The Comics Bureau

I’ve let the dust settle a bit before post­ing up any­thing need­lessly reac­tion­ary regard­ing Apple’s new iPad. For those of you that have inex­plic­ably not heard of it, the iPad has pro­voked the full range of reac­tions from lust to indif­fer­ence. Here is a quick roundup of what us comics-types have been talk­ing about;

Pub­lish­ers Weekly speaks to pub­lish­ers about the pos­sib­il­it­ies of digital pub­lish­ing and distribution;

Top Shelf pub­lisher Chris Staros said, “It’s prob­ably going to have a sig­ni­fic­ant effect over the long term, as many of the things we pub­lish can now be read in a com­par­able size to the actual phys­ical books.” Top Shelf is already at work on applic­a­tions for the iPod and the iPad and Staros believes the device will spur sales of phys­ical graphic nov­els, not­ing that the “art object nature of graphic nov­els will keep them in print for many years to come, and, in fact, it’s very pos­sible that the digital deliv­ery of them may even increase the demand for prin­ted ver­sions. Time will tell.”

Infoworld have a fairly tech-heavy set of eight ques­tions that Apple won’t answer;

Fam­ously tight-lipped, Apple often views the press as an exten­sion of its mar­ket­ing effort, treat­ing all but a favored few to a sad­istic game of hard-to-get. When Apple extends this silence bey­ond a product’s razzmatazz unveil­ing, it’s usu­ally meant that the product in ques­tion could not deliver the func­tion­al­ity journ­al­ists have asked about. With that in mind, unanswered quer­ies about the iPad may imply that the iPad is less “magical” and “revolu­tion­ary” than Jobs suggests.

Tech­land talks to Douglas Wolk about his thoughts on digital com­ics;

Me, I like phys­ical things. I strongly prefer hav­ing com­ics that I can not only read but give away or lend or sell or drop in the bathtub. It’d be great to have easy access to a com­plete digital archive of comics–and wouldn’t it make sense for continuity-minded pub­lish­ers to post apro­pos links to things that tie into their new com­ics each week? But, you know, comics-bootleg blogs and Rap­id­share effect­ively do that anyway.

I think that the paper/pixel debate will con­tinue to roll on regard­less, but I also think that there can be a tend­ency to think in very polar­ised terms — ALL paper or ALL paper­less. I’m pretty sure that whatever we end up with will be a hybrid digital/analogue com­ics eco­nomy. I’ll be post­ing up fur­ther thoughts on this topic soon, includ­ing some thoughts on the long-awaited-baited-breath Long­box system.