Apple's iPad: Rethinking Comics

By: Brian Heater

From: http://www.pcmag.com/

In the lead up to the iPhone's release in June 2007, the blogosphere half-jokingly referred to the handset as the "Jesus Phone." Mind you, all of that white-knuckled hyperbole played out well before anyone had any concept of the device's true potential. A year later, Apple would completely change the smartphone model, with the release of the iTunes App Store. With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that a number of industries are looking toward the iPhone's second coming—the Apple iPad—for their salvation.

View Slideshow See all (11) slides

More

When the iPad launched, media partners couldn't embrace team Apple quickly enough. Magazine and newspaper publishers saw the device as the savior of a dying industry. Even the most established papers and magazines have been hemorrhaging money by the boatload. The inability to sell physical copies of their product and monetize the online content that has replaced it has caused an ever-enlarging number of publications to fold. If you've seen Rupert Murdoch on television in the past year, chances are pretty good that he was decrying the "thievery" of his newspaper content by search engines like Google.

0diggsdigg

The last several years haven't been great for the comics industry, either. While comic books aren't quite as immune to recessions as, say, gaming or film, comic publishers seem to have fared better than their newspaper brethren. Like record labels before them, however, comic book companies were largely late to the Internet party.

While most comic publishers continued to focus the lion's share of their attention on print, a Web comic revolution exploded around them. The list of successful Web comic artists is long, but a few spring immediately to mind, including Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, whose strip Penny Arcade has blossomed into its own cottage industry. The series has spawned several books, an episodic video game series, a Web video show, and a twice-yearly gaming expo.

XKCD, Achewood, and Diesel Sweeties all achieved a considerable level success on the Web independent of more traditional publishing channels (Achewood has subsequently released books through Dark Horse Comics, Diesel Sweeties was picked up by United Features Syndicate, and an XKCD book was released by breadpig). Hark! a Vagrant author Kate Beaton made some waves late year by eschewing offers from larger publishers in order to self-release her book Never Learn Anything From History.

Publishing houses have since turned more of their attention toward the Web. Both of the majors—Marvel and DC—have launched large Web initiatives. Marvel is focusing its attention toward back issues. Meanwhile, DC opted to foster the creation of serialized Web comics, launching Zuda Comics, which allows artists to submit their comics in the hopes of winning a DC book deal. And then there are the independent publishers, like Top Shelf Productions and Dark Horse Comics (who, in 2007, struck up a content partnership with MySpace).

PCs and Smartphones
For a long time, the Internet seemed like the next logical step in the evolution of sequential art. With his seminal 2000 book, Reinventing Comics, cartoonist and theorist Scott McCloud helped popularize the term "infinite canvas," predicting that the unlimited bits provided by the Internet marked the end of the special limitations imposed by traditional publishing.

It's no coincidence that the most popular comics properties on the Internet are almost all newspaper-style strips, rather than online graphic novels. I really can't sum up the matter any better than McCloud did during a recent conversation we had on the subject of the iPad. "Comic strips made an easy leap onto the Web," the writer explained. "They got a little bigger, so they're easier to read. God created Web comic strips in a day and took the other six off. There was no design challenge. It fit."

When he says "it fit," he means it literally. Click on a link and there's the strip—no advancing or scrolling required. Comic books, on the other hand, are an entirely different story. They don't fit—not at all. I receive a lot of comics for review in PDF form, and I just can't do it. Flipping through pages with a mouse isn't natural. And then there's the whole lean back/lean forward paradigm that's been discussed of late, in the wake of the new generation of tablet computers. Have you ever attempted to read a full-length graphic novel while hunched over your keyboard? I don't recommend it.

As consumers began to shift their attention toward the smartphone space, so, too, did the comics industry. A new generation of handsets, led by the iPhone, offered yet another opportunity to re-think the medium. Phones offer comics in your pocket, comics on the go. And, unlike electronic ink-powered devices like the Kindle, the iPhone and its ilk have bright, beautiful color screens. Unfortunately, the special issues that befall comic books on the Web are all the more pronounced on the phone. For obvious reasons, the comic strip is, once again, the ideal size for consumption.

If only there were a device that was like the iPhone but, you know, bigger…

Click here for the full article.....