The Four Color Media Monitor

Tech Crunch talks about Google's new Bubble Zoom program for reading comics on computerized phones. To enlarge the word balloons is a clever idea. But making the most recent superhero comics the online offerings is not. They tell that:

For now, Bubble Zoom is only enabled within all Marvel and DC collected volumes (that’s about 2,800 comics in Google’s store — and they are all available for 50 percent off right now if you use the code SDCC2016), but Hartrell tells me that the team already trained the algorithm on millions of pages and plans to roll it out to other comics and manga over time. “We want to come to the world and say: we nailed all the styles and comics that are out there,” he said about the company’s slow rollout plans.

I'm sure there's other, far better choices out there, and that's why it's ridiculous they're starting off with such easy ones. After all, if few are reading their modern products on paper, there's little chance it'll be any different on a mobile screen. They had a big chance to make an unlikely choice by making arrangements with a smaller company like IDW, Dynamite or the revived First, who do have some titles worth and instead, they go for the obvious, and from what I can tell, it's with the newest output by far. All of which could be mired in crossovers, so they wouldn't be offering the best starting points for a newcomer.

The concept itself is creative. The comics they're formatting for phones, however, are not.

Labels: dc comics, marvel comics, technology