Digital Comics

The Oatmeal is a well known webcomic that crosses over into mainstream coverage with some regularity. And that's happened again. The short version is: some time ago, The Oatmeal had a dust up with a website called "FunnyJunk" over a bunch of The Oatmeals comics having been appearing on that site without authorization. Roughly a year later, FunnyJunk has sent a letter from a lawyer wanting $20K for defamation to avoid a lawsuit. Suffice it to say, The Oatmeal is a bit incredulous.

iVerse is tweaking their Comics+ app and is in the middle of a roll-out of some new features and a little rebranding.

DC is making a bigger leap into the digital comics space... tomorrow (6/7/12). They're starting an original series of weekly Batman digital comics, titled "Legends of the Dark Knight." The $0.99 comics will be out of continuity adventures, with each issue debuting on Thursday. They aren't skimping on the creative teams, either.

There are some comics that really should have digital editions. American Flagg! is a 15 minutes into the future classic of dystopian (not _quite_ cyberpunk) science fiction that put Howard Chaykin into the spotlight with First Comics in the early 1980s. A political satire featuring military industrial complex taking over, government regulation of cable television, the outlawing of sports (leading to an underground basketball league), subliminal messages, a talking cat,some Nazis, and a fair amount of sex, Flagg! is a hugely influential book.

Marvel wants you to try their digital comics so badly, they'll even pay you to do so. Their current deal is buy a Spider-Man digital comic and they'll mail you a $5 coupon for some print comics. There are a couple catches to this, but Marvel's offering you a free comic if you play your cards right.

It's been reported that Diamond has laid off three technical staffers: "Dave Bowen (Director of Digital Distribution), Jeff Dillon (Web Development Manager), and Lev Schneider (Programmer)." Bowen's presence on that report, raised the question of what's up with Diamond Digital, so I asked iVerse's Michael Murphy, since iVerse is the engine Diamond Digital runs on.

In recent weeks, we've been seeing the exclusivity monster poke it's head up on the digital platform. Marvel's exclusive with Comixology. Valiant is exclusive with Comixology. DC might as well be exclusive with Comixology. But, for the most part, there appears to be a catch: the digital exclusives seem to be just for the monthly editions. Single issues if you prefer.

by Serhend Sirkecioglu

--          My common complaint with the current wave of interactive/digital comics is the lack of ingenuity, risk, and execution, which fall into three camps. The first is the artist-centric camp where the person who made the comic is a competent cartoonist but has no knowledge of programming and is unconscious of interactivity, so the function feels gimmicky and not worth my time. The second is the program-centric, where the design is strong but the story is not much of a looker or read, and can feel more like a proof of concept than a whole-hearted piece. Finally, the third camp is the ones that peter out because the time and energy put into it outweighs the pay off, leading to burnout and an unfinished story.

Classics Illustrated, the comics Cliff Notes series that has been around in various iterations for over 60 years, making the line a classic in and of itself—they've just gone digital with ebook publisher Trajectory. Over 120 titles will be launched from both iTunes and the iBook store, selling for $4.99 each. These look to be the '50s original Classics Illustrated, celebrated in rhyme and song.

As any parents out there know, the iPhone/tablet as babysitter is a rapidly growing tradition among harried moms and dads. And as reported in Variety, DC is launching a DC Nation app to take advantage of this market—and grow future readers.

On Monday, digital distributor iVerse announced a new initiative that would allow libraries to download books from their digital library on a cost per checkout basis.

Mark Waid has posted the audio of his Thrillbent announcement panel from C2E2. He has more general comments here.