Wallace & Gromit Digital Comics come to the iPhone!

Digital comics need a combination of a few things to happen to really catch on. In their current form, they are limited by the screen size. Comics are designed to be seen as a page that's roughly 7 x 10, vertically oriented, with the panels being subsets of that page, but very rarely (with the notable exception of Watchmen) are regularly and orderly divided. In fact, creators have been working since the late sixties to great free of the rigid grid panel structure. So that leaves a problem of the screen.

While big, hi definition monitor screens may be good for viewing comics, they aren't good for reading on the couch, or as I suspect a more popular option, in the bathroom. The screens we DO have that are portable. iPods, Droids, and the like, just aren't big enough to get the feel of a comic book. The flow on the ones that have been released are, to say the least, disjointed. The artist sense of flow is lost, and so is much if the interaction between the characters.

So we wither need larger portable color screens (sorry Kindle) OR creators need to change the way the construct the page. This would compromise the core of the industry, printed books, for ancillary markets. While stranger things have been done, I don't think that the Fantastic Four would allow anyone to do that. It would be clobberin' time.

So until portable screens get bigger or comic layouts regress 40 years, I don't think digital comics are the hero of the industry, but they might be a good plucky sidekick.