With the news coming out of SXSW last weekend of Marvel launching Infinite Comics, a new approach to digital comics by formatting the comic for digital use rather than translating print comics to digital, there has been much attention to the topic of digital comics by writer Mark Waid. For those attending WonderCon this weekend, they heard more on the topic from Mark Waid, who promised to share his proof of concept comic Luther and sure enough he did.
Available for a free PDF download, Luther is a comic written by Mark Waid with art by Jeremy Rock. As a proof of concept, Luther shows Waid’s approach to digital comics which has the comic formatted more towards digital display screens and the emergence of elements on panels as you read. This example gives an idea of what we may expect from the upcoming Avengers vs. X-Men #1 Infinite from Waid and artist Stuart Immonen.
This approach to digital comics by Waid is not anything that hasn’t been tried before, as we’ve seen from many innovative comics on Graphicly (Disclaimer: Graphicly is iFanboy’s parent company), it’s definitely a step in right direction by an established comics creator such as Mark Waid attempting to help move the evolution of digital comics forward. At WonderCon, Waid promises that there will be more from him soon:
“Then come back here April 2 to see what else I have in mind for the future of webcomics and find out how you can participate.
This is big.”
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This approach to digital comics is indeed nothing new but this is a nice example. The challenge with digital comics will be to scale or adapt well to all screen sizes AND back to paper. On “Luther” the comic itself: I liked it a lot.
I’m not sure that in this situation some one like Waid is really concerned about this going ‘back to paper’. I think comics like these will be a sort of ‘digital only’ gig for the people involved. It’ll be the ‘gateway drug’ if you will for people to go all digital and quite possibly a way for the big 2 to do away with the paper side of things altogether in another 5 to 10 years.
I was thinking about HCs. There’s a market for bookshelf collections and I’d be surprised if Marvel ignored it.
this seems to be all about the user experience. you can’t really translate that into print, which i think is ok. I mean you can’t print the best apps out there either.
I think its good that we have prominent creators starting to think about new formats and experiment with storytelling devices outside of paper. The current format that we read comics in has remained virtually unchanged since before our grandparents were infants. Thats not always a good thing.