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there is less happiness in this The world of cool can resemble opening a new comic on a lazy Sunday morning. Nothing to do, nowhere to be – just you, a mug of coffee and some gradual art. Not much has fundamentally changed about the American comic book since publishers began collecting newspaper strips as bound volumes in the early 20th century.
Sure, the content has changed radically, but at the end of the day, the basics are still there: characters and text captured in panels designed to be read in sequence. However, the variety of delivery methods has expanded in recent decades. While early webcomics date back to the days of CompuServe, the rise of the digital comic book is directly linked to the proliferation of smartphones and tablets over the past 15 years.
Nowadays, if it has a screen, you can read comics on it. This includes screens that you can strap directly to your face. But as mixed reality headsets have moved toward the mainstream, comics reader apps haven’t really followed suit. There are lots of options available. For example, the Meta Quest Store has a Korean app called Spheretoon, which is a serious attempt at creating content designed specifically for the VR platform(s). youtube promotional video The optimistic customer offers the quote “Better than expected”).
The lack of options for VR isn’t entirely surprising, as these systems have historically focused on gaming and other fully interactive/immersive entertainment experiences. From what I can tell, comics fans aren’t clamoring for the chance to read their favorite titles through their Meta Quest headsets. However, in terms of focus, the Vision Pro is a completely different animal.
Among other things, Apple believes this is a great way to read content. This is largely evidenced by how the company has leaned into the notion of spatial computing as an extension of – or even an alternative to – the standard desktop variety. This is something I’ve started calling the “infinite desktop,” a play on the concept of the “infinite desktop” that cartoonist and media theorist Scott McCloud coined in his 2000 book “Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing Coined in “Art Form”. ,
Image Credit: brian heater
For McCloud, the notion of the infinite canvas is indicative of the limitless potential for creating art in the digital realm. He was tapping into the millennial hope around the Internet’s ability to liberate art from its physical constraints. Certainly the digital space has changed many aspects of the creation and consumption of art (both alternative and non-fungible varieties). But nearly a quarter-century after the book’s publication, as Apple has adopted an “infinite canvas” to describe its vision, has the comic book meaningfully changed?
sincerely? Not necessary. Whether you read a comic on paper or on a tablet, it’s basically the same experience. That’s not a bad thing – comics are great. One could reasonably argue that the printed comic book is the pinnacle of that art. It’s hard to disagree, though not for lack of trying.
The Spheretoon example brings to mind the mercifully ephemeral tendencies of motion comics. Like UK indie pop duo Ting Tings, they were briefly during the first half of Obama’s first term. In those early days of the MCU, publishers like Marvel were investing money in a format that was attempting to take advantage of emerging technologies by splitting the difference between comics and animation. Think of a comics panel with some moving parts.
Apart from a few of those ambitious but ultimately disastrous efforts, technological innovations have been limited to the way some comics are produced (Wacom tablets and the like) and consumed (smartphones and tablets). However, at the end of the day, they’re the same old comics with a different delivery method.
Image Credit: brian heater
Comixology – another early Obama-era invention – had a profound impact on this side of things. The service combined an extremely simple app and a fluid reader with a large store full of digital comics. Comixology Unlimited was launched in 2016, offering readers a Netflix-style comics subscription service for $6 per month. In 2021, Amazon – which had acquired the company two years earlier – did what big corporations do to promising young startups: It burned it down and let fans sift through the ashes.
However, despite that disappointment of an ending, the service had already set the gold standard for reading print comics on digital platforms, and its imprint is still very much available through first-party apps from comics publishing powerhouses like Marvel and Dark Horse. Is felt. None of these seem capable of reinventing digital comics for the spatial computing field, but one beautiful thing about the launch of Vision Pro is that it requires minimal developer effort to ensure that iPadOS Apps work on VisionOS.
Thus, ported iPadOS apps have made up the bulk of my Vision Pro comics reading. I’ve been playing mostly with Marvel and Dark Horse apps. The former works similarly to Comixology Unlimited, although it’s at $10 per month for a single publisher (I’m currently enjoying a 7-day free trial period). To reiterate the insightful YouTube quote above, the experience was “better than expected.” It’s not life-changing, not the end of my paper comics reading experience, but not entirely bad either.
Image Credit: brian heater
I say this as someone who has limited his Vision Pro usage for the reasons described this article, Reading books on a panel-by-panel basis involves: Very The amount of scrolling and overall, is less than ideal. However, it’s great to expand them across an entire page and have them in a mixed reality arena in front of you. Go to an environment like Mount Hood, and you can enjoy reading by a large lake in the middle of a pine forest.
The pages appear large and bright, showing off the art in detail through high-resolution displays. It’s not game-changing for comics in its current form, but it’s easy to imagine that any attempt to innovate the medium for the stage will be a motion comics story again. I’ve been through this once. I am good.
Nor would I purchase a subscription to a service like Marvel for the purpose of reading on Vision Pro. On the other hand, if I already have one activated for my iPad or iPhone, I can easily imagine taking a break from the infinite desktop to find out what the Great Lakes Avengers have been up to for the last 35 years. Have been.
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