It’s New York Comic Con Week, which means we have so, so, so much news to choose from in this edition of Comics Disassembled, my look at the things that I liked or didn’t like from the week of comics. But because I’m me, and because I didn’t write this column last week, we’re starting things off with week old news about an unfinished graphic novel turned Kickstarter. Heck yeah we are! Let’s get to it!

Becky Cloonan Comics? Becky Cloonan Comics!

Making comics is hard. That’s a constant theme of my interviews on Off Panel and often my coverage on SKTCHD, and there’s a reason for it. It’s extremely true. It takes a lot of effort to make something work. Heck, it takes a lot of effort to make something that doesn’t work. At least not in the way you planned for it to.

Becky Cloonan’s currently being Kickstarted release Fever Dream is a perfect example of this — and I mean a perfect one. Here’s what the Kickstarter has to say about it if you don’t believe me.

“Fever Dream is a new art book from award winning cartoonist Becky Cloonan, featuring 120 pages of sequential work, sketches and illustrations from a graphic novel she gave up on halfway through. After making peace with failure, Cloonan reworked the pages into a conceptual artbook, offered here as a high-quality softcover alongside a sumptuous hardcover edition.”

Cloonan is a real one for straight up admitting that she gave up on this project halfway through and that she had made “peace with failure,” and she’s even cooler for turning that experience into something new and different, as Fever Dream “inhabits the liminal space between a sketchbook and a graphic novel.” That’s not really historically been a thing! But it is now, and I bet it’s going to be cool as heck to see the cartoonist try and navigate making the original graphic novel work and all the thought that went into it, even if it isn’t a traditionally complete story. Throw in the fact that she says this is “for anyone who’s ever rage quit a project” and that the cover literally calls it “A Cursed Comic Book Abandoned by Becky Cloonan,” and you have the first Kickstarter that had a write-up that made me fall in love with a project before it was ever released. It’s beautiful.

I’m all in on Fever Dream. Some might not appreciate an unfinished work. I get it. But it’s Becky Cloonan. She’s one of the best to ever do it, and this is her operating within her wheelhouse: making moody, sexy art that has a little something something to it that spices it all up even more. There are only a few more weeks left in this campaign, so if you’re intrigued by Fever Dream, I’d get on it soon.

Marvel, Getting a New App

The other half of last year’s reveal that Marvel and Webtoon were teaming up for a new app is here, as their new app was officially announced this week. It’s…pretty straightforward! While initial questions circled whether this was going to be a more expansive collaboration, one that found both Marvel and Webtoon’s comics residing on the same platform, that did not prove to be the case. The result is a new app called “Marvel Comics (Powered by Webtoon),” which makes it sound like Webtoon bought sponsorship rights for a stadium named after the publisher. The reality is it’s just what it sounds like. Marvel has a new app, and Webtoon built it. Ho hum.

It’s coming on November 16th, and it’s effectively Webtoon’s version of a Marvel Unlimited type experience. Here’s what the official announcement had to say about it, in specific.

“Developed from the ground up by WEBTOON Entertainment for mobile and web, the app is designed to make comic discovery faster, reading more flexible, and ongoing series easier to follow. The Marvel Comics app will include archived comics, current comic book runs, and will support both traditional page-based comics and vertical-scroll formats.”

Honestly, it doesn’t sound meaningfully different than Marvel Unlimited beyond the potential for greater adoption of the vertical-scroll format. Marvel clearly agrees with me, because they’re sunsetting (aka ending) that app on December 7th of this year, albeit with users still being able to access their libraries until December 21st (as a note: users will be able to import their saved issues, reading libraries, reading progress, and more to the new app before that happens). For those who might be concerned about this being an opportunity for Marvel to raise the costs on its all-you-can-eat service, I have good news for you. It’s staying pretty much the same, with both flavors of the annual plan going up by 99 cents and the monthly rates each being level for the new app.

And the new higher tier comes with a real benefit. That’s that readers will now be able to access new releases a month after they debut rather than after three months. As with several of Marvel’s moves of late, it finds the publisher matching its rival in DC, who already had a tier that offered new releases in that timeframe on its DC Universe Infinite service. But better late than never, I say.

I saw a lot of handwringing about this announcement because of Webtoon’s involvement, especially when it comes to what it might mean. I quickly came to realize that many of the frustrations were from people misunderstanding what this news really meant. It seemed like people thought Marvel and Webtoon comics were going to be cohabitating, but as I noted earlier, that’s not what this is. It’s just an all-you-can-eat app for Marvel comics.

I understand why people may bristle about Webtoon’s involvement given the way they approach the creative side of their business. That’s legit! But if they’re good at one thing, it’s developing a robust and smooth user experience for people who want to read comics online. This new service will work both in an app and on the web, and given how much Marvel Unlimited users have had to grit their teeth through some of that app’s frustrating bugs over the years, the potential for improvement here is significant. Just think of this as Marvel hiring a web developer to build a new app for them, except the web developer was named Webtoon.

This has me so curious that I’m going to subscribe to the new app after a couple years away from Marvel Unlimited. I’m especially intrigued to discover if they’ll bring vertical scroll to all Marvel comics or if that’s just a situational offering based on pre-existing vertical scroll releases from the publisher. But in the end, this is a big deal that’s also not as big of a deal as that might seem. It’s just a new app, and one that has the potential of being much, much better than the one that preceded it.