Downloadable comics just got a huge boost in the arm with the addition of Marvel Entertainment to the fold.
Comixology, the maker of several iPhone and iPod Touch apps for purchasing and reading comic books, has announced the addition of one of the “big two” comic publishers to its stable of publishers: Marvel Entertainment.
While the catalog is currently limited to the titles of Astonishing X-Men (the first 24 issues written by Buffy, the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon), Marvel Zombies miniseries, Captain America, X-23 and X-Men: Age of Apocalypse, this is surely not the end of what the House of Ideas will be offering.
As the former manager of a comic book store (from Aug. 1986 to Dec. 2001), I have been interested in how this would work, so I dove in and downloaded Astonishing X-Men #1. I have to say, it works surprisingly well. You are presented with one panel at a time, and the “camera” zooms in to the word balloon of the person talking, when you hit next, it pans to other side of the panel on very wide panels. It felt a bit more like watching TV than reading a comic book to be honest, and I kind of liked it.
However, there is a rub here. The issue I bought cost me a $1.99, a fairly high price I feel for a digital comic that was only 22-pages in length to begin with. True, comic books now run you $2.99 to $3.99 on the stands (sometimes even as high as $4.99), but at least those you get to keep those for your collection. As someone who used to have over 10,000 comics in his personal collection, I can see the appeal of this for the casual reader, though. One of the reasons I dropped out of comics for the most part was that I simply couldn’t go on storing them, and I sold off about 8,000 of my books. I miss reading comic books, but I could never allow myself to buy one and throw it away. This method will allow me to buy issues I am interested in and not have the storage or guilt concerns.
Will this ever replace the printed form of comic books? Highly, highly doubtful. Could it bring back some old readers? Quite possibly.
If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, I say treat yourself to at least one issue, it was a worthwhile experience to be sure.
