Comics

The eBook app developer iStoryTime has just announced the imminent release of a new 6 part comic book app.

Don Bluth’s Dragon’s Lair Comic revives a popular nearly 30 year video game and brings much of the same humor to a new visual form. The comics app will shortly be available in iTunes. It’s free and comes with 1 free comic. The 5 later comics can be bought from inside the app for $2.

I have to say that I find the comics more interesting for their history than the content. They’re based on a video game which was released in 1983 as Dragon’s Lair. It was released on a laserdisc – not a cartridge, floppy, or tape – a laserdisc. This alone is noteworthy, considering how rare laserdiscs were even when they were on the market. I myself have never seen more than a handful of laserdiscs, and the only player I ever saw belonged to a school.

That game was also re-released for the iPhone back in 2010, so if you like you can alternate reading about the adventures with playing them.

Marvel Comics has released the first issue from its new “ReEvolution” imprint.  Avengers Vs. X-Men Infinite #1 is a print comic that comes to life with an augmented reality component.

Using the Marvel app, readers can scan the print cover to see it pop out, among other things. Aurasma, a company that designs augmented reality and virtual worlds, has designed the AR component. Readers can scan the pages to unlock extra content such as character bios and videos.

The comic book company, which regularly has one of the top grossing iOS comic book apps, is also selling a digital edition of the issue within the Marvel app for $.99. (Print owners get the digital issue for free).

Barnes & Noble announced today that they are taking a leaf from Amazon’s playbook. B&N has just signed its “first direct e-reader channel offering” to carry manga published by Viz Media, one of the leading manga publishers in the US.

Nook Color and Nook Tablet owners can now choose from an extensive collection of titles from Viz Media’s Shojo Beat and Shonen Sunday imprints. This includes over  a hundred volumes from 18 series, and each volume can be bought for $5 to $10. B&N has also promised to add new volumes as well as digital previews weekly.

Now that both B&N and Amazon have an Android tablet which can display color comics, it looks like we’ll start to see real competition between the 2. Amazon launched the Kindle Fire with a number of exclusive titles (including Watchmen, and numerous Marvel titles). Barnes & Noble retaliated by pulling those titles from their store shelves.

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Amazon has quietly pulled off another exclusive content deal this week with the Kindle Fire. DC Comics has agreed to offer 100 digital comic titles only on the Kindle Fire.

It’s an impressive selection of titles and it includes such well known works as V for Vendetta and Watchmen as well as  Y: The Last Man,Planetary, Superman for All Seasons, and many other comics starring DC’s main stay characters like The joker, The Flash, Green Lantern, and more.

“We’re thrilled to work with the leader in digital books to bring many of the world’s most beloved and best-selling graphic novels to Kindle readers,” stated Jim Lee, co-publisher of DC Entertainment. “We’ve learned from the success of DC Comics – The New 52 that making our graphic novels available whenever and wherever our readers want is critical to the future growth and health of our publishing businesses–both in print and digital format.”

Watchmen and a few other titles are up for pre-order now, and more will be released in the coming months.

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Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd, has pulled together his usual magic and come up with a pithy statement about sharing and DRM.

The Giving Tree is a poem by the late Shel Silverstein, and it’s also the title of one of his poetry collections. In the poem, the tree gave everything of itself: shade, apples, and eventually its very wood. Click on the image above to see the rest of the comic and read what Randall wrote about DRM. If you hover your mouse over the image you will get to read a second joke:

In the new edition of The Giving Tree, the tree uses social tools to share with its friend all the best places to buy things.

via xkcd

Graphicly is a new company lets comic book publishers sell digital comics through a Facebook app. We caught up with Graphicly CEO Micah Baldwin to discuss how the app works for publishers.

EBN: How does the Graphicly app on Facebook work?

MB: The app is very easy to use. It is added to a Facebook page much like any app, and it includes Graphicly’s technology, which is the reader wrapped with engagement tools like Twitter, Google+ and comments. The interactions that occur around that graphic novel stay with the graphic novel across the web and on Graphicly.com. The comics come from more than 250 publishers and 4,000 creators that have partnered with Graphicly to share and promote their content digitally. Read more

Ursula Vernon, creator of the web comic Digger, claims that her digital comic, was stolen by NY pop artist Chad Love-Lieberman. The comic book artist discovered the theft when her artwork showed up in a feature story about on Love-Lieberman on Campus Socialite.com. It was inaccurately credited as Love-Lieberman’s work.

Robot6.com has the story: “After running a feature about ‘New York Multimedia Pop Artist‘ Chad Love-Lieberman, nephew of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the website Campus Socialite retracted its story upon finding out that Love-Lieberman ‘is a fraud, taking other people’s art from the web, touting it as his own, and worst of all – selling it for profit.’”

In a post on her blog, Vernon gives credit to Campus Socialite for removing the story. She writes: “Mad props to the staff at the Campus Socialite, who got back to me in under ten minutes and promised to pull everything and edit the article—they were just as outraged as you’d expect them to be.”

The iPad and other tablets have made it possible to bring comic books to life as eBooks. In fact, comic book apps have been dominating Apple’s Top Grossing Apps list in the book category for the past couple of months. We caught up with David Steinberger, President/CEO of ComiXology, a company that designs digital comic books for Marvel Comics among others, to discuss how ComiXology is addressing the growing digital comic book market.

EBN: When formatting comic books for tablets, what elements are you trying to preserve?

DS: Our focus is always on the reading experience, which is why we developed our Guided View Technology that allows the user to go from panel to panel. We are always trying to author the comics to guide the reader through the comic as the creator intended. Read more

Gen, a new title led by Editor-in-Chief Robert McGuire, has just released its first issue.

According to Robert’s interview in Manga Maniac Cafe, Gen is going to have a monthly release schedule in Japan and the US. Each issue will have original seinen and doujinshi manga, and there’s only going to be a limited print run.

Rather than go the usual path of reprinting existing comics, Robert found Japanese artists to create original manga for an American audience. The work was translated in house as it was created, and Gen works with the artists to make sure that the nuances of the story aren’t lost.