Skip to Content

Review: Dark Horse Comics' "The Goon: Chinatown and The Mystery of Mr. Wicker"

I used to collect comics pretty religiously when I was a kid (after all, there was a comic book store right across the street from the church my parents always took me to), and lately I've been thinking of getting back into the hobby -- there's something really magical about sequential art and word balloons. And while, if the rumors are true, the new product coming from Apple will probably offer up a better way to do it, I was pretty impressed with my first experience reading the funny pages on the iPhone, in Dark Horse's "The Goon: Chinatown and The Mystery of Mr. Wicker" [iTunes link]. For just a fraction of the price of the actual TPB (trade paperback), you get to flip through a nice set of story and art pages, formatted (pretty) coherently for the iPhone.

There's not a lot of flash in the options -- the comic consists of about 420 "pages," which are basically screen-sized panels that tell the story of Eric Powell's hero The Goon, a broad-shouldered fella with ugly mug in the vein of Sin City's Marv, who mixes it up with the bad guys, gets beat up pretty often, and chases after a dame or two. You can either flip through the screens yourself (which I preferred, soaking in the art and pacing), or have them flip after a delay of your choosing. Unfortunately, the art is sometimes cropped a little closely, and the iPhone's small screen doesn't always let epic scenes play out in their original scale (again, something a tablet would be better at). But for $2 for a readthrough, I enjoyed the book a lot. Dark Horse has a nice series of comics available on the iPhone already (including a free sample), and if you're in the mood for a cheap read on your iPhone, they're worth a look.

TUAW is commonly provided with not-for-resale licenses or promo codes to permit product evaluations and reviews. For more details, see our policy page.

I used to collect comics pretty religiously when I was a kid (after all, there was a comic book store right across the street from the...
 

Add a Comment

*0 / 3000 Character Maximum

2 Comments

Filter by:
Zactu

@steve
Thanks for the heads up. Comments like this helps others.

January 27 2010 at 8:26 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
steve

Don't buy it if you have a 1st Gen iPod Touch... I isn't compatible and I didn't find out until after I purchased and tried to sync. 100% my fault for not reading closely enough, but hoping this post stops others from making my mistake.

January 26 2010 at 7:25 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Buy an ad here

Hot Apps on TUAW

Tweets

© 2012 AOL Inc. All Rights Reserved.