After months of hype, DC finally launched their Zudacomics.com website this week.  It's a strange beast in all sorts of ways.

Webcomics have been around for a while now, and it's clearly possible to make them work if you've got a good enough product.  Which begs the question: why would you go through Zuda instead of self-publishing?  Granted, they pay for the work, which has to help the cashflow.  And if the site takes off then clearly it could be a good way of raising your profile.  But it remains to be seen whether that will happen.

Strangely, the Zuda website avoids any mention of DC, except in the copyright warnings.  So instead of building on a brand they already own, they're trying to create Zuda from scratch.  That's a bold decision, but it makes a little more sense when you see the sort of material they've chosen.  The plan is for the website to have a few ongoing comics - presently just Jeremy Love and Patrick Morgan's Bayou - and to run a monthly competition in which readers vote on which of ten shorts should become a regular feature.  The initial selection is certainly eclectic.  It's hard to imagine DC ever commissioning some of these series in print format.  At present, Zuda seems to be positioned as a blue-skies imprint that will give pretty much anything a try.

But that in turn begs the question: how do DC expect to make any money off this thing?  It doesn't seem to be running any adverts, save for a tiny sponsorship logo on the competition menu page.  The stories themselves are free.  None of them have obvious potential as a conventional DC series.  Is the plan to throw a load of comics out there at random, and hope to stumble upon something that might make a successful trade paperback?  Or is this simply about belatedly staking out a place on the Internet for DC, establishing a creator-driven brand name and figuring out what to do with it later?

The competition format sits a little uneasily with the indie-oriented, creator-driven way in which the site has been promoted.  It also sits a little uneasily with the stories themselves, as it seems that each entrant gets eight screens to try and win over the voting public.  The problem is that eight screens isn't very much at all, and what makes for a good eight-page story isn't necessarily going to make a good ongoing series. 

There are other problems with the site.  They've chosen to use Flash as a viewer, presumably because it reduces the loading time between pages.  But you only have two options for size - a quarter-screen window, and a full-screen one.  (Using the Zoom function on Internet Explorer doesn't work - the picture size stays the same.)  Unfortunately, the lettering is almost invariably illegible at normal size, and manually zooming in on every single speech balloon isn't exactly sensible.  So your only real option is full-screen.  And at full-screen, the keyboard shortcuts don't work, so you have to change pages by bringing up a pop-up toolbar at the bottom of the screen and clicking.  Then you have to move the cursor away again, because if you don't, the toolbar sits there covering part of the art.  It's not a brilliant piece of design.

It seems that additional pages of Bayou are just being tacked onto the end of the existing story rather than being marked in chapters.  If that's going to be the standard, then it'll cause all sorts of problems, because there doesn't seem to be a "jump to next chapter" option.  There's only a "jump forward ten pages" option - not exactly handy when the standard chapter length is eight. 

For that matter, despite my best efforts, I couldn't find anything on the site to explain when Bayou was next going to be updated.  Is it weekly, daily, fortnightly, monthly...?  If it's weekly, which day?  Failing to post something as elementary as that is a bizarre oversight.  Then again, the first page also includes a note saying "Congratulations to Jeremy Love on Bayou ... Read it now - Free!" which links to the competition page instead of Bayou.  There's a lot of work to be done here.

Oh, and before you can vote, you have to log in.  That's fair enough, because they only want one vote per account for each competition.  Fine.  But to log in, you have to register.  And to register, you have to wait for the site to send you a registration e-mail.  And I've been waiting for two days.  It doesn't bloody work.  Evidently some people have been able to register, but it doesn't work for me, and I see a couple of people have brought this up on other blogs as well.  This is basic stuff.  Was this site rushed online before it was ready?

But what about the stories?  Well, Bayou is certainly head and shoulders above the rest.  It's a gentle and subtle story set in 1930s Mississippi, with some beautiful artwork and genuine emotion.  Freed from the need to beg for votes in eight pages, it's able to get off to a well-paced start. 

Other strips face the reality of trying to attract votes in the space of eight pages.  The entrants have taken different approaches to this problem.  Strips like High Moon have just produced the opening of their story, and more or less challenged the audience to vote for it.  Others, like Lepronomicon, seem to have just produced an extract from the series - in some cases, relying on readers to scan the intro blurb to figure out what the hell is going on.  And some, like Raining Cats and Dogs, just spend their eight pages explaining the concept without actually doing anything. 

None of these tacks are entirely successful.  It's probably unfair to judge any ongoing comic on the strength of an eight-page teaser - in fact, it's definitely unfair - but that's what the Zuda format requires.   And the reality is that none of them are especially impressive.  Several concepts here might make a decent series, but the format reduces them to the basic pitch.  It's a western with werewolves!  It's a superhero parody for ten-year-old boys!  Few of them really manage to get beyond that.

There are a couple of middling comedy strips, and a few insert-peg-A-into-slot-B stories from the superhero and adventure genres.  There are also a couple of oddities.  Dead in the Now is a very strange-looking thing about a sociopathic boy and his pet zombie which has a lot of style and energy but doesn't make good use of the limited space.  Black Swan has a potentially intriguing clash of art styles, but generally comes across as a bit of a mess. 

There are also a couple of obvious duds.  The Enders has a hopelessly convoluted premise and a dreadful plot, while This American Strife is a collection of unrelated gag strips which simply aren't that funny.  It doesn't help that Zuda apparently missed a page out, but even the completed sections often left me wondering where the joke was meant to be, let alone what was supposed to be funny about it.

The frustrating thing, though, is that none of these strips really come across well at eight pages in length, and it's hard to tell whether the creators simply couldn't overcome the format, or whether they just need more work generally.  There are a couple here that I might check out if they became regular features, and to be fair, Zuda only need to find one decent strip a month in order for this to work.  Ideally, they don't want to be turning nine worthwhile strips away - and on the strength of this opening selection, they won't be.  But I don't think this format shows off any of the creators in the best light.

There's an interesting idea in here somewhere, but if Zuda takes off, it's going to be on the strength of the ongoing series that it commissions, and not this questionable competition gimmick.  Hopefully, as time goes on, the ongoing stories will become the main attraction.  For the moment, though, it's mainly a vehicle for the competition entrants, and the standard isn't enthralling - perhaps as much due to format limitations as to the quality of the contributions.

Rating: C+

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