Tom Racine and me opine about the iPad and comics

Comments ⁷

1. Alec Fritz

   Great interview, it would be great if you were able to do more in the future.

2. Jonathan Lemon

   Great show.

3. Shane Davis

   Alan,
   You had some pretty interesting points, especially about what the Ipad could be a platform for a new generation of comics getting a bunch of ‘real estate’ back.

   Man, I hope so. If I remember right, didn’t Bill Watterson say among the primary reasons he quit was because of the restrictive nature of the daily strips? I know about the marketing battles, but I thought I heard him say trying to tell great stories with great art in a small 4 panel b&w daily was getting to be too hard.

   It makes me wonder about the possibilty that in 5 -10 years if the Ipad (or all the other copycat devices) will become as prevalent as cell phones are now and be the THE platform for news and entertainment.

   If so, imagining the potential comics that could emerge is pretty exciting. I’m not saying Mr. Watterson or Berke Breathed will come back, but it could mean the next ‘Pogo’ is lurking in the shadows waiting for a stage to walk out on…isn’t that a nice idea?

4. Tom Wood

   The ‘real estate’ exists now but I don’t see many using it. For comics placed on a website, as opposed to a paid-for app, the actual window that a comic will play within may not be that much bigger because they won’t allow the content to block out the surrounding ads. Google already has rules against that for Adsense ads.

   For anyone who can’t afford/doesn’t want Flash, do some search on JQuery and Mootools slideshows. There’s some pretty cool things happening in the Javascript world that lets you scroll around within a small window so you can pack a lot more real estate within a small space. There are also some that provide zoom in/out which should be useful.

5. Shane Davis

   Tom,
   I wonder if it’s a matter of portability. I don’t read webcomics by and large because I have to find them first, then sit at the computer and read them. But if I had a magazine sized Ipad (Gad I hate that name) or clone that was light, easy to read and operated wirelessly, I might be far more inclined sitting in the Starbucks to browse more comics.

   ALan I think hit on it in his interview…it’s probably all about convenience.

6. Stephen Beals

   I just want to say that I listened to this show while walking my Lab in a snowstorm.

   Two miles. 11 degrees(F). High wind. Two ugly beasts against nature. It was fun.

   Great show. Your reactions to the iPad pretty much mirrored my own.

7. B.J. Dewey

   Great interview, Alan! Absolutely the IPad is all about convenience! You don’t sit at a computer – you curl up in a comfortable chair with your IPad, just as you did with your print newspaper. There are lots of legitimate concerns noted here (flash, ad space, etc.), but the IPad will be improved on and copied. And it may very well be the platform future cartoonists have been hoping for, or at least the start of it.