Marvel Tries For A Digital Revolution With Infinite Comics

For the past week, Marvel Comics’s new initiative, Infinite Comics, has been the biggest secret this side of Daredevil’s secret identity (which if that’s too much of an in-joke for you, you really should be reading Mark Waid’s excellent Daredevil series). Today, at SXSW Interactive’ s ScreenBurn Arcade, the company that brought you the X-Men, Spider-Man, and the Avengers revealed Infinite Comics as a new digital comics format, part of their larger Marvel ReEvolution strategy.

Infinite Comics is Marvel’s new digital comics format. More comic book than “motion comic,” but more digital-enabled than a static scan, the new format allows for elements like removable word balloons and depth of field changes, but unlike previous attempts, are put in the hands of the writer and artists, not the publisher.

“We call these Marvel Infinite Comics because the storytelling possibilities are, frankly, infinite,” said Axel Alonso, Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief. “Writers and artists now have a whole host of new tools at their disposal to redefine the comic book medium. Current tablets and smartphones, along with comiXology’s Guided View technology, allow us to develop new, full length stories for a different medium that are very much truly comics—but experienced by readers in a way no other major company has ever executed.”

The other component of the ReEvolution is Marvel AR, a smartphone app that lets users see DVD extra-style content when aimed at a printed comic book using augmented reality. It’s an interesting strategy, providing the ability for bonus content even for those who prefer to read their books on paper instead of on a screen.

It’s an interesting two-pronged approach to digital comics, making digital comics harder to pirate while making them more feature-filled, while at the same time giving more functionality to the more traditional paper comic. It doesn’t do much to address the pricing issues of comic books — $4 a pop is a bit much for a digital download, when I can watch an entire movie for $3 — but it is an interesting step.