DC Entertainment Is Changing the Shape—and Scrollability—of Comics

Comics are due for a reboot and the old guard knows it. DC Entertainment, the elder statesman of the business, has been trying everything to get young eyes on its familiar characters, from Monday’s surprise announcement of DC Go! webcomics, to a recently-launched kids’ line, to a licensing deal with teen favorite Webtoon.

Today, the company announced a partnership with even more potential to reshape the medium: a distribution deal with GlobalComix, a digital platform that has raised millions in funding to optimize traditional comics to be read by scrolling vertically on a smartphone.

Starting today, fans will be able to read 400 DC, Vertigo, and Wildstorm books, including story arcs from Batman, The Joker, and Doom Patrol, on GlobalComix’s subscription-based app, with many free to sample. The comics will be in standard panel-and-page format, but given GlobalComix’s investment and strategy around verticalization, DC’s move suggests a clear trend. That’s because the deal follows yesterday’s unveiling of DC Go!, a new mobile-optimized initiative on its DC Universe Infinite (DCUI) digital service. It won’t roll out until November 20, but when it does, it’ll allow readers to flick through original Harley Quinn, Nightwing, and Raven series—as well as some archival material—in a style familiar to anyone using apps like TikTok or Instagram.

Seems simple, obvious even, but it’s a shift the traditional comics industry has been slow to make. When comics first made the migration to digital formats, they largely resembled the same multipanel pages that comics readers had been looking at for years, optimized for the screens of iPads or other tablets. Vertically-scrolling comics, on the other hand, allow readers to follow the story top-to-bottom, like reading a feed on their smartphone. With all the other things now available on those screens—mobile games, social media—old-school publishers have to keep up.

That point was hammered home this summer when Webtoon, the South Korean mobile platform that has popularized vertically scrolling comics worldwide, went public in the US based on a valuation of $2.67 billion. DC’s plans, announced in the lead-up to New York Comic Con, which begins Thursday, indicate that the comics giant is ready to advance on a number of fronts.

“The legacy American comic publishers seem to have reached the limits of new customer acquisition through media,” says Milton Griepp, publisher of ICv2, the trade publication of the comics industry. If they want to grow, he adds, they’re going to have to embrace vertical scroll comics, “which are bringing in tens of millions of new, mostly younger readers worldwide.” (Disclosure: This writer has written for ICv2.)