comic-books posts

This might be the wackiest patent that I've ever seen Apple apply for. The company has recently put in a patent to describe the process of making a digital comic book out of a video game playthrough. The idea here is that you'd play through a segment of a video game (Mass Effect is the one used in the example), and then Apple would collect information about your character and the way that you played the game. It would then use that information to turn the experience into an e-book, which could either be sold digitally or printed.

Say what? I guess that's cool, but this just seems like Apple is laying down a quick patent on a pretty harebrained idea; it doesn't seem like a preview of an actual service that we'll eventually see implemented on the Mac. Then again, Apple has worked pretty closely with Comic Life in the past, and it has connected the popular comic creation app to both iPhoto and MobileMe. Maybe it's looking at extending that service further.

Another (presumably more practical) patent has Apple examining improved equalizers on iTunes and in the iDevices. This one I can get behind. The EQ that's there right now works, but the patent involves more dynamic adjustments and some user-free audio enhancement. Again, Apple patents ideas, not actual products, but there's still a possibility that we'll see either or both of these ideas implemented in the future.

From iPhone app ... to comic book? That's where Pocket God is apparently headed. The extremely popular iPhone app has "inked" a deal to release a set of comics based on the little islanders. The books will be available on the App Store first, in virtual form, and they will eventually take the form of paper comics. There's an iPad app available now (for 99 cents) that features the adventures of Ooga, Noobie, Klik, and friends. (Wait, they have names? Now I feel bad about tossing them into that volcano.) The physical books, which will be released in September, will have four-page stories that can't be seen anywhere else.

It's crazy to think that Apple's little software store has spawned a full-fledged franchise, and this isn't the last we'll see. TUAW has heard, off the record, that at least one other major iPhone app property is putting together a very large licensing deal, which (if it works) will bring a very popular App Store brand to more traditional media. We've seen lots of instances of major brands coming into the App Store, but some original properties on the iPhone and iPad are growing up into a life of their own.

We've mentioned Comic Zeal on the site here before -- it's an iPhone app that allows you to read comic book .cbr files on your iPhone. Of course, it's exactly the kind of app that you'd hope to bring itself right on over to the iPad, and that's exactly what developer Bitolithic has done -- they're provided an excellent preview of the Comic Zeal iPad app over on their blog. It looks great -- there's a full-screen view, of course, but the navigation has been tweaked, and there's no real separation any more between selecting a book and seeing it. While the iPhone's smaller screen meant they had to compartmentalize those two functions, the bigger iPad screen means they can just put a pop-up in and do the whole thing all together.

Also interesting to note is that they've placed controls at the top of the screen rather than at the bottom -- they say that when the iPad is sitting in your lap, it's awkward to hit buttons at the bottom as you usually do on the iPhone. And this version will be called Comic Zeal 4, not Comic Zeal iPad or HD, because eventually most of the features in this version will find their way back to the iPhone version as well. Comic Zeal looks like a great comic reading solution on the iPad, and it's awesome to finally see some apps.

Of course there's an app for this, but I'd never even considered it. While I do occasionally read .cbr (Comic Book Archive files) on my desktop, the iPhone didn't really occur to me as a portable comic book reading device. But sure enough, there are apps for that. iComic is probably the cheapest, but I hear it's a little tough to get set up. ComicZeal is extremely popular, and just a little bit cheaper from the somewhat similar myComics. Pull Lists uses a desktop client to sync up comics for you, which is a little more than I need, but it seems like some people like it. There are actually lots of choices, it turns out -- I would have thought that the iPhone's screen was pretty small for reading comic book pages, but I'll have to give those apps a try.

Or, if you're too cheap to pay a buck or two for a full app, you can even do it yourself. .cbr files are really just .jpg archives, so as this tip from a while back on the iPhone Comic Book Reader says, you can actually extract out the jpegs, and then just sync them up to your iPhone via iPhoto if you want. Three dollars really isn't that much, and any of those apps listed above will give you a little more functionality (easy flipping between pages, bookmarking, and many other features per app), but if you really want to DIY, there you go.

Now it would be nice to be able to officially buy .cbr archives over the web from some of the major companies -- the closest they've come that I know of is a subscription service, but of course you've got to use their own client for that (and there's no iPhone app that I can find, though Uclick has a few apps in there for certain books). As long as reading pirated .cbr files is outlawed, only outlaws will end up reading them.