This week, Boom Studios offered the first issue of the new miniseries Hexed for free online on the same day the print edition went on sale, a stunt they pulled off last year with Northwind. Northwind sold well and validated the notion that people will pay for a print edition even if the comic is available for free on the internet. Waid explains the current promotion in a video before the comic, and he talks a bit about the Northwind experience in this interview with ICv2.

A couple of print comic publishers have experimented with offering free content online, but they tend to hedge their bets and only put the first 10 or 12 pages up. Boom is offering the entire four-issue miniseries. With that in mind, I decided to look at how the first issue works as a webcomic. I haven’t been a big fan of Boom’s books in the past—they’re just not to my taste—but one thing I noticed right away was that Hexed seems to be pretty readable. One big problem with print comics is that their vertical pages don’t fit well onto my horizontal computer screen, and that’s true here, but it’s mitigated by the fact that the artist, Emma Rios, tends to divide the page into halves or thirds, so it’s easy to scroll through. Although the story is told in first person, mostly the main character’s interior monologue, the writing is concise, so the page isn’t cluttered with a million tiny text boxes. And the art is clear and linear, so it’s easy to grasp the gestures in each panel. The colors are absolutely lovely, and they probably look better on a backlit computer screen than on a printed page.

The deeper question is whether Hexed passes what I think of as “the Zuda test”: Continue reading →