Thursday 23rd of July at 9:26 am.
Injokester: Woohoo! New comic maker site to play with!
Thursday 23rd of July at 9:29 am.
Injokester: Fail. Utterly fucking fail.
Seriously though, the artwork is awful and the interface so damn painful. Looks like the whole thing's designed to appeal to school teachers.
Heh, I even saw this during sign-up: "Note: it is illegal to lie about your age". Illegal? Really? Well fuck me with a rake. Better arrest every internet user and/or female in the entire fucking world. Against the T&C's? Sure. Illegal? Exaggerate much.
And then I saw the terms and conditions. Just out of curiosity I did a word count. 5033 words, or roughly 12 pages. I used to hang at a great little forum once where the T&C's read as follows:
"The admins are in charge, don't fuck with us."
God-damn I miss those days. But fuck it, I wanted to check this thing out so I agreed to their 12 pages of legal jargon and lied about my age just on principle. Come on, arrest me.
Once in the first thing I did was check out the user community. Lame. As so many other sites have proven, the more flexibility you give the general public in the creation process, the more likely they'll fuck it up. If you want to know just what sort of bottom dwellers gravitate to a site like that just go read a few of the featured comics. If the comic wasn't funny (and it won't be), read the comments below. I guarantee you there will be a bunch of people saying "HAHAHAHAH!!!!" or similar, whether there was actually a joke in the comic or not. Think I'm exaggerating? Keep reading until you find one without any text at all. Yay, look at the pretty colours!
The lowpoint of my experience on Pixton so far was reading a comic that told the old old old joke: "If a blonde and a brunette jumped off a cliff, who would hit the ground first? The brunette, because the blonde would have to stop and ask for directions." Okay, so someone took a lame old joke, set it to pictures and put it up on the internet. Whoopy fucking do, happens all the time. What really bothers me though it that the fucktard who did it got 30 comments from 30 other fucktards along the lines of "HAHAHAHAH!!!!", along with 150+ reader votes that averaged out to 4.5 out of 5 stars.
Actually I suppose I could give props to anyone that stayed interested enough to make it the whole way through the comic maker interface. But I won't, because that means you spent the whole time looking at badly drawn flash art and persevered anyway.
To be fair though I'm going to take the time to point out the things I did like about Pixton.
1) The name. Pixton. That's a whole 6 keystrokes less I need to use to get to their site than stripcreator.
2) The wide range of art and the ability to mix and match different sized art, have heaps more panels, etc...
For someone that's actually funny and knows how to write this opens up a lot of potential for comedic use. There's just one problem here though: So do socks with buttons sewn on them if you can do a silly voice. The end result is that this site will be filled almost utterly with scrubs wanting to write a comic but not knowing how, and unlike stripcreator or witty comics the pain isn't over in 3 panels, it keeps going and going and going. A good writer can work with just about anything, art is secondary. Don't believe me? Check this out: http://www.qwantz.com/index.php. Ryan North for the win.
So to wrap it up: I hate their site layout, I hate the site navigation, I hate their artwork, I hate the majority of their community. Congratulations Pixton, you've built yourself a novelty. Next time take into consideration that the reason sites like stripcreator work is because intelligent and clever cartoonists are either too lazy to use a convoluted interface like yours or will go ahead and draw their own work.
Fuck you Pixton, you fail.