Conversational Euro-Comics: Bart Beaty On Lewis Trondheim’s Bludzee



By Bart Beaty

I love the comics of Lewis Trondheim. And I love my iPhone (yes, I'm one of those people). So when I learned that Trondheim would be doing a daily comic strip for the iPhone (and other less awesome brands of smart phones), I signed up with great enthusiasm. While my initial high hopes have not been dashed exactly, I'm starting to suspect that this might be a case of two great things that don't necessarily add much value to each other.

Bludzee is the name of Trondheim's strip. It is available in 19 languages (you can switch it up in the options menu) and is sold by iTunes for 99 cents per month. By buying September, you get August free so there are already almost five weeks worth of the strip on the phone.

The interface is very basic. Each strip is six panels long and you can either read it by having the phone scroll the strip for you (each panel is given about three seconds reading time) or by doing it yourself. I do it myself. I find the autoplay too slow for the many wordless panels, but when I adjusted to speed it up it was sometimes too fast for the text-heavy panels.

The strips for each month are presented as items hanging from a tree that grows as new days are added. One nice feature is that the app marks the strips that you've read, so it is easy to stop and start without losing your place. When you want new strips, you open the app on your phone and download the work either from a wifi source or over a digital network from your phone provider.

The downloading is the part that has killed my initial enthusiasm. I read the first five weeks at home via wifi on a new 3GS iPhone. Some strips loaded in as little as four or five seconds. Some took between ten and 15. I couldn't determine any differences in the strips that might account for this, so maybe it's random. Regardless, 15 seconds is a long time to wait for a strip that might take three seconds to read. When I downloaded a strip using the 3G option in the park the other day it took much longer. The speed issue is just a killer. Right now the reading experience is far too slow to be enjoyable.

As for the strip itself, it's very nice minor-Trondheim. Bludzee is a kitten living on the 106th floor of an apartment building in a major city. He (or she -- it's not yet clear) communicates to a friend on the outside world by way of the internet, and is, at present, mystified by his surroundings. The best strips are the ones that tread closest to Patrick McDonnell's territory. In mid-August there was a very strange sequence in which aliens came into the house and broke the door. I wasn't sure what to make of this, and wondered if Trondheim had bored of his own premise after only about 20 days. Bludzee has also had some interactions with a neighboring bulldog, which might push it even more into the Mutts area.

It's impossible, really, to judge a daily strip after only a few weeks (unless you're a syndicate editor, I suppose...). Trondheim is one of the best cartoonists of his generation, so I wouldn't bet against this becoming a very good strip someday. Right now it is cute, well-drawn (the September 2nd strip is the first to make use of backgrounds, and I thought it was the most visually interesting) and not really that funny. It's a wry, grin-inducing strip, at best.

The problem is that right now it is hamstrung by the slow delivery. I'm one of those people who can't read Doonesbury at Slate because I find the interface is too slow and it breaks up the reading pace. Sadly, the Doonesbury interface is vastly faster than that of Bludzee. With luck, upgrades will be made to the speed of the app, and Trondheim will get the sort of platform he's clearly hoping for. This is an ambitious undertaking, but given the speed issues I'm not sure it would be worth a second dollar from me in October. At this point, I'd rather wait to see if someone brings it out as a book.

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To learn more about Dr. Beaty, or to contact him, try here.

Those interested in buying comics talked about in Bart Beaty's articles might try here or here.

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posted 11:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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