Broken Frontier

Let’s just call Tim Kring the master of golden opportunities. Foreseeing the implications of the WGA strike, the Heroes creator moved quickly to provide an explosive mid-season ending to the show during a string of hiatuses which rendered most other shows powerless to move the plot. As the end of Volume 2 gives way to the dawn of Volume 3, one character has been shot, another trapped in an exploding building and one more buried alive but NBC says “Wait, there’s more!” – pointing to an extensive series of online graphic novels which have supplemented the series since the beginning.

Navigation has always been an issue for big budget online presence in the graphic medium. Webcomics have made it pretty easy to read an entire comic worth of stories in a matter of minutes but, surprisingly, online graphic novels from major companies are often behind the task. This is probably due to the misconception of placing comics online instead of integrating them into the web itself. Though NBC is no exception, the reading system remains pretty intuitive and easy-to-use.

There are two problems with NBC’s system for Heroes. Despite the abundance of material for Heroes fans to tinker through, there’s just not a lot of organization at work. When I came to the site, I wasn’t sure if I wanted the Heroes graphic novel, the Rogue graphic novel or an animated novel mentioned elsewhere on the site. NBC seems to be trying quite a few different things, and while they are all major successes, they could be arranged a bit more clearly.

In particular, the Heroes animated graphic novel – complete with sound and limited motion – works fine, but opening the comic by tucking the corner to the other end of the screen (like a real comic) can be tedious, especially if you don’t have a big enough screen. Put it this way: if this was a “real” comic, I’d have ripped it in half by now trying to open it.

The stories mark a wide range of substance. Some are more or less filler, while others offer dramatic insights into Kring’s exhaustive world. With the spin-off Heroes: Origin supposedly scrapped due to the strike, the online graphic novel could serve as an expansive dumping ground for first appearances of several new characters, though its hard to know if any of them will play a role in future episodes with the strike’s toll on the overall season still uncertain.

It would be nice to see a post-“Powerless” comic, as NBC almost seemed to imply at the end of the latest episode. Since the end of Volume 1 left a sizeable four month gap until Volume 2, it’s possible a certain window could exist between Volumes 2 and 3. But whether this possibility is in the cards remains to be seen, as negotiations between the WGA and the studios could end the strike relatively quickly... or prolong it indefinitely. Either way, Heroes’ online presence is a saving grace most television shows can’t afford.

In other news, Last Blood continues to excite me despite the weird plot twist. Namely an army of zombies have arrived touting guns under the command of a vampire named Sullivan Davis, who claims to have just returned from Hell. Is this literal? What did Dawn of the Dead say? When there is no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth. We’re not getting many answers, and the story could blow up in our faces if the creators aren’t careful, but it’s still the number one webcomic on Top Webcomics for a reason.