Bottom of the Ninth - Any Good?
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I'll give a shot and report back, I got an iPad.
Woodward's a good animator, but I'm pretty leery of animated comics.
-EDIT-
So, okay.
Well, the animation is bloody brilliant, but that was to be expected. Woodward's speciality is flowing motion, and he's working it well here. Every scene of movement is a beauty to behold. The audio is pretty slick, voice acting is especially good, the music can be a little annoying (it will hitch when playback is interrupted by activating a panel or turning pages, and of course there's problem of it just being on all the time) but it's not a deal-breaker by any means. Unfortunately, someone failed to edit the text of the comic... there's at least a couple examples of misspelled words ("intelligent" being spelled "intelegent" was so ironic I think it might have been on purpose, but I can't be sure) and missing commas or other punctuation problems which are always kinda sad to see. And the spoken lines (which you get by tapping the word bubbles) don't always match the text (maybe this is a feature rather than a bug... alternate reads, if you will).
Despite what they're saying on the page there, this is not "a whole new form of interactive storytelling". This is the same integration of animation and comics panels that's been done in pretty much every attempt at making comics into a multi-media experience. It's a comics page where individual panels can be click/tapped to start animating (either beginning with the art on the panel or ending there), with added audio. There's some neat tricks in there, but nothing revolutionary aside from, perhaps, the quality of the animation itself.
And as such, it suffers from the exact same problems that motion-comics, ani-comics, etc. have all suffered from in the past. If it were comics, or animation, it would be pretty damn great. But it takes away from the unique elements of both without adding anything to either. The best I can say is that they're playing the same tune I've heard before, but they're playing it with virtuoso skills. This is definitely the best example of something I've seen tried and fail before.
Comics are a unique reading experience. It's basic McCloud; you take each panel in your own time, you move your eyes around as you like, and you set the pace. Time is flexible, and between each panel you as the reader are complicit in the action. This comic takes some of that away, by forcing a pace... when the panels are animating, you had better not look at anything else but that panel. God help you if you read fast, 'cause you're going to be locked on specific segments until they're done.
Past that, you can't always tell when a segment is done, and if you activate another element on the page it creates an interrupt. If you move to the next page and you want to go back, you'll have to reload that page (which also reloads the elements associated with it). And for my copy, at least, there was a notable glitch where, after reaching the end and starting over, the ability to turn the pages stopped functioning. Had to kill it entirely and restart the app.
In the end, it's definitely worth checking out if you've got an iPad (after all, it's free). And who knows, perhaps in this new era of portable media platforms this may succeed where others tried and failed. If they do triumph, they've certainly worked hard enough to deserve it. I expect I'll keep checking it out just because I'm a sucker for animation and art, but your mileage may vary.
Personally, I'd like to see this level of animation quality applied to a reading format closer to Yves Bigerel's digital comic format, where you focus on a handful of panels at any one time and set the pace by moving forward or back as you like (interestingly enough, in that very comic he talks about these EXACT problems). Not only does this help alleviate the issues with layout and pacing, but the aspect ratio is already suited to animation if you want to include fully animated elements. From what I understand, this is the format that Marvel's been looking at with their "Infinite Comics", and I think it's a wiser move than animating chunks of a traditionally formatted comics page.
TL,DR - It's very well-animated and very well-drawn, but nothing that hasn't been seen before.
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