ComicMix Launches Comics
by Joey Manley
The online comics have launched at Comic Mix finally. The thing that I’m going to talk about is their user interface, which they’ve made much of in press releases. The comics themselves are not fully rolled out, and the two titles that launched today are not far along enough in their storylines for any kind of evaluation (though I will say they’re obviously professional, and show a tremendous amount of promise).
Anyway. The user interface. I kind of like it. The much-vaunted proprietary reader is a sort of AJAX-based take on the user interfaces of .cbr/.cbz applications like CDisplay. So you can resize the image, or choose to display a two-page spread or a single page, and so on. That’s a good place to start, but it’s not quite there yet. There’s nothing wrong with this interface — except for some missed opportunities, some ideas that would be completely irrelevant in the context of a downloaded comic, but which really come to the front in the context of a webcomic. Quick example: it would be nice if they came up with a way to identify permalinks to individual pages, so a blogger like me could say, for example, “Did you see how cool it looked when Grimjack did so and so ….?” and link to the specific page I’m talking about, dropping the reader directly into the user interface at the correct point in the story so that he or she could continue to browse around. Sounds like a minor thing, but you’d be surprised at how much traffic comes into WCN via those kinds of deep-links, and how sticky those visitors end up being. It would also be nice if there were full-content RSS feeds. The experience of reading the comic in a feed would not and could not be the same as the experience of reading it on the site, which I think is probably something the people behind this site would be bothered by, perhaps bothered more than most of us would. Which may be a strength, or may be a weakness. We’ll see.
All of that said, the UI I’ve developed for WCN and for my other sites is not nearly as good as this one. The UI I’ve developed is strictly Web 1.0. Compared to their UI, my UI is crap. I know it looks crazy for me to be daring to criticize the work they’ve done, given that context. It’s just that I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot over the past six months, while working through the development of the next version of WCN, so I have some pretty strong opinions about what a webcomics UI should do, and what can cripple and/or strengthen a webcomic’s viral marketing opportunities. My own current theory is that the more similarly a webcomic works like a blog — in terms of the multiple ways that a reader can keep up with it, link to it, learn about it, search through it, embed it elsewhere out-of-context, read it on a cellphone, send it to a friend, read it without Javascript enabled, etc., — the more likely that comic is to take off and be wildly popular, all other factors being equal. ComicMix’s UI work is quite a step forward for the reading of comic-book-formatted comics on the web, but there are all kinds of ways that it could be, um, bloggified, for lack of a better word. They’re smart people over there running that site, and I look forward to continued improvements in the UI.
And at some point I’ll blog about the comics, once they’ve all rolled out. I’m looking forward to reading them.
October 3rd, 2007 at 11:39 am
Joey I absolutely agree about permalinks and RSS feeds. Myself, if a comic doesn’t have an RSS feed, I just close the window. I have way too many blogs and others things to check on to be able to remember to go back to a comics website every X number of days to check a comic. Permalinks are important, too, for the reasons you mentioned. That’s just basic UI 101.
October 3rd, 2007 at 1:24 pm
First impression: faithfully preserving every limitation of the print medium….
October 3rd, 2007 at 5:50 pm
I like the idea of a “bloggified” comic site. I think the more user friendly a site is, the better. And I totally agree that permalinks are a total must. I thought their comic navigation had some promising and cool aspects, although it annoyed me that I had to scroll down just a tiny bit to see the bottom of the comic page before moving to the next. Maybe it’s just my little 17 inch monitor, but their best fit option was just slightly too big, and the zoomed out version, which I think is a cool idea, was a little too small. (It’s something that annoys me about my own site, so I’m not trying to be too critical.) It’s cool that you can simply use the Page Up and Down buttons to navigate. And I also really liked being able to see a spread of two pages, though personally I’d rather see the option to have each page any size (like WCN). That way if you want to do a big beautiful page spread, the page could be much wider. One good thing about the web is there are no page restrictions so you could have longer pages as well if necessary. But anyway, I thought there are some good ideas there, but still not as user friendly as I’d like to see. One thing I’d like to see is an option to save your place in the story. Not so big a deal when they’re only eight pages, but when there’s hundreds it’s another thing. That’s something I really need to add to my site (although mine needs a whole redesign so again I can’t really criticize.) But I’m glad you’re bringing out all these ideas and features. I’ve recently had some people kindly mention the rather unuser-friendly design of parts of my site, so this is good stuff.
October 3rd, 2007 at 6:18 pm
Now that I’m thinking about it, I think there are some good aspects to the ComicPress 2.0 theme for Wordpress by Tyler Martin that I’d like to see in more webcomics. Specifically, I’m talking about the fact that each page is commentable, can have it’s own permanent blog entry separate from the actual blog (which WCN all has but Comic Mix lacks), but each comic, like a regular blog entry, can be tagged with keywords, is fully searchable, and can be categorized and subcategorized into multiple categories. This makes for an incredibly flexible archives. For example, all the pages with a particular character or subplot could be categorized and then brought up in a custom archives page. And it’s possible to have custom thumbnails of each page in the archives and RSS. And since it actually is a Wordpress theme, you can use Wordpress plugins such as the one that let’s you poll your readers (like voting for their favorite character which I’ve found kind of useful in my blog). So it’s user expandable. I particularly liked all that. You can also tag a page to save your place in the story. ComicPress does has plenty of issues, but I do wish more comics had those kinds of features (including mine).
October 3rd, 2007 at 7:38 pm
The only thing about blog user interfaces that *doesn’t* work for webcomics is the archiving structure, which is backwards from what you’d expect a webcomic’s archive structure to be (scrolling down a page, you’re going back in time, rather than forward).
Has ComicPress solved this? If so, I’ll take a look at it.
October 3rd, 2007 at 8:52 pm
You’re right, I hadn’t thought about that. ComicPress does it blog style in order of newest date to earliest (and by month and year), rather starting from the beginning of the story. That is a problem. I have no idea how one could fix that in ComicPress since that’s just how Wordpress works. But if you could have the same basic functionality, but customized for a webcomic it would be pretty cool. I’d love to do something like that myself, but its way over my head. I’ll be doing good if I can hack together the “saving your place” feature. Another feature I like, that I got from Megatokyo, is using Twitter to give micro updates on the progress of the latest page. Especially since my production time varies wildly depending on how ambitious I try to get (or how much life gets in the way), it’s nice that people can easily see what I’m up to, and kind of gauge when I’ll be done. And it was easy to add to both my regular site, and my WCN mirrored site.
October 3rd, 2007 at 10:42 pm
What Bo said.
October 3rd, 2007 at 10:48 pm
Speaking of blog-type stuff. I think the Act_I_Vate guys found the right way to do it using Live Journal. See the post, click to read. I had to look all over the page for the Comic Mix comics.
October 4th, 2007 at 12:08 am
That annoyed me about Comic Mix as well. They say “featured comics” but there’s no link that says “click here to read” or “latest page” etc. Probably my biggest webcomic site pet peeve is having to search all over for the actual comic. Personally, I prefer it when the latest one is on the front page. The reader shouldn’t have to go through hoops to get to it. (Or a direct link to the latest in the RSS.)
October 4th, 2007 at 4:07 am
[...] [Analysis] Joey Manley critiques the ComicMix comic-reader interface. [...]
October 4th, 2007 at 8:22 am
When I first read this, I was like, “Is there something Tim and Shaenon aren’t telling me?”
October 4th, 2007 at 10:05 am
Pingback spam is the worst kind of spam.
October 4th, 2007 at 11:06 am
Comments per page are a must for webcomics. Over in SideChicks, the term WWLD (What would Lincoln do) still sparks comments. And yesterday, there was a brief back and forth about why there is no feminist outrage at SideChicks.
The ComicMix reader denies access to a feeling of community that the web fosters.
October 4th, 2007 at 11:25 am
Yeah, the more I think about it — there’s a sort of frozen-in-time aspect to the comics displayed in Comic Mix’s reader (and in other fancy corporate readers, like the one CrossGen used to use, and the Marvel DotComics one, and so on), where the comic book stands all alone, by itself, outside of the ebb and flow of the community’s response to it. The great lesson from blogs is that if you have frequently-updating content, you need to account for the ways people will use that content for their own purposes (which gets to the permalinking and RSS feeds, etc.) and also the ways that people will respond to that content (comments, pingbacks, etc.) You don’t absolutely *have* to do so, of course, but doing so adds a lot more likelihood that your work will take off and be popular, I think. Otherwise it comes across, to webcomics readers, who are accustomed to reading everything within the context of a larger conversation, as sort of sterile. But I could be wrong!
October 4th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
First, thanks to everybody who’s had generally kind and constructive things to say about the site, the reader, and the comics themselves. Just to address a few quick points:
We do have permalinks and comments right there on the left; we’ve gotten a lot of comments already at http://www.comicmix.com/comic/comicmix/grimjack-the-manx-cat/1/, for example. We don’t permalink by page yet, we thought linking by installment was the better way to go, particularly for keeping comments together– there becomes a point where comments by page becomes a bit unwieldy. Obviously, we’re open to other opinions.
As far as being “bloggified”, you do know what Brian’s last job (okay, second-to-last) was, right?
October 4th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Glenn: yup. Like I said, I know you guys are some smart guys.
October 4th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Gerhard: I thought it was rather intutive that if you clicked on the featured comic under “featured comics” you got brought right to that comic’s page and then there’s a big “Click here to read this now!”. So i’m a little confused as to how much searching you had to do… maybe you were just making it hard for yourself?
I’m not a big webcomic reader myself. I like being able to leave comments but I want to read the pages then comment not have everything all mashed together. Again that could be my pamphlet-comic reading self. I like this reader better than the one say for DHP on Myspace
October 6th, 2007 at 12:47 am
Adriane: They’ve tweaked the site design after those comments were posted, but…. Much like on the spinner rack, if you want the comic to be read it needs to be front and center.
But if the comics are to play second fiddle to the blog, then having easily ignored text-links-that-look-like-GoogleAds to them up top, and a tab in the corner, is just fine.
October 6th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
Great feedback on the reader — from Joey and everyone who commented.
I responded in detail on a lot of your points here:
http://www.brianalvey.com/2007/10/06/building-a-great-online-comic-book-reader/
William G.: Great point. Comics will definitely not be second fiddle on ComicMix. We have a bunch of modules that list and promote our issues, but since we only had one or two issues available I hid them all. Even with four or five issues, having a “Most Popular Issues” box is silly since there’s no difference at all between “Most Popular Issues” and “All The Issues We Have”.
Thanks!
October 9th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
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