Digital comics announcements from New York Comic Con 2009

Dirk Deppey who writes the daily Journalista blog for The Comics Journal totally nails it in his commentary about digital comics announcements from New York Comic Con 2009.

"Three new things that won’t change comics forever

Everybody’s convinced that digital comics will save the media, but how? Will it be an iPhone application? How about the new Kindle? Marvel’s latest Clutch Cargo adaptation, starring that oh-so-popular Spider-Woman, perhaps?

Try “none of the above.” Where comics are concerned, all three possibilities are solutions to problems that consumers don’t yet actually consider to be problems. Put simply, to the extent that online comics have grown in popularity it’s because of content, not the delivery system, and they’ve tended not to be tied to one proprietary system or another. The success of cellphone manga in Japan is due to a pre-existing fanbase being given the opportunity to download popular titles for which they already have a craving, on devices that everyone owns. All of the above pretenders to the downloadable-comics throne suffer massively in this regard: UClick may have Bone and the Ninja Turtles, but how many children have iPhones? Those are toys for older, wealthier consumers. Likewise, the limited catalog of titles in Marvel’s initiative don’t include current comics, the one thing that they could offer that would attract readers in massive numbers, due to a desire not to be tarred and feathered by retailers, and so the most popular source for new digital comics remains BitTorrent. And the Kindle is only just beginning to look feasible as a platform for anything other than text, and its relative rarity in the marketplace doesn’t exactly make it look like an attractive option.

Given all that, your Web browser remains the technology most likely to facilitate an online readership. Wake me up if that changes any time soon..."