s setup in order to read a comic book? What’s it gonna take if I want to read a full graphic novel? A prostate exam?
Fuck that; I clicked through with my good old Firefox browser to take a look at the store. And look, and look, and not find any way to get my free book. Oh, I found a way I could buy the book – for the same price I bought the one on my lap, that I could read, collect, resell or throw at the fucking screen if I couldn’t get my free download.
So I read a little further, and – ah! I need to go to a page off Marvel’s main Web site to get my book! My mistake; I should have read further. So let’s go there, shall we?
Here we go! So let’s just enter this 12-character code, and… no joy. What the… ah! The code is case-sensitive, just like it says in the 2-point type right below the download code! What could be clearer? So let’s show my commitment to the concept of digital comics by UNLEASHING THE FUCKING THUNDER OF CAPS LOCK!
Hey, it’s loading! My free book must be right around the –
What? What the hell do you care about my birthdate for? You’re giving me a comic book, not Hustler. Right? Because at this point, I think I’d like a Hustler. It would be easier to get on the Internet, I’ll tell you that.
Long story short: I had to do a complete registration for Marvel’s Web site, including my whole name and other generally personal information, including the name of the store where I bought the book (And the list of stores did not filter off the opening word “The,” so it was helpfully filed under “T”), and then…
Paydirt! It’s the book I already bought! And it only took me fifteen minutes, three Web sites, and a bunch of personal information to get it! On a device on which I didn’t want it! But enough of that; let’s talk about the reading experience for a minute.
I will give Marvel’s online app some credit: it’s reasonably intuitive, and it gives you the option of seeing entire pages at a time, two pages at a time, or something called “Smart Panels,” which takes you from panel to panel so you can see the art bigger, or in the event of a Splash page, from action point to action point. This is probably a useful piece of functionality in a book like Ultimate Spider-Man, where the page layout often doesn’t make any fucking sense at all.
But I didn’t like the splash pages in any way in this app. If you set it to see the entire double-page spread, you get all the art… but it’s about 60% of the size on the printed page, and the text was unreadable. To Marvel’s credit, there is a little “Magnify Text” widget that turns your mouse into a magnifying glass you can hold over the text, so you can not only get the experience of reading a comic book, but also the experience of being a feeble elderly person who forgot his glasses! All it’s missing is a cup of Jell-O and a soiled Depends to show you your inevitable depressing future!
That said, if you switch to the Smart Panels view, you zoom in the same way you do individual panels… which means you only get to see small pieces of the splash, which completely eliminates the effect such a piece of art is supposed to have. It’s like watching a porno made up of nothing but crotch shots; it’s drains an exciting experience and turns it into an industrial documentary.
But if there’s no comic store near you, it’s certainly better than no comics at all. And to be fair, it was easier and less onerous to read using this app then I originally anticipated. If I lived in a place where I had no access to print comics, I would learn to use this app and be, honestly, Goddamned happy I had it and that it’s as good as it is, faults and all. And you can read the book whenever you’re in front of your computer! Right? Um…
How the fuck do I come back to read this damned book again in the future?
To be continued…
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