Although comic books have always been a creature of print and paper and ink, the idea of converting them to computer screens is nothing new. Examples of digital comics date back to as early as 1985, and pirated comics have long been available to savvy Web users on underground BitTorrent sites. But publishers, for the most part, have ignored the whole issue of digital comics for years. But no longer.

With initiatives either launching or under way at nearly every major comic book, manga house and traditional book publisher, digital comics are on the verge of becoming an important part of how the medium is marketed and sold, and suddenly nobody wants to get left behind.

“It's changed from people saying someday we need to do this to saying we need to do this now,” says Jeff Webber, v-p of product development at uclick, a mobile entertainment company that distributes comics content on cell phones.

Comics on cellphones

The diversity of initiatives is dizzying: Marvel Comics, Boom! Studios and Viz Media have made select back issues available in digital form; DC Comics and Top Shelf Productions now curate Web sites of comics developed specifically for the internet; Korean manhwa house Netcomics offers comics online for a small fee; and Tokyopop, Devil's Due Productions, Papercutz and Virgin Comics have joined with mobile digital publishing services like uclick and GoComics, to distribute their content on mobile phones—not to mention e-books, animated comics on iTunes, or the smart phone-based reader from ClickWheel, which also offers a format for reading comics on the iPhone.

But as publishers scatter in a variety of different digital directions, it's hard to know when—or whether—some kind of industry standard will emerge. Some pundits are more optimistic about the possibility than others.

“There will never be a single way to do something that will be developed by [comics] publishers,” says Dan Vado, the publisher of Slave Labor Graphics, citing the notoriously quirky and individualist nature of the independent comics community. This lack of unanimity stems partly from the fact that the comics industry has become more complex and diversified than ever in both form and content, with monthly pamphlets, trade paperbacks and hardcover publishing, mainstream, independent and Web comics all crowded under its umbrella. How each particular format—or publisher—approaches the digital question depends a great deal on how flexibly it defines itself, and how easily that definition translates to ones and zeroes.

Comics on the Blackberry

Although Web comics have the distinct advantage of being native denizens of the Internet, they've also been much faster to capitalize on cross-media possibilities. While the Web model of distributing content for free has often been met with skepticism or even fear in the print industry, Web comics have used their free content to attract huge online audiences, and publishers are successfully monetizing them by collecting their free Web content in hardcovers and trade paperbacks.

One need only look at Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid, originally launched as a Web comic about the life of a middle-school boy, for evidence that the Internet can help print publishers turn a profit. The collected hardcover volumes from Abrams rocketed to the # 1 spot on the New York Times bestseller lists, and both volumes are on the PW bestseller list. The book now has more than a million copies in print while still remaining freely available online. Even Random House's Del Rey imprint, which publishes both manga and nonmanga comics, announced at Comic-con that it will publish a book collection of Goats, a very popular Web comic by Jonathan Rosenberg.

“Web comics are their own viral marketing,” says Dark Horse Comics director of publicity Jeremy Atkins. “We still live in a world that is based in tangibility, so at the end of the day, all the Web attention translates into people in stores.” Dark Horse has published several successful books of Web comics, including a hardcover collection of the cult humor strip Perry Bible Fellowship that went through three printings and sold over 30,000 copies.

Comics on the Sony Reader

The company also sees over 150,000 readers per month on its Web comic site, MySpace Dark Horse Presents, numbers that surpass the readership of even the most popular monthly periodical comics. Selected content, including an Eisner Award—winning digital comic from Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon, will be published in a trade paperback this September, and the series also remains online.

“What we're seeing is that people use these digital books as a way to try out the material,” says Atomic Comics store owner Mike Malve. “And if it's something they find they like, they visit us and buy the printed books.”

Brian Hibbs, owner of the San Francisco comics store Comix Experience, compares Web comics to the distribution of comic strips in newspapers, where “you give away the Calvin and Hobbes strip for free, but then you sell it in book collections.”

Still, there are some concerns about the potential consequences for retailers if digital comics move existing consumers away from print channels without adding enough new readers to compensate for the loss. “If 20% of customers were willing to migrate from print to digital, I suspect that almost every direct-market comic shop would go out of business,” says Hibbs. “There's a real potential risk to lose the entire direct market.”

And while no print publisher is yet prepared to give away all its content online, some are beginning to conduct experiments to gauge the potential impact of free Web distribution on print sales. This January, Boom! Comics broke ground by releasing a new periodical comic, North Wind #1, in comic shops and on the Web simultaneously. Despite the objections of some comics shop retailers who saw the day-and-date release as a potential threat to their in-store sales, the first issue sold out within a week and went to a second printing.

“Usually on the fourth issue, you're seeing a 10%—20% sales decrease, but we saw a 20%—30% increase,” says Mosher. “By the end, there wasn't as much opposition as there was in the beginning.”

On October 1, IDW Publishing will follow their lead with a simultaneous print and Web release of Presidential Material, two one-shot periodical comics about the lives of presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain.

“On the Web, we can reach a potentially much larger audience that won't be going into a comics store,” said IDW president Ted Adams.

Going the Other Way

But converting print comics into digital images doesn't just change the audience publishers can reach; it also fundamentally alters the way that comics are read. Not all cross-media shifts are created equal, and while many Web comics adapt easily to print editions, the reverse is often a more difficult transition.

If you create a comic for print, I don't think it's going to be the perfect thing for the digital world,” says DC Comics publisher Paul Levitz. “I think real success will come from creating for the medium you're in.” At Zuda.com, the DC Web comics site, the focus has been on designing content specifically for the computer screen, rather than converting print comics into digital form.

There is also no reason to assume that the legions of current Webcomics fans who enjoy native Web content are going to embrace print comics just because they go digital. “The Webcomics audience is somewhat discrete from the print comics fan base,” observes Leigh Walton, co-editor of the Top Shelf 2.0 Web comics site. “It's foolish to expect that people who have an RSS feed for Dinosaur Comics are going to suddenly start reading Fantastic Four because it's on the Internet,” says Walton. “People who are interested in a certain type of content are going to follow it wherever it may be, and it's not about the format.”

Nowhere is that more true than in manga, or Japanese comics, which have become the most popular form of published sequential art in America. Manga is published overwhelmingly in the paperback book format and its success is largely driven by a younger audience that also happens to be more Web-savvy and less wedded to print than its forbears. As cell phone and smart phone technology in America finally catches up with what's available in Japan and Europe, some comics publishers have moved quickly into mobile phone distribution, a format that has proved enormously popular and lucrative for manga in its native land.

According to Tokyo research firm Impress R&D, Japanese consumers spent $20 million on mobile manga in 2006, and $70 million in 2007. If that rate of growth continues, Japanese mobile comics sales could rise to $250 million by 2009, “as big as the entire U.S. manga and print comics market,” says Jeremy Ross, director of new product development at U.S. manga publisher Tokyopop.

Although there is no guarantee that digital manga distribution in America will evolve in the same way as in Japan, Tokyopop's foray into mobile manga via uclick's GoComics Web site has experienced very positive reader response. Ross says that Tokyopop's titles have had as many as a million unique hits a month on the subscription-based service, with some seeing three to five times more readers online than in print in a given month.

Mainstream comics have begun to make some initial moves into mobile distribution as well, with DC offering an animated motion comic adaptation of the classic superhero graphic novel, Watchmen, through both iTunes and Verizon Vcast, and in conjunction with Scribner, S&S Digital and CBS Mobile, Marvel Comics is releasing N., a comics and video hybrid adapted from a short story by Stephen King, in episodes on mobile phones and the Web. “The digital model will enhance print sales, whether it's for [King's prose anthology] Just After Sunset, which contains the short story “N.,” or Marvel's N. comic book miniseries,” says Marvel v-p of development Ruwan Jayatilleke.

E-books are also beginning to emerge as a potential distribution method for comics, though the grayscale displays of current e-book readers mean that color comics are not yet an option. Black and white comics like manga, however, can be adapted, and Tokyopop has already made a number of its manga titles available for reading on the Sony Reader, a handheld digital reading device. “We're very excited about the future, although the future is not quite here yet for e-books,” says Ross.

Digital comics in all their forms are still in their infancy in America, and as publishers explore different media, methods, and models of distribution there are still more experiments than answers about the best ways to deal with digital content.

Regardless, says Mosher, “whether it's mobile, on the Web, or something else that we can't conceive of right now, the bottom line is that getting as many people as possible to be exposed to comics is a good thing.”