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Tron Enhanced Digital Comic Treats Readers Like Simpletons

Published Fri, 03 Jun 2011 09:14:02 -0500

Last updated Fri, 03 Jun 2011 09:58:48 -0500

Disney has launched a very swish HTML5 enhanced comic book format for its new Tron: Legacy online comic, launching today. It's meant to only work on Internet Explorer 9, but it seems fine on Google Chrome (and dead on Firefox), and the comic is viewed in a continual sideways scrolling fashion. As you "grab" one side and pull it across, elements of the panels move and twist, fly off or onto the page, or change perspective, giving a similar feeling as when you turn the page of a good pop-up book. Also, because this is Tron, elements of the images pulse and glow. While the former adds to the reading experience in some ways, the latter only reminds you that these are static images, the illusion of the frozen frames that you in the gaps with, shattered. Nevertheless, this is an exciting and interesting approach to the comic book format online with new tricks that could provide all sorts of narrative possibilities, as the system taps into the same graphical resources that larger games do.

It's a shame then that this Tron: Legacy comic is for complete idiots. One of the central rules in comics is that if you're showing it, you don't need to say it as well. Tron Legacy not only does both, but does it in a "Jack And Jill" style fashion as well. See what I mean.

Sam sees the disc. Sam fetches the disc. Good dog, Sam. There's a video to demonstrate the technology below, but it doesn't seem to work on Firefox either. Those Microsoft tinkers. Again, Chrome seems to cope.

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