Comics must be to restart and the old guard knows it. DC Entertainment, the elder statesman of the business, has been trying everything it can to attract young people’s attention to its familiar characters, ever since Monday’s surprise announcement of DC Go! webcomics, to a recently launched children’s lineto a licensing deal with teens’ favorite Webtoon.
Today, the company announced a partnership with even more potential to reshape the medium: a distribution deal with GlobalComix, a digital platform that has raised millions in funding to optimize traditional comics for scrolling reading on a smartphone.
Starting today, fans will be able to read 400 books from DC, Vertigo and Wildstorm, including story arcs from Batman, The Joker and Doom Patrol, in the GlobalComix subscription app, and many of them can be tried for free. The comics will be in standard panel and page format, but given GlobalComix’s investment and strategy around verticalization, DC’s move suggests a clear trend. That’s because the deal follows yesterday’s unveiling of DC Go!, a new mobile-optimized initiative on its DC Universe Infinite (DCUI) digital service. It won’t launch until November 20, but when it does, it will allow readers to flip through the original Harley Quinn, Nightwing, and Raven series, as well as archival footage, in a style familiar to anyone who uses apps like TikTok. or Instagram.
It seems simple, even obvious, but it’s a change that the traditional comics industry has been slow to make. When comics first migrated to digital formats, they largely resembled the same multi-panel pages that comics readers had been seeing for years, optimized for the screens of iPads or other tablets. Vertical scrolling comics, on the other hand, allow readers to follow the story from top to bottom, like reading a feed on your smartphone. With all the other things now available on those screens (mobile games, social media), old-school publishers have to keep up.
That point was made clear this summer when Webtoon, the South Korean mobile platform that has popularized vertically scrolling comics around the world, went public in the United States at a valuation of $2.67 billion. DC’s plans, announced in the run-up to New York Comic Con, which begins Thursday, indicate that the comics giant is ready to move forward on several fronts.
“The old American comics publishers seem to have reached the limits of acquiring new customers through the media,” says Milton Griepp, editor of ICv2, the comics industry trade publication. If they want to grow, he adds, they will have to embrace vertically scrolling comics, “which are attracting tens of millions of new, mostly young, readers around the world.” (Disclosure: this writer has written for ICv2.)