2012 is turning out to be a great year to be a comic reader, with top notch creative talent producing a diverse range of stories. But we’re also experiencing an unheralded level of experimentation and innovation with the transition to digital. Today we’re taking a look at the Madefire App for the iPad, which launches with an exciting new project from Dave Gibbons and a robust interactive feature set.
Madefire offers comics and graphic novels in a form they’re describing as “Motion Books.” Each title takes unique advantage of the iPad’s feature set, including functions for the gyroscope and accelerometer, with visuals optimized for the retina display. It’s sort of like taking control over the actions in a motion comic, turning the passive experience of that medium into something far more interactive.
See for yourself:
Now, a cool feature set is nothing without a capable creative team. Luckily, the Madefire Motion Books have a great pedigree, including Dave Gibbons and Batwoman co-wtier Haden Blackman. As you can see in the videos, the art’s pretty stellar too.
The Madefire App launches with three original comic and graphic novel titles, and four previews of future titles, including:
•“Treatment: Tokyo” by Dave Gibbons, Kinman Chan and Robbie Morrison
•“Treatment: Mexico City” by Dave Gibbons, Doug Braithwaite and Robbie Morrison
•“Mono” by Ben Wolstenholme and Liam Sharp
•“Captain Stone Is Missing. . .” by Liam Sharp and Christina McCormack
•“The Irons” by Haden Blackman and Gary Erskine
•“The Engine” by Guy Adams and Jimmy Broxton
•“Houses of the Holy” by Mike Carey and David KendallThe first three titles include the first episode, introducing readers to the format, story line and characters. Subsequent episodes will be delivered to readers twice a month and users will be updated via Push Notification when the new episodes are ready to download.
Madefire – Treatment Teaser from Madefire on Vimeo.
To top all that, Madefire is offering their basic tool kit for the creation of Motion Books for free on their website. So get noodling.
You can download the Madefire App for free in Apple’s App Store on the iPad or on iTunes.
Find us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
Subscribe to our RSS Feed
Some rights reserved.
This looks awesome.
I need to DL and start playing with this, and i love that they give you you the tools. What i’m seeing here is not so much gimmicks, but conceptual and design based innovations and a desire to tell stories that work with technology to do new things.
this is exciting! thanks for sharing it
Wow..that does look awesome.
Too bad I don’t have an Ipad.
Would my Kindle Fire be able to do this?
Anything announced for this being available for the android market?
Not big on Motion Comics so I’m a bit skeptical about this.
Looks nifty, but it should be noted that the app is incompatible with the 1st gen IPad for its lack of a front-facing cam. Bummer that.
iPad 1 (first generation) is now supported. The initial lack of support for iPad 1 was really due to memory optimization (the iPad 1 has only 256MB of RAM vs. 512MB for iPad 2 and 1GB for iPad 3).
The app doesn’t do anything with the front-facing camera; that’s just another way to say “iPad 2 or newer only” in the App Store.
Anyway, all iPads now supported.
thats totally rad….we still have an iPad 1 around the house so i’ll be sure to check it out.
Not compatible with the iPad? wth? I guess you need iPad 2 or 3 🙁
it says that it needs a front facing camera iPad v2+
Yeah, what do they need the camera for?
@Nordh I imagine it tracks your eyes so when you move the screen the image adjust accordingly so you can view from different perspectives.
I was all excited to try this until I saw it won’t work on 1st gen iPad. Crap.
Personally I don’t want an app tracking my eyes or watching me in any way. That is creepy.
Sorry to duplicate the reply above; just wanted to let you guys know:
iPad 1 (first generation) is now supported. The initial lack of support for iPad 1 was really due to memory optimization (the iPad 1 has only 256MB of RAM vs. 512MB for iPad 2 and 1GB for iPad 3).
The app doesn’t do anything with the front-facing camera; that’s just another way to say “iPad 2 or newer only” in the App Store.
Anyway, all iPads now supported.
I’m not much of a digital reader, but this looks quite awesome. Definitely checking it out.
The app is solid, very well done and it works seamlessly, no need to tweak or set up or poke around. Also, being its own app, it has a sense of consistency and it stands out form other offerings.
“Treatment” looks gorgeous. I like it but in my brain it doesn’t register as a comic. It ventures too much into animation and gaming (note that Madefire comics come complete with music and sound effects) – which I both love but are already their own thing. I still like my comics being comics.
“Captain Stone” looks a bit like a Vertigo painted GN and it’s slightly less cinematic. It’s interesting in that it has a comic inside the comic which reads more like a traditional comic… but there are balloons with the comments of the “outer” comic characters reading the “inner” comic. Which in a way is telling how much Madefire comics transcend traditional comics.
Mono is maybe the more traditional looking of the three but it does really clever stuff with panel composition: zooming, progressive coloring and other stuff.
I think the best compromise as “Digital Comics” so far is Marvel’s Infinity but they almost launched it as an afterthought as a tail of the regular books and it requires some settings in the ComiXology app. I believe they should have launched their own separate Infinity app with a good launch line-up.
Mark Weid’s Thrillbent is similar to Marvel’s Infinity (and I seem to remember he’s behind both). Very nice but it’s still lacking a tablet app (currently it is browser based).
DC’s tablet comics are simply half page comics which feel at home on a tablet in landscape mode. They look ready to be remounted as a normal printed comic. Which is not necessarily bad, mind you.
OK, maybe this was kinda confusing.
The bottom line is that for me nothing can replace the serenity of reading a traditional (real?) comic.
Madefire’s is a solid hybrid multimedia product in it’s own right and it definitely has a place in the tablet market.
I’ll keep an eye on it but I still don’t feel like dropping regular stuff for it just for the format itself.
This could be interesting. Making the tools available is always a good idea. Hopefully it will eventually include more “internal”, less action-oriented types of stories as well (I’m thinking along the lines of I Kill Giants). Wait & see, I guess.
Looks like it’s time for me to finally venture into the iPad world. This is way too cool to not be in on from the ground floor.
It takes ideas that was presented in those brilliant pirated scans of Old man logan and what Mark Waid is doing at Thrillbent, and turns them into loud, brash and nauseating trash.
wow… the motion in the comic is amazing.
It’s kinda funny, this is exactly what cutscenes were like in 8-bit and 16-bit video games. While it’s new and innovative in comics, it’s also amazingly oldschool and not new at the same time.
I will say, there’s something a little bit inherently cheesy about the format. It could be used for some fun stuff, but overall if it doesn’t have voice acting and working as a low budget cartoon, it’s pretty much a format that’s a bit less good than comics already are.
Still, nothing wrong with experimenting and trying things.
Looks a great ideia, but I think it’s more for games than for comics. I’d love some ipad investigation games like that… Cinematic/gaming like Quantic Dream makes.