Strange Attractions

I’ve been reading a lot of back issues recently that have been of the magic persuasion, which has been introducing me to a lot of the new characters. I started with the JLA Black Baptism mini-trade that came out a couple of weeks ago and have now transitioned to a combination of Day of Vengeance, Animal Man, Hellblazer, and Shade the Changing Man. I’m not sure why I haven’t been reading any of DC’s magic books. I’ve been really enjoying them and they’re more interesting to me than some of the other superhero books that I have been reading. Right now, I’m pretty interested in every book that will be in the Dark set from The New 52, especially Justice League Dark. The more of the older magic books I read, the more appealing the Dark line is becoming.

I’ve been reading Batman Beyond digitally since it has come out and often pick up digital comics, especially when they’re on sale like the Vertigo titles from this weekend. The weakest link in DC’s Digital Comic Initiative for The New 52 is by far Comixology and their digital platform. The iPad app is really inconvenient to use if you have lots of titles, especially if you have multiple titles from a single series. Also, by tying themselves so closely to Comixology, DC is at their mercy. If Comixology flounders, DC is screwed. The Gnome often has problems with the Comixology app not giving her access to things that we’ve purchased or the app constantly crashes while she’s trying to read a comic. A paper comic won’t crash on you when you turn the page. The more I use Comixology’s service, the more I think that Dark Horse and Archie had the right idea in creating services on their own instead of depending on a third party.

Apple is supposed to release the next version of their iPad and iPhone operating system, iOS 5, sometime in the Fall - most likely in September. One of the new features in iOS 5 is called Newsstand and it’s designed to help content publishers who have apps with constantly updating content, like a daily newspaper. I don’t have all the details about it, and as a developer couldn’t talk about them if I did since I’m under NDA, but one of the things that Newsstand does is download new content in the background whenever a publisher releases that content. Thus, you can wake up in the morning and find the day’s New York Times on your iPad ready to go. It would be really cool if Comixology takes advantage of the Newsstand functionality. As a Comixology user, you subscribe to the comics that you want on a digital pull list. Every Wednesday your iPad has automatically downloaded the comics you subscribed to for that week. If they did that and reworked the app’s UI for large quantities of comics, then the digital initiative gets much more interesting than it is now.