There's some joy in this A cold world is the equivalent of opening a new comic book on a lazy Sunday morning. There's nothing to do and no need to be anywhere. Just you, a mug of coffee, and some continuous art. Not much has fundamentally changed about American comics since publishers began collecting newspaper bindings in the early 20th century.
True, the content has radically changed, but at the end of the day the basics still remain: characters and text captured in panels designed to be read in sequence. However, in recent decades, the variety of shipping methods has expanded. While the earliest webcomics date back to his CompuServe days, the rise of digital comics is more directly tied to the proliferation of smartphones and tablets over the past 15 years.
Nowadays, you can read manga as long as you have a screen. This includes screens that can be strapped directly to your face. But while mixed reality headsets are moving closer to the mainstream, comic book reader apps haven't quite followed suit. There are several options available. For example, the Meta Quest store has a South Korean app called Spheretoon, which is a dedicated effort to create content specifically designed for VR platforms (a promotional video on YouTube says, “It was much better than I expected. Here are some hopeful testimonials from customers:
These systems have historically focused on gaming and other fully interactive and immersive entertainment experiences, so the lack of a VR option is not at all surprising. As far as I can tell, comic book fans aren't clamoring for the chance to read their favorite titles through MetaQuest headsets. However, in terms of focus, the Vision Pro is completely different.
Apple believes, among other things, that this is the best way to read things. This is largely evidenced by the company's focus on the concept of spatial computing as an extension of, or alternative to, the standard desktop. This is what I've started calling the “infinite desktop”, and is what cartoonist and media theorist Scott MacLeod wrote about in his 2000 book Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Revolutionize an Art Form. This is a play on the concept of “infinite desktop'' created in . ”
Image credits: brian heater
For MacLeod, the concept of an infinite canvas is a nod to the endless possibilities of creating art in the digital realm. He was hopeful at the turn of the millennium about the Internet's potential to break art out of its physical constraints. Indeed, digital spaces have transformed many aspects of how art (both fungible and non-fungible kinds) is created and consumed. But nearly a quarter-century after the book's publication, have comic books changed in any meaningful way, as Apple embraced the “infinite canvas” to illustrate its vision?
Honestly? not much. Whether you read a manga on paper or on a tablet, the experience is basically the same. That's not a bad thing. Comics are great. You can certainly make the argument that printed comic books are the pinnacle of that art form. It's not for lack of trying, but it's hard to disagree.
The Spheretoon example is reminiscent of the motion comics trend, which was thankfully short-lived. Like the British indie-pop duo Tin Tins, they briefly made headlines during the first half of President Obama's first term. In the early days of the MCU, publishers like Marvel poured money into formats that sought to take advantage of emerging technology by splitting the difference between comics and animation. Think of a comic book panel with some moving parts.
Aside from a few of these ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful attempts, innovation has been limited to a few ways in which comics are drawn (such as Wacom tablets) and consumed (smartphones and tablets). But at the end of the day, they're the same old comics just delivered differently.
Image credits: brian heater
Comixology, another early Obama-era innovation, had a big impact on this side of things. The service combines a super simple app and a fluid reader with a large store full of digital comics. His Comixology Unlimited was launched in 2016 and offered readers a Netflix-style comic subscription service for $6 a month. In 2021, Amazon, which acquired the company seven years ago, did what large corporations do with promising startups. In other words, they burned Amazon down and let their fans sift through the ashes.
But despite the disappointing ending, the service has already established the gold standard for reading paper comics on digital platforms, with its imprint on first-party comics publishing giants like Marvel and Dark Horse. It is still felt strongly through the app. Neither looks like a winner at all when it comes to reinventing digital comics in the spatial computing space, but one of the great things about the Vision Pro launch is that it guarantees that iPadOS apps will run on visionOS. Minimum developer effort is required to achieve this.
As such, the ported iPadOS app accounts for the majority of my Vision Pro comic reading. I primarily play with the Marvel and Dark Horse apps. The former works much like his Comixology Unlimited, but is for a single publisher and costs $10 per month (I'm currently enjoying a 7-day free trial period). To quote the enlightening YouTube quote above, the experience was “better than I expected.” It won't change your life, and it won't end the experience of reading paper comics, but it's not entirely bad either.
Image credits: brian heater
I say this as someone who has limited use of Vision Pro for the reasons explained in this article. To read the book panel by panel, many Scrolling is difficult and overall less than ideal. However, it works very well to expand them across the page and place them in a mixed reality zone right in front of you. When you stop in a setting like Mount Hood, you can enjoy reading on the shores of a large lake in the middle of a pine forest.
Pages are large and bright, and the art is detailed through a high-resolution display. While things don't change much for comics in their current format, it's easy to imagine that any attempt to innovate the medium for this platform will end up repeating the motion comics story all over again. I experienced it once. i'm good.
Also, I wouldn't buy a subscription to a service like Marvel just to read on Vision Pro. On the other hand, if you already have an active one for your iPad or iPhone, it's easy to imagine taking a break from your endless desktop to find out what the Avengers of the Great Lakes have been up to for the past 35 years.