Tag: Comixology

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Technology

The Problem with Vertigo

Can someone please explain to me what the hell DC Comics is thinking when it comes to the promotion of its Vertigo imprint? Vertigo is the home for creator-owned mature series over at DC, and its currently on a roll with a good number of great regular series (DMZ, iZombie, Northlanders, Sweet Tooth), as well as a growing line-up of one-shot graphic novels. These are the kinds of books that people who don’t usually read comics would probably like, and yet Vertigo’s website makes absolutely no sense for non-comics readers. The only pages found on the site are for individual issues, which is fine for a graphic novel, but not for a series. Last week I read through the current run of The Unwritten (#1-17), and wanting to recommend it to people, I had to link to the Wikipedia page because there was no decent page to link to on the Vertigo page, that would explain properly what the series was about.

Something needs to be done in order to give new readers — anyone who’s heard of a series and wants to know more about it — a place to do that. And even though I’m not a particular fan of all the publisher-specific iPad apps out there (all spinoffs of the Comixology app), the one that would make the most sense is a Vertigo-branded one, for people who have absolutely no interest in the super-hero fare that DC Comics mostly publishes. Sure, you can buy the Vertigo books through the DC app, but the mainstream audience that you could get reading these book are not going to find them there.

Pictured, the cover to The Unwritten #17, illustrated by Yuko Shimizu, who has done all the covers for the series. That particular issue is rather amazing, presented in the form of an actual choose-your-own-adventure story (but I do recommend reading everything that comes before it first).

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Books Technology

Let’s Get Non-Physical

Some more interesting musings by Warren Ellis in regards to digital comics, this time using the success of his free-to-read online web comic FREAKANGELS as an example. Now combine this with iPad delivery, and you have a strong case for comic creators making the move to digital-mostly, with maybe the additions of printed collections for those who still prefer their books that way.

In a later post, we also learn that new issues of the Walking Dead comic series — the one that will debut next month on TV as a Frank Darabont-produced series on AMC — are now available for sale on iPad (through the Image Comics and Comixology apps) the same day they show up in shops. This is something I’ve found to be a big problem with digital comic sales — so far you can’t buy the latest issues of a series, which doesn’t make much sense if you want to reach your core comic reading audience. The one downer is that the digital issue is now priced same as in print, $3, versus the $2 they were charging for previous digital issues.

Categories
Technology

Graphic.ly Reading Comics

So far your main option for buying and reading comics on the iPad as been the Comixology app, and its suite of publisher-specific spinoffs (Marvel, DC, BOOM! Studios, Image Comics, etc.) As Warren Ellis pointed out yesterday, there’s a new challenger out — something we definitely need, competition is good — in the form of Graphic.ly.

Just like Comixology, there’s a desktop component to it — currently a Windows-only app, but with a web-powered version to come — but what’s more interesting to me is the iPad version (there’s an iPhone version too, with Windows 7 and Android versions coming). Also like Comixology, that app acts as both a store — where you can buy comics at similar prices ($2 an issue), with a few free samples available — and a reader.

Graphic.ly does things a bit differently than Comixology, with one of these resulting in a major improvement. Although Comixology lets you read a comics page-by-page, the mode that seems to wow most people — and it is enjoyable to use — is the panel-to-panel reading style, where touching the “forward” part of the screen zooms into to the next panel, filling up the screen with the image, and therefore increasing the readability of the text (it can occasionally be too small when you try reading page-by-page).

What Graphic.ly does different is that although it still moves from panel to panel, instead of only showing the current panel, it fades out the rest of the page as it zooms in, but you can still clearly see where you are in the page, and how the current panel relates to the others around it. But the most impressive feat is that, from what I’ve seen, even when you are zoomed in, the image and text remain crisp. The biggest turnoff for me using Comixology is that a lot of panels end up looking very low-res when zoomed in, and to me it ruins the reading experience.

But Graphic.ly isn’t perfect. As Warren mentioned, there are currently issues with the payment system (at least for the desktop version, I didn’t try purchasing anything on the iPad). Prices are also the same as what we’re seeing on Comixology, and I think this needs to change — I’m fairly certain that you’ll sell a ton more comics if you sell issues at $1 or less. I also think a subscription system could work — imagine paying something like $5-10 a month to Graphic.ly (or Comixology), which would give you access to everything in their collection.

The other thing I’d like to see is less reliance on just dealing with the big (and not so big) publishers, by allowing indie creators to sell their books directly. That would be a real game changer, and would open the space for non-mainstream titles from up-and-coming creators, just like the iTunes App Store opened up the retail space for one-man or small teams of developers.