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Marvel Digital Comics - Part 2
Jan. 29th, 2010 09:09 pmVery recently I posted an initial review of Marvel Digital Comics. Pretty much everything I had to say was positive, and I still believe the thing is a very good deal. However, I have run into a couple of the quirks of the system, and I ought to describe them for sake of completeness.
I have run across one technical bug. Occasionally, as one is flipping through a comic, one wants to go back a segment to check back what happened a couple frames ago. Most of the time, this works just fine and dandy. Occasionally, however, doing this causes some form of rendering error. The page artwork stays fine, but the speech bubbles get all wonky - they look stretched, and are often seriously misplaced. A simple reload of the comic fixes the problem, though it is repeatable after the reload.
On two occasions, I have seen this effect a whole comic - where most or all of the text bubbles are seriously our of whack. This persists when the comic is refreshed. It is repeatable on different computers. I expect the content file has something out of kilter, so the flash simply doesn't render the things properly.
Two comics out of 90+ I have seen though, is not bad. If I had a mail-subscription, I'd expect a couple-of-percent failure rate in getting damaged in the mail, too. So this does not upset me.
The non-technical point - I have finally found a "hole" in coverage, and yes, I can see some folks find it annoying. Ultimate Spider-Man, #92 through #97 are missing from the collection. I can guess why - it is probably a good seller in print, as it contains Deadpool, who is supposed to be very popular. However, it is also the stretch where Peter Parker is dating the X-man Kitty Pride, which I was hoping to show to my wife, who's a serious fan of Kitty Pride.
Searches are not always as comprehensive as I expected them from my first experiments. I was reading along in Spidey just fine, when I see a reference to Spidey fighting the Green Goblin on the front lawn of the White House. I know darned well that this didn't happen in the issues Id' read so far - so I cranked up the search, and looked for incidents of the Ultimate Green Goblin... and found almost nothing, and certainly nothing. That was surprising. I had to go to Wikipedia, and discover this was handled in it's own little miniseries (The Ultimate Six), which I then went and read. No big loss, there, but good to know that the search cannot be expected to be exhaustively complete.
These in no way, shape, or form make me regret the subscription. I'm still having a blast. But it is important to know some of the limitations.
I have run across one technical bug. Occasionally, as one is flipping through a comic, one wants to go back a segment to check back what happened a couple frames ago. Most of the time, this works just fine and dandy. Occasionally, however, doing this causes some form of rendering error. The page artwork stays fine, but the speech bubbles get all wonky - they look stretched, and are often seriously misplaced. A simple reload of the comic fixes the problem, though it is repeatable after the reload.
On two occasions, I have seen this effect a whole comic - where most or all of the text bubbles are seriously our of whack. This persists when the comic is refreshed. It is repeatable on different computers. I expect the content file has something out of kilter, so the flash simply doesn't render the things properly.
Two comics out of 90+ I have seen though, is not bad. If I had a mail-subscription, I'd expect a couple-of-percent failure rate in getting damaged in the mail, too. So this does not upset me.
The non-technical point - I have finally found a "hole" in coverage, and yes, I can see some folks find it annoying. Ultimate Spider-Man, #92 through #97 are missing from the collection. I can guess why - it is probably a good seller in print, as it contains Deadpool, who is supposed to be very popular. However, it is also the stretch where Peter Parker is dating the X-man Kitty Pride, which I was hoping to show to my wife, who's a serious fan of Kitty Pride.
Searches are not always as comprehensive as I expected them from my first experiments. I was reading along in Spidey just fine, when I see a reference to Spidey fighting the Green Goblin on the front lawn of the White House. I know darned well that this didn't happen in the issues Id' read so far - so I cranked up the search, and looked for incidents of the Ultimate Green Goblin... and found almost nothing, and certainly nothing. That was surprising. I had to go to Wikipedia, and discover this was handled in it's own little miniseries (The Ultimate Six), which I then went and read. No big loss, there, but good to know that the search cannot be expected to be exhaustively complete.
These in no way, shape, or form make me regret the subscription. I'm still having a blast. But it is important to know some of the limitations.
