iVerse Owner Interviewed

The Vancouver Press has just published a short interview with iVerse Comics owner Michael Murphey and some reaction from comic shop owners to his views that digital comics wil affect monthly print comic sales.

iVerse launched its first iPhone comics last November and Murphey says the growing popularity of mobile devices meant he couldn’t resist the opportunity to develop a bridge between the print and digital comic worlds.

Like uClick and other publishers, iVerse take traditional print comics and original content, depending on the situation, and convert those into mobile-formatted comics, releasing them for the iPhone, iTouch and Google Android phones. Many of iVerse’s comics sell for 99 cents through the iTunes store, and some first issues are free. Among the more than 60 titles the company has released through iTunes are issues from the Atomic Robo, Oz: The Manga, and IDW's Star Trek: Countdown series.

Murphey reveals that he's well aware not all comic-book fans have smartphones, so Murphey and his team are working on comics-viewing software for Windows and Mac operating systems.

“Basically, if there’s a screen on it, we need to put comics on it for people,” he said. He also feels the fast-developing medium of digital comics means there may be changes ahead for the print-comics industry.

"We may not see as many monthly issues printed,” Murphey he argues. “Instead, we’ll see the trade paperback printed, and the monthly issue will just go digital. But I don’t think that print will ever be completely replaced by digital, and I don’t think it should be.”

Murphey estimates that Japan’s digital-comic-book industry brings in about US$270 million a year, and that the North American market could match that by 2011.

Murphey's views aren't really surprising: you only need to see what's happened to newspapers to see how digital delivery has damagaed print sales. Like Murphey, I still think there's going to be a place for print comics - you simply can't beat the flexibility and tactile nature of paper as a delivery medium just yet, for all the hype about digital comics. But I do think digital comics offer an unprecedneted opportunity for comic creators to reach a much wider audience than they ever would with print, but finding ways to monetize them remains elusive.

Perhaps initiatives like Scribd's new service, which allows writers to publish digital copies then charge for them, taking 80 per cent of the sale (see this New York Times article), are just one way this can be achieved.

• Read the full article on the Vancouver Free Press web site

• iVerse Comics: www.iversecomics.com