Misery Depot gets reviewed
on the first column of Septagon Studios News Blog
's newest feature: E-Book Spotlight. The article, written by Dave Baxter, uses Misery Depot as an example a alternative distribution models. Some excerpts:
On the American major comic publishers attemps at digital comics:
The major companies’ provisional attempts at offering products and services online have all been, frankly, pathetic. Not just within the music and book industries, but comic publishers are off to a bafflingly slow start to boot. Marvel is offering 6-month old product available only on their security-protected non-customizable “reader” and DC’s Zuda is fundamentally an American Idol-type competition that results in a handful of ongoing webcomics, to be cancelled at a moment’s notice due to poor response, and which may or may not ever see print (depending again on response), and the comics’ rights are locked away with DC for years before the creators can look into the ever-evolving, spontaneously sprouting, ground-breaking avenues of exposure that should be the right of any creator to pursue in order to sell more books. Beyond this then: unless a Zuda-spotlighted comic is picked up by DC, any story appearing inside a Zuda competition will have a mere 8 pages of material posted. That is, in a word, and to repeat myself, but what the hell let’s add a second word to spice things up: absolutely pathetic.
On Misery Depot:
The story reads like Philip K. Dick writing for Alfred Hitchcock; it’s The Twilight Zone given a good kick of literary post-cyberpunk post-modernism (yeah, wrap your head around that). Being a book tailor-made for online reading, Piqué smartly keeps things visual. There was a study enacted a while back (which I’ll be covering in greater detail inside the upcoming, third Killing the Grizzly installment) which concluded that online readers naturally skim a page and do not “read” it exhaustively, as they would a printed page. Even a PDF document is considered a “content blob” and won’t be read like a book unless printed out. This means that, if chasing a purely online audience, who likely won’t, in numbers, print so costly a document as a full-color comic, the book itself must be legible to the “skimming” eyes of online readership. Misery Depot is a largely silent story, following the journey of the main lady protagonist, as she wanders and struggles to reach her daughter. Information is imported through images, labels, designs, and dialogue that are parsed out with a designer’s eye, placed at key moments that are effortless to read, even online.
On Juan Romera:
But this leaves the lion’s share of the work to artist Juan Romera. His figures and backgrounds have the dark and liquid look of a 2000 A.D. sci-fi thriller, reminiscent also of Charles Adlard (The Walking Dead). His work is expressive, while maintaining the sterile and inexplicably sinister qualities that MD requires. Romera masterfully presents the inhabitants and their plights, laying-out each page with an intuitive choreography that taxes the reader not at all. Romera colors Misery as well, and his grey and drab-green palate fits like a formaldehyde-stained glove.
Dave Baxter also writes the column Killing the Grizzly
at Septagon Studios News Blog, in which he further explores the world of digital comics. A must-read for those interested in the medium.
Etiquetas: creative commons, dave baxter, dc, interview, juan romera, killing the grizzly, marvel, misery depot, review, septagon studios, zuda