REVIEW: Smash! Pow! GoComics poised to please comic book fans

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly feature, Yay or Nay. Every week we’ll review a new wireless application or service from the user’s point of view, with the goal of highlighting what works and what doesn’t. If you wish to submit your application or service for review, please contact us at rcrwebhelp@crain.com.
Application: GoComics’ mobile comic books
Running on: LG Fusic for Sprint Nextel
Yay: Comic books are cool, and reading comic books on a cellphone is cool too.
Nay: Unsurprisingly, comic books on a 2-inch screen are hard to read. Further, manipulating GoComics’ application is somewhat complicated.
We say: For $3 per month, you can read a number of relatively good comics from your cellphone, which is a pretty good deal considering most of the comics available through GoComics’ service would cost a few dollars each if you were to purchase the actual books.
Review: GoComics’ mobile comic book application provides mobile access to what appears to be a large and growing number of independent comic books. Fans of well-known comic characters like Superman, Batman and the Hulk likely won’t be satisfied with GoComics’ application, as it seems the market’s two major comic book publishers – Marvel and DC, which oversee the vast majority of popular superhero characters – have opted to sit out the mobile space.
However, a number of up-and-coming publishers have signed on to GoComics’ offering. Popular titles like “PvP” and “Bone” are available, as well as lesser-known books like “Umbra.”
Genres span the gamut, from science-fiction and fantasy (think zombies) to humor (think cute dogs) to the outlandish (our favorite: “Devi is the mysterious story of the warrior goddess Devi and the battles she fights that no one ever sees”).
GoComics’ comic book application provides a list of highlights – “new today” and “editor’s pick,” for example – and an A to Z list of all the titles available. Each book includes links to the various available issues (most list only the first few issues) as well as information on the story and the creators.
Reading the actual books was snappy; pressing the right directional button scrolled through each panel, and most of the text was readable. However, we had trouble reading the larger panels as GoComics’ application shrunk them down to fit our phone screen, which made the text so small as to be almost unreadable. We would have preferred a zooming function, or some other method of making the text clearer on large panels.
Each issue is broken down into downloadable chapters, and scrolling through a chapter was quite easy. However, at the end of each chapter we were taken back to the book’s main menu, so we had to keep track of which chapter we had just read and which one was next. We would have preferred to click directly to the next chapter and continue reading, rather than having to keep track of where we were in the story.
Overall, GoComics’ mobile comic book service was enjoyable, and allowed us to peruse comic books we wouldn’t normally have an opportunity to check out. Despite a few glitches, any comic book fan (at least, those interested in the indie comic scene) likely would be pleased with the result.