True, not all 40 mil iPhone owners are comic readers - but that's the size of the potential comic reading audience - which is, I'm pretty sure, bigger than the potential comic reading audience who know where their local comic shop is.
Which I'm not disputing. Comic stores are a niche outlet that cater to a specific subset of comic art (the North American monthly), but comics and the comic form existed long before comic stores did, and the Apple tablet isn't even out yet.
Horse>cart?
Not sure what you feel is a 'vague idea of digital reading'?
Well I
read comics, but even I have questions about where to start with digital, like price, subscription models, format, impact on story flow while navigating around the digital (I presume proprietary) comic story, but the potential 'new' audience of clueless masses will have even more questions that will stretch your brain to snapping point and any one of them could be a deal-breaker, no atter how small or banal the issue may seem.
"What's a good comic?"
"Where do I buy them?"
"How much?"
"How do I read them?"
"Can I go back?"
"Why is it so long/short?"
"Is that all the story there is?"
"Why is it not like the book/film/cartoon?"
IDW's Star Trek tie in comic sold as many copies on the iPhone as it did in print.
Detective Comics sold millions when Tim Burton's Batman hit theaters - summer blockbusters shifting spin-off merchandise is nothing new, and the only thing that's changed since 1989 is the availability of comics. The Star Trek tie-in was also a standard comic and not made specifically for digital distribution.
The only vague thing, so far, is whether this tablet will happen (it will) and whether it will be capable of displaying comics (it will) (the lingering doubt I have is will 2000AD specifically, be able to use it, and will Apple want to become the ONLY publisher on the device - ensuring all comics are published by Apple?)
Surely a re-lettered version of strips (larger fonts, I'm assuming) isn't that complicated a task for material that's already assembled digitally anyway? As for Apple having a monopoly on digital distribution, they don't
quite have that with iTunes, but there have
still been legal challenges - in France, a successful one that forced them to offer files in formats other than Realplayer - and considering we've both acknowledged at some point that the problem with comics at the minute is their distribution is monopolised through one avenue, do we really want Apple to control what some are hoping is a breakout delivery method?
you don't need a uniform format - you just need decent images and a bit of software that knows how to show them off (and, in fact, a uniform format may be the dullest thing - excluding all sorts of cool and fancy tricks...)
You underestimate the human capacity for stupidity. There are perfectly sensible and intelligent people who can't turn off a computer properly or even use a Wii controller, so ideally what you want to popularise the medium is a 'push button, read comic' model that even some of the less cunning mammals can use. You can reinvent the wheel and add fancy tricks later, but first you actually have to give it to people in a manner which they can use.
When you're publishing digitally, what constitutes a 'bigger publisher'? IDW? BOOM? Dark Horse? (all on iPhone) or Marvel? (which you can buy through iVerse, PanelFly or Comixology's Comic reader).
Perhaps 'publisher' was a poorly chosen word on my part - I meant their recogniseable properties, like the Star Trek tie-in you mentioned which sold loads, or Spider-Man when the new movie hits, or Iron Man, Scott Pilgrim, maybe an A-Team comic? Something that will be in people's faces will shift while it's still fresh in the memory, but not much longer after that - in this regard, the big publishers have a massive head start with their intellectual properties.
in the meantime, small teams are gonna be out-innovating them all over.
I'm not saying it's impossible for breakout hits from unknowns, but I think the idea that the big boys are twiddling their thumbs is optimism at best. Marvel has quite a large digital arm at the moment, and it's bolstered by a huge back catalogue alongside the exclusive content and a crackdown on illegal scanners. They're waiting to swoop on new formats, and if this one is friendly to their existing comics layouts, they won't even have to work that hard.
I'd suggest, too, that what most of us think of as mainstream (something like x-men) will, when a Twilight iphone comic comes out, look like a piddly gnat of a comic in comparison of sales numbers.
But we'll still laugh at it from our high horses, even as we read our comics about wolfosexuals with metal skelingtons and future-cops with no faces fighting skysurfing mobster gorillas. The sad thing is, we'll probably still be absolutely right to do so, and we'll still be outnumbered.
