Some breaking news to kick things off: Neon Ichiban, DSTLRY’s digital comics marketplace, just announced it is adding IDW to the mix. The perennial top-five publisher brings its strong-selling licensed properties such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Star Trek, Sonic the Hedgehog, Godzilla, and much more alongside creator-owned essentials like Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees and Locke & Key, as well as the Top Shelf library of graphic novels, including March and They Called Us Enemy.
This follows Neon Ichiban’s spate of new publisher signups last week, including Mad Cave, Dynamite (see “Exclusive: Dynamite Signs on with Neon Ichiban”), and Titan. They join Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Oni Press, Kodansha, and Vault, who were already on board, giving Neon Ichiban strong representation of the top ten American publishers as they continue the private beta of their platform.
Neon Ichiban is of course the new project of ComiXology cofounder David Steinberger and former cX content and marketing dynamo Chip Mosher, spinning out of their DSTLRY imprint of deluxe-format original series. This latest announcement and surge of momentum is clearly good news for the company as they try to advance their strategy and vision for the new digital market space amid a moment of intense competition.
Big week for digital. Neon Ichiban’s announcement comes on the heels of a flurry of activity in the digital comics space, which has felt like an extinct volcano for almost a decade.
GlobalComix, another insurgent in the space, announced it inked a big deal with DC earlier this month (see “Exclusive: GlobalComix to Add DC Titles on Day and Date of Physical Release”), including day-and-date digital releases. DC is in the midst of its own renaissance, posting strong sales on the back of popular new Batman and Superman series. GlobalComix, which gained initial traction on its monthly digital subscription model, has recently added individual issue sales and PDF bundle downloads, and it also features a broad lineup of top publishers, independents, and creator-published work.
And then of course WEBTOON announced its big deal with Disney last week, where the two companies will collaborate on an entirely new platform to offer a catalog of Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar and, intriguingly, Disney’s own comics, as well as selected WEBTOON titles (see “Webtoon and Disney Team Up to Create New Digital Comics Platform”). This follows an announcement over the summer that will bring selected Marvel content to the WEBTOON app (see “Disney and Webtoon Announce Multiyear Deal”).
What’s driving the digital surge? Enthusiasm for digital comics seems to come in waves. The early 2010s were a hotbed of activity, with several startups contending for market leadership. ComiXology, post Amazon-acquisition, tried a bunch of things later in the decade, notably ComiXology Originals (which are still active with some interesting creators and announcements). WEBTOON’s efforts to crack the North American market starting around 2017 also added some juice, reaching a crescendo as the company headed into last summer’s IPO.
The global success of webtoons and the big shift in the Japanese market from paper-based manga to digital during the same period seems to have brought renewed focus to the space. With distribution uncertainties continuing on the print side, it’s no surprise that US publishers are willing to bank on expanding the digital footprint beyond the 10-15% of the market that seemed to be the ceiling.
Are digital comics a commodity? For publishers, there’s no downside to distributing on as many digital platforms as possible. In fact, competition creates greater visibility in the market, more opportunities to put comics in front of readers, and potentially the chance to play platforms against each other to get slightly better business terms.
That anti-exclusives attitude among publishers is also good news for the startup platforms who can make big, splashy announcements about increasing their catalogs and impress their investors. It also provides more chances for them to build sales by recommending new reading to fans of established characters and series.
But what’s in it for consumers? Comic fans, being comic fans, likely want their digital library in one place so they can organize everything for easy reading and tee up their new acquisitions without accidentally duplicating purchases. This dynamic helped comiXology consolidate the market in the early days.
If three or four different outlets are all offering roughly the same catalogs, give or take a few publishers, what will help the eventual winner start pushing the snowball downhill to roll up competitors?
Pick your battlefield. The competition between platforms will likely come down to features, business model, and community.
WEBTOON comes into this fight with the advantages of a mature, proven technology stack and strong back-end metrics for promoting rising titles and cross-selling new material to existing audiences. It is less clear whether those advantages, built for a young, mobile-first readership raised on the fast-paced storytelling style of vertical-scroll webtoons, will transfer to the more traditional readership in North America, whose expectations are built around the “satisfying story chunk” of a 22-page printed comic.
Neon Ichiban’s secret sauce is the platform’s features allowing for limited, exclusive, and signed and remarqued comics in the digital space. Steinberger and Mosher recognize how collectability drives sales for print and have invested heavily in creating both the feature set and the marketplace to enable those same dynamics in their app. Whether fans and collectors buy into this or not is the company’s biggest bet, and it’s why adding heavily collected, continuity- and scarcity-driven publishers like Marvel, DC and IDW is so critical.
GlobalComix has a different theory of the case. Observing the success of WEBTOON, the company has invested in a bespoke approach to verticalizing American comics to provide the convenience and mobile readability of webtoons with the more complex staging and storytelling of American and European comics (see “How GlobalComix is Trying to Bring a Webtoon Reading Experience to Panel and Page Comics.”) Now that WEBTOON and Marvel are on the same track, it will be interesting to see how that competition plays out.
Meanwhile, with Sweet Shop, former Omnibus cofounder Kenny Meyers is banking on the simplicity of creating an online alternative to the local comic shop for in-app pay-to-download digital that will address the segment of the market not interested in all the bells and whistles.
Each is hoping that their unique site experience and value proposition will lure readers in, and they will create both a social community and a critical mass of buyers who can then be cross-sold and upsold into new titles, new genres, and new IP.
Hegemony or multipoliarity? The old digital comics market was a winner-take-all situation, with Amazon swooping in to acquire the dominant player as soon as the field had been cleared. The nature of the market in those days dictated that kind of dynamic.
Does it still? While everyone in comics is trying to figure out how to bring the sizzle of the manga, webtoon, and young-reader audiences to the rest of the comics business, it may be there are limits to how much overlap is possible.
In that world, a Disney and WEBTOON platform makes sense, but Marvel and WEBTOON might remain a niche combination. Neon Ichiban can own the collector/fan/speculator market and do good business there without having to elbow others just looking for readers out of the way. GlobalComix can build a creator-oriented environment to challenge ComiXology originals while offering a good forum for discovery of new content, and perhaps also fill the niche vacated when digital-first Europe Comics stepped back.
Either way, the new digital arms race is good news for publishers and creators seeking to expand the market and for readers who want a choice of platforms and ways to buy and own digital comics. Announcements like Neon Ichiban’s IDW deal are exciting, but the real race will come down to which company, or companies, do the best job executing on their vision and capitalizing on their traction.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
Rob Salkowitz (Bluesky @robsalk) is the author of Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Cul-ture, a two-time Eisner Award nominee, and a proud longtime contributor to Eisner-nominated ICv2.
Source: ICv2
