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Notes on the DC Universe Infinite app

I was and still am a big fan of physical copies of comic books. But I can’t afford to buy all the comic books I want to read. I have long used libraries to supply my comic book-reading habit (see my original praise of libraries and then discussing passing the 1000-book mark of borrowing comic books from libraries), but this changed with the pandemic, which initiated the transition to digital copies via the library (first with RBdigital and then the Libby app) and my trying the Marvel Unlimited app. Things haven’t been the same since.

As mentioned in the post talking about the RBdigital app, one of the most unfathomable aspects of reading digital comics legally in the UK is that DC Comics doesn’t offer any digital comics to our libraries. Marvel, Image, Dark Horse – thousands of comic books in the digital library offering of the City of London libraries, allowing people to get hooked on their content. DC Comics? Fuggedaboutit. Why do you hate the UK, DC Comics?

This country-specific hatred continued when DC Comics launched the DC Universe Infinite (DCUI) app, making it a USA-only business for well over a year (and other countries, to be fair, but that doesn’t feed into my narrative). As part of a large multinational corporation, DC Comics should have been able to launch worldwide from the start; to not do that was to throw money away and it demonstrated narrow thinking.

In another frustrating decision, DCUI was launched in the UK in May 2022, but just 6 months later was the launch of DC Universe Infinite Ultra, which increased the number of available comics (from 27,000 to 32,000, mostly Vertigo books that are not accessible on DC Universe Infinite) but mainly changed the time limit of when the comic books would arrive on the app: it’s 6 months after publication for DCUI but only 1 month after publication for DCUI Ultra. This obviously comes at a price (an annual subscription to DC Universe Infinite is £54.99 whereas the same for DC Universe Infinite Ultra is £87.99); this was too much for me, especially because I took advantage of the initial launch offer: buy an annual subscription in the first month it was launched and keep renewing it, you pay £36.99 until you stop the subscription. So, I miss the ability to read Vertigo comic books, but I’m not bothered about the 6-month delay, so it’s not a big deal, but why the wait to launch the extra version? Why not have both options available from the start?

So, what about the app itself (which is the point of this post)? The app opens with the Netflix-style carousel of new books at the top, followed by a row of the books you are currently reading (under ‘Dive back in’). Beneath that is the row of Latest releases, the books that have come out on the app this week. Strangely, even though I am only on DC Universe Infinite, the next row of books is the Ultra latest releases – I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a constant reminder of what you’re missing and thus nudging you to upgrade, but it’s annoying, plus it’s strange because the book covers are blacked out with a lock icon on the top to say, ‘YOU CANNOT READ THIS BOOK, YOU CHEAP SCUM!’. Under that are the DC Go! Books, comics in the dynamic vertical-scrolling experience for mobile devices. Beneath these rows, the selection changes: as I write this, it’s Creature Commandos because of the recent cartoon, then DC All In books, New Gods storylines, Harley Quinn-related books – just a variety of different options being pushed differently depending on what’s going on in the world.

If you click on a book, you go to another page that has a button to start reading the book; there are also buttons to bookmark as a favourite (the heart), add it to a list (the plus button), a download button for offline reading, and a sharing button. Underneath, it provides a brief summary of the book, the main creators (hyperlinked to search results for the creators), plus a row showing the rest of the books in the series in sequential order, so you can keep track. The reading experience is the same as all other comics-reading apps – smooth page transitions, the ability to read panel-by-panel, the ability to select different pages via a menu – nothing unusual and it does the job well, which it should be.

Screenshot of DC Universe Infinite app error page

So time to discuss the negative. The app is the buggiest of all the reading apps. I have encountered the ‘Oops’ page way more than any of the others, even if it’s a cute animation-style Alfred Pennyworth. This isn’t just when I was using an older Android device that wasn’t the latest operating system – it’s also on my current tablet, which is up to date. The worst bug was pages that were nearly almost completely grey – the very top few millimetres show the comic book page, but not the rest (you can see that the pages exist when you use the menu to see the page selection option). These things shouldn’t be occurring on an app that I am paying for.

[To be fair: I contacted Customer Services, who were quick to respond; they suggested switching off VPN/privacy apps, neither of which I use, then came back with uninstalling the app, shutting down the tablet, turning it back on then reinstalling the app. This worked, but it’s an extremely aggressive solution to something that should not occur and has never occurred with any of the other comic book reading apps.]

The search option is another frustration. We have been spoiled by online searches perhaps, but it’s peculiar the results that show up. The results page starts with a row of storylines (collections of comic book stories that are somehow related to your search terms), then individual comic books (you have to click ‘See more’ to show all the results), the a row of Comic series, a listing of book series, be it a run on a main character or a mini-series. Getting the results you want can be a challenge.

For example, I was searching The Ray, specifically the Priest run from the mid-1990s – I’m missing a few issues, so wanted to read them. (It’s not a great series; it was only because it was early Priest stuff during my ‘collecting creator’s works’ period.) The ‘Storylines’ results row displayed Hitman: A Rage in Arkham, Batman/The Flash: The Button, The Nice House on the Lake, among others. The row of ‘Comic books’ results starts with The Legend of Wonder Women from 2015. The ‘Comic series’ row showed Gotham by Midnight, Ragman, Robin: Son of Batman, Trinity of Sin: PandoraThe Ray series I wanted was the tenth result in the list.

Another issue with the search is that it returns all books, no matter what subscription you have, but it’s only when you click through that you discover it’s an Ultra-only book that you can’t access – surely that should be more obvious on the search results? It’s similar on the ‘Comics’ tab, which is a huge list of all the books available on the app (well, not completely: there are some entries that include ‘0 items’ as the number of books available – WTF?), but there is no indication if you can actually read the book or not until you click through to the actual book itself. C’mon, DC Comics …

The user experience is frustrating in other areas. Instead of Marvel’s tick with ‘Read’ to indicate if you’ve read a book, the DCUI app uses a blue line at the bottom of the cover of the book. However, this blue line somehow ends up on books you haven’t read, particularly in the row of ‘Latest releases’, which seems amateur. In the ‘Dive back in’ row at the top, it has a list of the next book in the series, even if it’s only available on Ultra. The most annoying bug is the inexplicable switch to the next comic book on from the one you just read – I would finish an issue of a series, set up the next issue to read later. When I open the app later, the first book on the ‘Dive back in’ row would be the issue after the one I hadn’t read. This isn’t a one-off – it has happened many times, to the point of me having to double-check each series before continuing to read the series.

The ability to mark books for reading later on is good; however, to access this list, you have to click ‘My DC’ on the bottom of the app, which takes forever to actually load (well, more than 10 seconds, which feels forever on a device nowadays). I don’t mean to complain so much, but the experience is significantly worse than the Marvel app – I don’t see why this should be.

Despite this, it’s still enjoyable to be able to read comic books from DC’s vast library that I wouldn’t be able to access otherwise – all those original books (Action Comics #1, Detective Comics #27, Showcase #4) plus all those odd books and anthology titles with creators you admire but you wouldn’t necessarily buy (e.g. I read DC’s Crimes of Passion #1 from 2020, with some John Paul Leon art). I have also read some great books that I couldn’t have read otherwise (Taylor and Redondo’s Nightwing, King and Evely’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, Taylor and Putri’s Dark Knights of Steel, Waid and Mora’s Batman/Superman: World’s Finest, King and Gerads’ Strange Adventures, King and Smallwood’s The Human Target – I would list more but the section of My DC that lists my Comic History has no more than 20 comic books in total, despite having a subscription for nearly 3 years and an average of reading at least a few comics every day during that time; damn it, I was trying to be positive about the app …).

In summary: the DCUI app is the only way I can actually get to read DC Comics in the UK (short of, you know, buying them), so I shall put up with the (many) irritations for the time being.

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