Product Corner: Corralling the issue sprawl problem in Marvel Unlimited
Or, why is it SO HARD to read the two big Hickman sagas?
This is the first edition of Product Corner, where I, Keith, apply my day job – product management – to things that are not my product. Where possible, I will also follow up with the laziest possible "solution" to the problem herein.
So. I am that most cursed of things in the tech sphere, a product manager. If that's a new term to you, I get it. The product manager (shorten that to PM at your own risk, there are so many other kinds of PMs before you even get to times after noon) theoretically sits somewhere between the people who want a software thing, and the people who make the software thing. When people complain about Twitter's For You feed, and they should, it sucks, there is a person that is catching those requests, and figuring out what a solution does or doesn't look like.
(Mostly at Twitter, it's what solutions don't look like, as my sense is that folks are mostly just taking turns making sure the place doesn't burn down between rounds of layoffs.)
The worst product managers look like this guy:
But there is something of an answer to the question that John C. McGinley asks here – why can't the customers just take their requests straight to the software people? Frequently, almost always, customers know what doesn't work, but they don't always know what a solution looks like and how it should behave, and the software people – engineers – know how to write the code, but not necessarily what the user experience should look like!
My personal sickness is that I can't turn off that part of my brain when I'm not at work.
Product people are sometimes not-well-liked – they are frequently the face of things that aren't getting done or aren't going well to customers, and the source of pressure and timelines for engineers. But a decent product manager collects requests, prioritizes, plans, and sets the product and the team up for success. This is what I try to do at my current gig, at bio-tech-y startup Neochromosome.
My personal sickness is that I can't turn off that part of my brain when I'm not at work.
Okay, so, case in point, your boy here is a fledgling Marvel Unlimited addict. For the uninitiated, Marvel Unlimited is a great iPad app (and Android tablet app, but those don't really exist, honestly), and an okay smartphone app (no matter how hard you try, getting a 2-physical-page splash onto a smartphone is not a great experience, even though the hopping and zooming around is a pretty great technical achievement!) for reading Marvel brand comics, like 70 years worth of 'em. The combination of Apple's big bright screens and Marvel's punchy colors is a pretty transporting combination; I have whiled away many hours of my evenings reading back issues of West Coast Avengers, Hawkeye, and Black Widow.
But I frequently fall off the wagon due to the lack of what I think could be a very simple feature – you see, comics broadly and Marvel specifically have a habit of having cross-comic events. World War Hulk, The Infinity Saga, Secret Wars, the more recent Dawn of X/Reign of X dueling X-Men events – these are long, interwoven events crossing many lines of comics that are designed to be read in a given order. These events are fairly forgiving – if you miss the way a given event affects a non-Peter-Parker Spider-character, you won't get lost.
But comics fans are completists, and with the advent of Marvel Unlimited, where all the issues are just THERE for you to read, a whole community effort has arisen to make semi-canonical issue orders to help readers navigate their way through long runs in comics, or even creators entire oeuvres. At the current moment, I'm making my way through Jonathan Hickman's looong run over Fantastic Four and Avengers comics, and I'm doing so with the help of comicbookreadingorders.com, a truly great resource! If you click through to that link, you'll see that this run takes a reader in and out of Fantastic Four, Secret Warriors, Avengers, New Avengers for 200-plus issues.
So, as a reader, this turns out to work like this:
- I open the above page in Safari.
- I open the Marvel Unlimited app and check where I left off.
- I return to that page in Safari, and find what's next.
- I return to Marvel Unlimited and use the very limited search feature to find the comics run for a given title – there are so many runs of Avengers, and you sort of have to go looking for the title and year combination described.
- I read that comic. GREAT.
- Marvel Unlimited prompts me to read the next issue in that series (which may or may not be the next issue in the reading order)
- I go back to Comic Book Reading Orders, and verify that I'm supposed to read the next issue, and if so, I let Marvel Unlimited take me there. If not, I have to go searching for the relevant issue
Etc, etc, ad infinitum. You'll notice that only in step 5 there am I ACTUALLY READING COMICS – it sort of drives me batty! Why doesn't Marvel Unlimited have reading guides that take you through events?
Well, they kind of do. In the Marvel Unlimited app, there are Reading Guides that take you through events/series/creators' careers -- but using them is crazy frustrating!
First off, when you go to use the reading guides, and you finish off a given comic, the app wants to take you to the next issue in the series, not the next issue in the reading guide, which is not what we want! So there's a lot of hopping around and backtracking even within the Marvel walled garden, and it's really easy to lose track of your current place.
Secondarily, and more importantly, Marvel has to make and maintain these guides, and they just aren't necessarily what I, the reader, want! They skip major preceding and following events, they lose sidequests that are of pretty great interest, and they often get the order, if not wrong, then maybe not perfect. And I really can't blame them – comic book nerds are annoying and precise about this stuff, and it would be literally impossible to get it right for every reader.
My "solution" here is not complex – just let the nerds do it!
My "solution" here is not complex – just let the nerds do it! Build a tool in-app that allows people to create their own reading orders, and let people export a link they can share on their sites and Reddit and Twitter and Mastodon or wherever else! Comic Book Reading Orders could have a little link on their site that cracks open Marvel Unlimited and imports their reading order, and then the reader – me – would be able to make my way through their precise reading order.
In a perfect world, Marvel would fix issue number one up there too – if I'm working my way through a reading guide, Marvel should guide me to the next issue in the guide, not the comic book series for a given issue.
The problem here is of course, I'm not the first person to ask for this. It seems like maybe a major chunk of work like this is not forthcoming, unfortunately – the app itself is very stable, which is great, but I haven't seen lots of forward motion on new features for the app proper. Which is fine! I'll survive.
But jeez, it would be great.
(Hell, there's probably something that a rando like me could build in like Python that would generate a document or webpage that links into Marvel Unlimited for each issue, and that might reduce the back-and-forth a bit? Hmmmm.... In a future edition, I'll try to implement this!)
