When Mikhail mentioned that a dude he knew was putting comic books into phones I chuckled at the notion, imagining somebody shoving Bazooka Joe comics into the receiver holes of a telephone. Or maybe calling a Batman hotline where he greets you with “Hey crimestoppers, turning down the thermostat saves money and that reminds me of a crook I captured! It all started when-” Mikhail explained that it actually had to do with releasing issues of comic books as downloadable content for iPhones, the Star Trekkiest device that exists in modern living. I have mixed feelings about this.

I have loved buying, reading and owning comics more than anything else since before I could read.  I still have the earliest comics I was given before I could read: Muppet Babies and Archie, for the most part.   I’ve always loved all comics and I used to read all that I could get my hands on. When I was twelve, I was reading Gen 13, Spawn, Sandman, R. Crumb, Will Eisner, my dad’s silver age DC superhero books, Punch Magazine anthologies, Madman, Impulse, etc… I loved it all.   Even when the comics upset me or confused me, I still read them.  When I first came to New York, being ten blocks from a comic store at any time almost led to my starvation since I would spend all my money on comics.  The size of my collection grew and grew until it peaked at twenty short boxes, three magazine sized boxes, and two bookshelves of just trade paperbacks and graphic novels. I’ve slimmed down my collection to a less depressing size and slimmed my depression down to a less debilitating amount, but comics are still the most important art form to me.

A lot of cinema nerdos hate that people watch movies on this teeny cigarette box sized screen. Music tardises hate CDs and MP3s. I don’t really know if putting comic books in people’s iPhones makes sense or not. I don’t have an iPhone, although I wish I did. I like paper, I like the comic shop environment, and I like owning a solid object. For people less fussy about how they absorb art and media, these concerns will probably not stop them from enjoying something they like in a more convenient form.

Mikhail set me up with John Roberts from comiXology who is involved with making current popular comics available for sale as iPhone downloads,  and we discussed his new thing.

Who are you? What are you doing?

My name is John Roberts and I am the CTO for comiXology, a website dedicated to comic books. I maintain the design of the site as well as do most of the development on it.

Do you remember the first comic you saw, read or owned?

My father had collected comics in college, so he had/has a decent collection that is boxed away, but he also had early trades like Bring on the Bad Guys and Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told. I would sneak into his office and read them when he wasn’t around, so I can’t tell you what the first comic was, but I remember reading his Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four in trade paperback format. The first comic I ever owned was probably Superman. I do remember when we went to buy my “first” comic, but I don’t remember what it was.

What’s coming out now that you like?

I really like Irredeemable from BOOM! Studios, Mark Waid is doing an excellent job. I consistently read Invincible, Madman Atomic Comics (although that’s over now), Ex Machina. My tastes have changed since I’ve gotten older, I seem to like the more off-beat, non-mainstream comics. I really enjoy The Walking Dead, I started reading that thanks to our iPhone Application.

Is Walking Dead non-mainstream? It’s getting made into a TV show and it seems to be the comic that non-hardcore comic readers talk to me about the most when they find out I like comics. They used to ask me if I liked Craig Thompson’s Blankets. I would say no.

It’s not Marvel/DC and its not superheroes, so I would consider it non-mainstream. Road to Perdition was based on a comic as well, but how many people know that? American Born Chinese is another great non-mainstream comic I enjoyed.

What is comiXology?

comiXology is a mixture of things, there’s the website, which lists all the upcoming comics coming out in the next few months and allows users to create a “pull list” of items they want to purchase at their local comic shop. There’s also our retailer tools that allow comic shop owners to have access to their customers’ pull list information to help them in their ordering. And finally there is our Digital comics initiative that allows users to purchase and read comics on their iPhone.

What is this that you’re doing, putting the comics into the phones? Do you know how crazy this sounds?

Not that crazy, the Japanese have been doing it for years, but it wasn’t until the iPhone that doing it in the US became practical. The resolution on the iPhone allowed us to take the original art from the publishers and use it without having to resize it or degrade the quality. But crazy does describe this whole strange journey.

“A strange journey” you say? To quote Rocky Horror callbacks, “How strange was it?”

This whole thing started because I couldn’t remember what I wanted to buy at the comic shop once I got there. That prompted me to create a Dashboard widget that allowed the user to browse the Diamond Shipping Lists, which prompted me to build the website (it was easier then building a Konfabulator Widget), which prompted my partner to enter us into the Stern Business plan competition (which we won), which evolved into what the site is now, finally ending up on the iPhone. Yet I still can’t remember what I want to buy when I go to the comic shop.

Mikhail told me about you putting comics onto iPhones. Tell me more of how that works, from the getting to the reading.

We have an iPhone App called Comics by comiXology which allows users to download and read comics on the iPhone. We went to great lengths to try and maintain the experience of reading a comic, so that means we leave the pages as is, and use cropping and subtle movements to navigate the page. I had my reservations, at first, about what the user experience would be like, but as I previously mentioned, I’ve been reading The Walking Dead solely on the iPhone. I like the idea of Digital Comics; there are a lot of comics that I’d love to read, but don’t want to own. This option allows me to get the stories, but not the clutter of owning the books.

I hear you on the clutter. I just bought the first two Marvel Zombies trades and they were awesome but I can’t see myself re-reading them. Every couple months I take a rolling suitcase worth of comics to Jim Hanleys to trade in for credit.

That’s good to know, I have a ton of trades that I don’t think I’d ever read again, that I’d like to get rid of.

So what’s the interface like? You see the whole page and then touch a panel and it gets larger?

We have a demo version of the player which we use to present our original comic Box 13 by David Gallaher & Steve Ellis of Zuda’s High Moon.

The player presents you a viewable panel. You can choose to have the full page shown at the end or the beginning of a page, and you can zoom and pan that image, but for the most part, you are presented with a cropped version of the page. You click to go forward or back and are taken through a “guided view” of the comic, which allows you to read the comic in the best means possible, with as little effort as possible.

It’s rather elegant, moving smoothly across the page, revealing the story, and, in some cases, displaying the story better because reveals are honest reveals, as opposed to the bottom panel of a page you can view in full.

A lot of nerds hate the idea of music or film on iPods.  Have you had any backlash to what you’re doing?

There are always going to be people who will prefer paper to digital, and we don’t want to see paper disappear, we just want to accompany it. The comic industry is really tough right now. Diamond Comics, the primary distributor of comics in the US, has increased the minimum number of orders on a comic in order for them to carry it. As a result, a lot of the smaller publishers are unable to distribute their comics. Haven Distributors has been working to help smaller publishers get their comics out there, and we’re hoping to do the same. Also, there’s a lot of stuff out there that I’d love to read, but don’t want to own, and digital distribution allows smaller publishers to reach a larger audience that wouldn’t normally buy their product.

What comics are going to be released this way?  Does it cost the same as the physical copy of the copy?

We have approximately 25 publishers, plus a “Creator Owned” category that is made up of various creators, and the list is growing. We have Marvel, Image, Red 5, Devil’s Due, Moonstone, SLG, Top Cow, Zenescope, Viper, First Salvo, Digital Webbing, BOOM!, Arcana, A Wave Blue World, AdHouse, Asylum Press, Bluewater, com.X, EigoMANGA, Evil Twin, AAM/Markosia, SLG, Studio 407, Th3rd World and our own label, which we will be releasing original content on the iPhone with. The first title, Box 13, is already available both on the iPhone as well as on our website.

And that’s where we left it.  If you are a person who commutes and likes the idea of comic books in your phone, then follow the links and see what’s up. Check out this video of how the thing works: