July 9th, 2010
Marvel Comics on the iPad – One Thumb Up
UI for the Buy
So last night I finally sat down with the joint iPad (belonging to me and my beloved) and rocked out to some awesome Captain America comic books. Here’s a few quick observations.
As a friend of mine put it, it is great for comics. The form factor and the four-color are a perfect match and the way you move through the comic is approximately the feel of reading the printed page. Of course it helped that I was reading the epic ‘Winter Soldier’ story arc by perhaps one of my favorite comic book writers Ed Brubaker featuring sexy spies in latex, cold war mind control and an oversized creepy psycho-analyst named Dr. Faustus.
However what didn’t work for me, or didn’t work enough to prompt me to write a blog about it is the manufactured transitions which are at the core of this manifestation of the digital experience. You can either read a comic page-by-page like below:
Dig the White Space
This for my money best replicates the off-line experience. Is this a good thing? I don’t know but a long time ago I read Scott McCloud’s ‘Understanding Comics’ and in that book he posited that it is the white space between panels where all the action is. A reader fills in the gaps – for example as the shield flies through the air and back into Cap’s hand.
Then there is the new way of reading, which is enabled by this digital experience. As opposed to reading an entire page and going from panel to panel on that page, you ‘read’ one image at a time causing you to have to preserve in your head more information in order to experience ‘action’. Over time this may work for me, but right now it’s jarring and is actually disruptive to the reading as opposed to making it more dynamic or more entertaining. It is nice to get to look at the art up close and personal but seeing one sole frame at a time as you do below, well it’s not the joint.
On the one hand it’s awesome and amazing that this works at all and it may extend the life of comic books by another 40 to 100 years, ensuring the possibility that my child will enjoy them as much as I have. On the other I’m still not sold on the presentation format and hope they keep innovating until they do find the right ratio of motion to still.
This entry was posted on Friday, July 9th, 2010 at 3:41 pm and is filed under Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.