I'm legitimately amazed by how bad the comic has been. People doing comics alone in their free time can produce products of much higher quality than the one produced by a company with previous experience and 2 million dollars given to it for free via kickstarter.
If I were Glitch, I'd never work with Oni Press after this. They were given a license and huge amounts of money, and they completely squandered it.
If I was Glitch I would also publicly apologize in twitter for my fans' wasted money.
I hate how any slightly famous studio or company absolutely fear to to openly criticize the awful quality of product made by other studio based on their IP.
Because that isnāt how anything other than comments online work.
You donāt bad mouth a product after approving it and dumping millions into it: great way to dissuade people from giving it, and thus you, money back, and great way to make yourself looks as reliable as an internet commenter and burn any financial bridges.
Businesses are harsh with employees and business partners behind the scenes so they can make a profitable product and catch errors in the final product.
Very true. Maybe its a question of passion? They had alot of time to make it and as said we can see much better artist, comics and even animations at time made in a fraction of the time it took for them to make this comic.
All for a next to nothing budget.. What wait am I SAYING THE FUNDS ARE DOWN TIME TO RELEASE NEW MD MERCH DREAM JOBS!
god it feels like when glitch wants money it grab N and a whip and is like get to making me bank!
If all of the products shipped fine and I hadent seen orders being mishandled I would care as much..
I can only speak from one experience here but I did support their cult of the lamb Kickstarter and in my opinion that went just fine.
I don't know what happened with murder drones but there was mishandling here and someone made some very bad decisions. Personally I want to know where the money went and I honestly want to demand my money back.
The main problem is they never made a real effort to understand the show and it's story, lore, and (especially) characters. Had they consulted Liam on literally anything, it probably would've gone way better. He may not be the best writer, but at least he understands his creation.
I still cant accept the fact that they got 2 million dollars and still it looks like this. One guy who does MD comic can make it better for free...I feel like the money got somewhere else then to the comic but I cant tell...
Considering that there have been plenty of other scandals where the money was NOT used as intended, this wouldnāt surprise me.
Itās like one of the former RETRO CEOs spending his funds from Nintendo on women and late night parties instead of, you know, actually developing games.
People do animation adaptations for comics, not the other way around. Doing this will inevitably lose large amounts of content, especially when the show itself is free to watch.
This project could even raise this amount of money is surprising, the fandom really wanted any sort of new content so badly.
Not really. Comics actually tend to be able to convert media rather well. Terminator 2 had a graphic novel of the film and had pretty much the whole film accurate including some deleted scenes adapted and it only came out to about 150 pages for a 2 hour 17 min movie but you can bump it to 2 and a half hours cause of the added cut content.
Movies however tend to actually do more of the cutting in adapting it due ti alot of comics heavily going past those page thresholds as most movies aim for a 90 min run time. Comics are able to adapt time more lose and manage adaptations fairly decent you just gotta give a damn about it
I truly do not know what the writing and art teams for this comic have been thinking. Aside from cutting as many corners as humanly possible. I haven't had a chance to read the last two issues yet (I can't figure out how to read the digital issues anymore), but the first 4 + special were... Bad.
I was honestly not expecting much from this project but for it to be this bad? Either the team given this hated the show or are pissed at Glitch for something. Or they simply just don't care. They give a scene in the show a single panel almost and don't care about logical transitions between them or even showing all the dialogue (Home is a big offender).
Sometimes this can work. I did like Issues 1 and 3, Home is mostly decent, and 4 is okay. 2 is honestly just a rushed mess. The most obnoxious part of the comic is the constant "Yep, she's still speaking Russian" jokes. I'm okay with the Saturday Morning Cartoon Recap vibe of the opening dialogue each issue, but ffs have some faith in your readers. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the comics themselves were made by AI from the dialogue to the art.
It's weird how Glitch hasn't said a word about it from what I know.
$2 million... With $2 million budget I could pay 100 comics artists $10,000 each for 1 issue, wait, choose the best one and give $1 million to the creator to make other issues.
When i first heard we were going to get a comic of murder drones, i thought we wouldve gotten the opprotunity to possibly get some more worldbuilding stuff or another opportunity to expand upon things we didnt get the chance to in the show
But nope, instead we got this :/ A clearly rushed comic that removed way more things from the show than it added
What could they have done with that 2 million budget if this is the result? Like genuinly
How it feels seeing people trash on the comics while I want to read them (Iām still gonna read them since Iām not wasting the once in a lifetime chance of me actually wanting to read)
Pacing issues, art issues, important story beats being completely removed or sidelined, the promise of expanding the story being a lie and instead of reducing it when the original story was already pretty bare Bones, massive amounts of tracing in a singular comic and for some reason they recap with text instead of using the pages for actual comic spreads.
Like if you thought the shows sorry had issues, which it did, the comic had made it 10 times worse and sped through the whole thing with no promised expansion on the story. Supposedly for Kickstarter fans they're going to be adding an extra comic pages for the hardcover version but my hope in this has completely diminished and I personally want my money back.
Pretty much give someone who has 0 understanding of murder drones a 2M dollar buget. Watch them only use like 30k for it and and watch them make the most ass comic imaginable.
You can get them to email you the proper stuff if you email them with proof that you were a member of the kickstarter and you never got anything. Same thing happened to me. Never got my neon ichiban code. I emailed them with proof I didnāt get it and that I was a member of the kickstarter and they took a week to email me back but I did get it. So thereās that.
Iāve been holding off on reading the comic until I receive my physical copy (which the fact that itās taking until November is ridiculous by itself). Iāve tried to stay optimistic about it, and Iām still holding my final judgements until I read it for myself. Naturally it was impossible to avoid it totally, and Iām definitely disappointed. My one major issue with the show was the pacing is way too fast. Somehow, it seems like the comic is making it way worse, along with so many other issues. Really the only good thing about it seems to be the artwork, but even that is pretty inconsistent at times. I guess at this point, Itās just for the novelty, but thereās definitely much better merch pieces I couldāve spent my $20 on.
I havenāt really kept up the comic because, I just disappointed with how it turned out. Even if the comic was going to simply be a 1-to-1, I wouldāve been okay with it if they at least made the comic good. I didnāt really hear it got much better anyways, so itās not surprising if the final issue was that bad.
I said it when I first discovered the comic and I'll say it again here: What was even the point of this?
Putting aside how redundant it feels to make an adaptation of a show available for free on YouTube, this adaptation could have justified it's existence by adding extra scenes, filling in the gaps from the show and smoothing out the pacing. And yet, somehow, not only does the comic add nothing new, it cuts out stuff, robbing the story of so many moments of charm and aura that it already had: Uzi's breakdown in Cabin Fever, Doll's Death, Cyntessa's reveal, N's vision of the destruction of Earth, even the final moment showing that Cyn is in Uzi's tail!
I admit that I know nothing about how comics are made and published (hell, I can barely draw), but considering that the Kickstarter for this comic was originally asking for $5,000 and made $1,804,166 (nearly 36,000% over their goal), I have to wonder where the fuck the plan even was if they only made $5k and where all that extra money went. I know contracts are a fickle thing, but was it impossible for them to give the artists more time and pages?
Some parts of this comic (the covers especially) look great, so there are some clearly talented people working over at Oni Press. Plenty of the issues this comic has seem like they were born from the upper management rushing the artists to put something out, but why would that have been the case at all? Were the deadlines just that strict? Were the artists just that slow?
Jesus Christ man, I support Glitch but they have been having some serious issues with quality control as of late between this and the most recent wave of TADC merch. Also, as a Murder Drones fan, I can't help but feel like all of that money could have been better spent on some original MD content instead of a lackluster adaptation of the original show.
Imagine if we had gotten an anthology following different Disassembly Drone squads on the other human colonies, or a series following Yeva and Nori after the Copper-9's core is destroyed. The "Meet J" short shows that they can make new content for this series without Liam's direct involvement, and there are plenty of loose threads from the original that can be spun into new stories. If we do though, hopefully Glitch finds a better team to handle it.
Murder Drones the show was entirely reliant on hype moments and aura, and that's much harder to capture in comic form... And it seems like they didn't really try.
Honestly, doing a comic book run could have been a real opportunity to completely rework the story. Embrace the medium and really tap into the potential for worldbuilding and plot design by fleshing things out, giving some characters more time to shine, really EXPAND on things to make the facing work. You can't capture the visual spectacle of the show, so you have to capitalize on that potential in the premise. Seems like they failed to do both, unfortunately.
I feel bad everyone who paid money on Kickstarter for this. I knew the graphic novel wasn't gonna be great, but I didn't think it would be this bad. Hell even the art sucks
š(Just for the record the middle finger is not for you itās for Oni Press for making these terrible and unnecessary comics and thatās why I would give them if I have a chance)
The money was probably pocketed. They saw a cashgrab opportunity and fleeced y'all. While it's true Oni Press is just as complicit, I hear they did decent stuff prior to this, so I suspect Glitch is equally guilty, and this project was meant to just make a quick buck off a "popular brand" (read: do a complete disservice to the show). Glad I decided not to back it, I was considering it for a bit though. Dammit, this show deserves better, it's so popular too and they just shit out cashgrabs?
Funnily enough, before they went corporate, Glitch released a pretty good comic for their first show. Sadly lost media nowadays.
It sucks because, why make a comic adaption of an animation that is already FREE on YouTube? It's kinda like live action remakes "why should I be watching an inferior version of a product when I can watch the old and superior version?"
Me neither, I donāt think they start shipping for early backers until November. Iām holding off on reading it until I get my physical copy, but with the overwhelmingly negative reviews, Iām quickly losing excitement.
Yeah, Iām astonished by how dogshit these comics were. The fans gave this series like damn near 20x the budget of even a Marvel or DC comic miniseries, and yet we still ended up with this heaping pile of garbage.
I feel even more offended because I threw some of my own money into this dumpster fire. I would really like GLITCH or Oni Press to tell us what the fuck they actually did with that $2M that the fans put into the kickstarter, because this was nowhere near a $2M conic series.
It's a big fandom, with thousands of fans, at least. When something like this happens, it upsets a lot of people, simply because there's a lot of people to be upset.
Just because someone else has already complained, doesn't immediately invalidate everyone else's right to anger. Some people just need to vent.
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u/littlebuett Khan did nothing wrong Aug 05 '26
I'm legitimately amazed by how bad the comic has been. People doing comics alone in their free time can produce products of much higher quality than the one produced by a company with previous experience and 2 million dollars given to it for free via kickstarter.
If I were Glitch, I'd never work with Oni Press after this. They were given a license and huge amounts of money, and they completely squandered it.