Some joy in it The cold world can match cracking open a new comic book on a lazy Sunday morning. Nothing to do, nowhere to be – just you, a cup of coffee and some sequential art. Not much has really 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 tables designed to be read sequentially. In recent decades, however, the variety of delivery methods has expanded. While the first webcomics date back to the CompuServe era, the rise of digital comics is more directly linked to the proliferation of smartphones and tablets over the past 15 years.
These days, if it has a screen, you can read comics on it. This includes screens that you can stick directly to your face. But as mixed reality headsets have entered the mainstream, comic book reading apps haven’t really followed. There are many options available. The Meta Quest store, for example, has a Korean app called Spheretoon, which is an honest attempt to create content designed specifically for a VR platform (a Promotional video on YouTube has the promising customer quote “much better than expected”).
The lack of options for VR is not surprising, as these systems have historically focused on gaming and other fully interactive/immersive entertainment experiences. From what I can tell, comic book fans aren’t clamoring for the chance to read their favorite titles through their Meta Quest headset. When it comes to focusing, however, the Vision Pro is an entirely different beast.
Apple believes, among other things, that it’s a great way to read things. This is largely demonstrated by how the company has leaned into the concept of spatial computing as an augmentation — or even an alternative — to the standard desktop variety. It’s something I’ve come to call the “infinite desktop,” a play on the “infinite desktop” concept coined by cartoonist and media theorist Scott McCloud in his 2000 book, Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form”. “
Image Credits: Brian Heater
For McCloud, the concept of an infinite canvas is a nod to the limitless possibilities of creating art in the digital realm. It was capitalizing on the turn-of-the-millennium optimism around the internet’s potential to break art from its physical limitations. Certainly the digital space has transformed many aspects of how art (both the tradable and non-tradable varieties) is created and consumed. But nearly a quarter of a century after the book’s publication, as Apple adopted the “infinite canvas” to describe its own vision, has the comic really transformed?
Prices? Not really. Whether you’re reading a comic on paper or a tablet, it’s essentially 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 this art form. It’s hard to argue, though not for lack of trying.
The Spheretoon example brings to mind the mercifully short-lived trend of animated comics. Like British indie pop duo the Ting Tings, they were briefly a thing during the first half of Obama’s first term. In those early days of the MCU, publishers like Marvel were throwing money at a format that tried to capitalize on emerging technologies by splitting the difference between comics and animation. Think comic book panels with some moving parts.
Beyond some of these ambitious but ultimately doomed efforts, technological innovations have been limited to the way some comics are drawn and consumed (Wacom tablets and the like) and consumed (smartphones and tablets). At the end of the day, though, it’s the same old comics with a different delivery method.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
Comixology—another innovation of the early Obama era—had a profound impact on that side of things. The service combined a dead simple app and fluid reader with a large store full of digital comics. Comixology Unlimited launched in 2016, giving readers a Netflix-style comics subscription service for $6 a month. In 2021, Amazon – which had acquired the company seven years earlier – did what big companies do to promising new startups: burned it down and let fans sift through the ashes.
Despite the unhappy ending, however, the service had already set the gold standard for reading print comics on digital platforms, and its mark is still very much felt through first-party apps from comic book companies like Marvel and Dark Horse. None of them seem to be looking to reinvent digital comics for the spatial computing space, but one of the nice things about the Vision Pro release is that minimal developer effort is required to ensure that iPadOS apps work on visionOS.
As such, iPadOS mobile apps make up the bulk of Vision Pro’s comic book reading experience. I’ve mostly played with the Marvel and Dark Horse apps. The former works pretty much the same way as Comixology Unlimited, albeit for a single publisher at $10 a month (I’m currently enjoying the 7-day free trial). Echoing the enlightening YouTube quote above, the experience was “better than expected.” It’s not life-changing, it’s not the end of my paper comics reading experience, but not entirely bad.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
I say this as someone who has limited his use of Vision Pro for reasons outlined in this article. Reading books panel by panel involves a lot of scrolling and is, overall, less than ideal. However, expanding them to a full page and placing them in the mixed reality zone in front of you is pretty neat. Enter a setting 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, showcasing the art in detail through the high-resolution displays. It’s not a game-changer for comics in its current form, but it’s easy to imagine that any attempts to innovate the medium for the platform would be the story of animated comics all over again. I’ve experienced it once. I’m fine.
Nor would I buy a subscription to a service like Marvel’s strictly to read on Vision Pro. If, on the other hand, I already had one active 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 past 35 years.
