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The comic book industry is thriving in the digital world. That’s great news for distributors, but not so great news for comic book storeowners. While die-hard collectors will still show up at 10:00 a.m. every Wednesday morning for their weekly saver stash, it is getting harder to bring new readers into the fold. That is, it is getting harder to convince potential comic book collectors to leave the comfort of their living room to venture out to their local brick and mortar shop to buy physical copies of their favorite titles.
That’s because digital comics have found a home in the App Store. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the most popular digital comic distribution app, comiXology’s Comics app, was the top-grossing non-gaming iPad app for the third year in a row.
“In a billion dollar marketplace with competition between over a million apps, it’s gratifying to rank as the Top Grossing non-game iPad App in the entire iTunes App Store,” comiXology co-founder and CEO David Steinberger.
Currently, the number one bestselling comic on comiXology is the most recent issue of The Walking Dead. The comic has been around since 2003, but it is the AMC drama series that has pushed the title into the spotlight. This could explain why digital comics have become so hugely popular on the iPad.
Traditionally, fans that wanted to read a comic book would have to go to the dreaded comic book store. The average person has all kinds of assumptions about comics and the people who read them. In the past, fans of Marvel movies and DC cartoons would have just skipped out on reading the comics for fear of being labeled a “nerd.” Now that you can get same-day comics delivered right to your iPad without having to leave the house, normal folk can read The Walking Dead at their leisure without having to suffer the glaring looks from “real” comic book fans.
Comics is free to download and offers same day releases of some of the most popular titles from Marvel, DC, and a wide variety of independent publishers. Plus, the app has many first issue downloads for free and graphic novels at significantly less than print price. All that, and you don’t have to ask the comic book guy where to find issue #191 of “Wonder Woman.”
According to the Hollywood Reporter, comiXology sold more than six billion “pages” of material in 2013, which is three times what it sold last year. That, plus the many comic book reader apps, like Image Comics and BOOM Studios, make the company the highest profiting non-gaming app in Apple’s top grossing apps of 2013.
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