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Thoughts?

“And as you can see, it actually knows how to read the comic for you.”

Not the first nor the last to employ this strategy for getting around printed comics on mobile devices, but they certainly win the award for most chilling tagline.

Has anyone tried the various mobile readers out there and compared them yet? I’d be curious to hear others’ reactions.


Discussion (8)¬

  1. Mike Leung says:

    A List Apart published what seems to be a comprehensive table how various mobile-readers react to various stylesheet media-conditions, and a configuration method to reconcile them: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/return-of-the-mobile-stylesheet

    Breaking down strips and pages into individual image-panels and isolating them into an area readable only to mobile-display doesn’t seem particularly challenging. Then you just kill the display of the normal artwork. Boom, mobile-comics.

    There’s a lot of speculation about making Flash available on the iphone being treated as fanciful. I don’t know if the self-promotion of my fancy-display site ever registered here, but as a non-Flash display, it was easy for me to linearize the images and text for mobile, and I’m still waiting to hear if it doesn’t work anywhere.

  2. PostStarBoy says:

    Bought PanelFly and it is buggy as hell. The Comixolgy Comics app is not as pretty, but BLOWS it out of the water in terms of functionality and backend management of content. In particular the way their reader handles comic pages is nothing short of brilliant.

  3. Mark Bernal says:

    A few thoughts:
    – I’ve found that reformatting my digital puzzle comic “One Strange Way” was much easier then reformatting a comic page intended for print. Minus the interactive puzzle part. 😉 http://www.onestrangeway.com

    – Being a digital comic developer and a former video game developer I’m very interested in publishing my stories across a variety of platforms much like video games are published on several different consoles. The variety of digital comic viewing apps seems similar to the variety of video game consoles. They all have their own features and flaws but what will be more important to the developer is the size of their audience.

    -Motion comics also fit this growing trend of viewing your comics where you want to and how you want to. I’m certainly looking to explore this area of development as well. I’ve posted some samples of this on my site. http://www.bernalmedia.com

    – I love that the comic industry is finally starting to explore the possiblities of digital comics. Why has it lagged behind other industries (music,movies,tv,newspapers)?

  4. frank says:

    here is a site that compares different iphone comic reader apps..

    http://iphonecomicbookreader.com/

    written by sherm cohen from
    http://cartoonsnap.blogspot.com/

  5. These guys are hip. You can tell because of the nose-ring spokeswoman.

    • Scott says:

      Oh, I have no problem with pitch lady’s nose-ring. I’m betting she just happened to have one. She’s harmless enough.

      I actually approve of explaining products this way, in plain english using visuals. But then, of course, it’s the quality of the product itself which will make the difference in the long run.

      • Oh I agree, I just had to point it out 🙂 It’s not everyday you get to see that. Personally, I’d like to see a Campbell’s soup mom with a tattoo or something.

  6. […] Here’s the demo for Panelfly, a new mobile comics reader app; Scott McCloud finds it a bit disturbing. […]