Reviews

Now that we are starting to post more reviews on the site, I felt it was time to explain our various systems at work.

First and foremost, you will notice that we don’t use a numeric or alphabetical scale on the site. This is done intentionally as we feel scores are an arbitrary system. What differentiates an 8 and a 9? Is a A for GI Joe, the same type of A for Black Swan? These problems are inherit in any scale, and we really just wanted to avoid people ignoring the context of a review based on its final score.

What we DO have however is a recommendation system. At the end of the day, we want to put our money where our mouth is so we will recommend based on our own experience the product. The scale seems to vary across the mediums, but they roughly equate to:

Buy It/See It/Own it: The highest honor that can be bestowed upon any product so good that we recommend you run out and see it in its natural environment. Whether its buying a new single issue of a comic, catching a movie in theaters or buying a brand new video game.

Rent It/Borrow It/Read It: This means the product is okay, but not earth shattering. If a friend owns it, borrow his copy, read it in a book store, wait until its in stock on Netflix basically no need to rush out the door now.

Avoid It: This is universal.Just avoid it. We mean don’t make eye contact, don’t talk about it. Probably shouldn’t even read our review on it.

Now, some of you may have noticed that we do use a numerical score in our comic book reviews, but that’s a slightly different idea in place. One of the things, I’ve been most interested about as a comic reader was finding a way to get new readers into the fold. Unlike games and movies and music, I find that comic reading is a very niche market, and what you often here from people is they don’t know where to begin. Instead of doing various beginner’s guide (which we will do as well), we wanted to create a system that would ease readers in even with on-going series.

The scale, much like the idea, is a simple way for readers to decide if a comic is worth getting for them. Generally, each of these come with a minor write-up explaining why we graded it as such, but just to give a firmer idea. We will now be using a 5 point scale.

5- Means the comic is easily accessible, you really don’t need to know much else then what’s presented in the comic to enjoy it.

4- The comic is accessible, but it may have tie-ins to another series or maybe its the 2nd part of a story, its good enough to start with, but may need to do some extra work.

3- The comic comes with a little baggage. You will be required to do some research to get some ideas, references or characters, but even still the comic is accessible to a new reader on its own.

2-You better have a Wiki app on your phone, you’ll need to do some research to fully understand this comic. Sure some elements will be explained to you, but like 75% of the book references events and characters you’ve never heard of!

1- Let’s hope your best friend is someone named Grant Morrison or Brian Michael Bendis, you are gonna need a comic expert to explain what you just read. There’s probably some time-travel/alternate Earths involved in the book somewhere! Enjoy what you can!