After hating them because they were basically the pretty new thing on the block, I’ve warmed up to DC’s Zuda Comics format. I love how you can press the Full Screen button, and the page occupies a huge portion of the laptop screen. It’s a great format for art-heavy comics. The best comics on the traditional image-based format seemed best suited for simple, uncomplicated artwork. The Zuda viewer lets you admire the detail to the tiniest cross hatch.

However, I found myself agreeing with a recently posted rant on the Scienteers website. Zuda Comics is slow. Really. Goddamn. Slow. I run on a home wireless system that runs off a cable modem that is usually quite speedy. Yet each page takes somewhere between 10 to 20 seconds to load. Some readers have informed me that they are still running on dial-up modems; I can only imagine the sort of load times they have to suffer. The problem only compounds when you consider that the type of comics hosted on Zuda are the more traditional types that are meant to be flipped, page after page, as you would a comic book. This is the Era of Instant Gratification, and readers don’t like sticking around when they perceive they’re wasting time.

And this is a goddamn shame, because a part of me says that it’s unfair to judge the comic because of the slow medium it runs on. After all, does one judge an Ernest Hemingway novel based on the quality of its paper? Thus, in reviewing writer David Gallaher and artist Steve Ellis’ Western/horror mash-up, High Moon, I’m not going to give the creators red cards because, at times, the suspense and anticipation built by the storyline were completely killed off by the download times, symbolized by a slowly filling word balloon with cruel, mocking eyes.

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