Red Circle New Crusaders App Report Card
Current Grade: A-
Original Launch Grade: B-
And the grades are in for how Archie Comics’ Red Circle New Crusaders App is currently doing, and it’s gone up from a B- a few months back to a nice honor roll A-!
New Material: The brand new material of the New Crusaders comic is still given to us on time every week as promised. Still a head of print, still about six new pages every week all completely finished, never feeling rushed, and a quality comic at that, with writing by Ian Flynn and currently art by Alitha Martinez.
Old Material: Here is the big improvement that has driven our rating up from a B- to an A-: The presentation and frequency of the old material. When the App first launched it gave us a giant slew of back issues, and then sat quietly there for about a month before adding more. At the time, some of the material was rush scanned, giving us blurry pages, the staples in the pages scanned in as well, etc. Since then the quality of these scans has improved. Still, once in a while we will get an old issue where some collector wrote their name in a corner page as a kid or the like, but that’s the price of getting these old issues in a Netflix-like set up for a low cost. The frequency is a little nicer, too. Although we don’t get a ton of issues released in one big chunk, we get 2-3 new back issues released a week, making everything feel manageable to read and leave us wanting more.
Upcoming Material: According to Archie, we should be seeing the comic The Lost Crusade, written by folks like Ian Flynn and Chuck Dixon with art by Mike Norton, which will bridge the gap of what happened at the end of the 1980s Mighty Crusaders leading up to the New Crusaders, being added on soon. This will be released during the 5th week of the months that have five weeks, versus the average four, so there is always new material and no dead space. We’ll see if it happens on August 29th, fans are crossing their fingers it does.
So overall, everything is the same quality track or has improved. For a dollar-a-week subscription, I couldn’t think of a better edition to your iPad and your digital comic fix.
Drew McCabe
drew@comicattack.net
