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.)

One of the immediate benefits of DC’s GlobalComix partnership is that the books will be available worldwide. DCUI offers access to a lot of the company’s 85-year publishing archive, but has geographical limitations that GlobalComix, true to its name, does not. According to DC Comics general manager Anne DePies, that global reach was important. “We are always looking at ways to meet our fans where they are,” she says.

DC does a lot of deals, but this is their first new digital partnership in a while. In 2011, the company’s agreement to release its “New 52” line on comiXology kicked the first phase of digital comics into high gear, leading to several years of triple-digit market growth culminating in Amazon’s acquisition of comiXology in 2014.

GlobalComix, which has aspired to fill the gap left when Amazon folded comiXology into Kindle in 2022, gained traction by bringing an assortment of titles from publishers and individual creators together for a single $7.99 monthly subscription. It launched iOS and Android apps earlier this year and has been signing up some of the larger publishers, including Dark Horse, Image Comics, Boom! Studios, and Dynamite Entertainment.

But the company’s highest profile move is its recently-launched initiative to convert traditional panel-and-page comics to the vertical scrolling format, something in line with DC’s own direction. “The mobile reading experience on a phone is just better with vertical scroll,” says GlobalComix cofounder and CEO Christopher Carter.

GlobalComix has raised nearly $10 million in new rounds of investment on the potential that verticalization can crack the medium open for readers mystified by a patchwork of images and text laid out across a physical page. Carter believes that a better user experience will help those much sought-after younger readers become lifelong fans of the genres and stories that DC and other publishers specialize in.

GlobalComix has been working on its vertical comics initiative for the past 18 months, identifying the creative workflows, technologies, and financial models necessary to convert comics that were originally made to be read on the page into a more mobile-friendly format. Several examples went live on the platform over the summer, including an adaptation of the hit Vault Comics series Barbaric. The company also works on comics that are made to be vertical from the beginning, like the Stranger Things comic from Dark Horse it released last month.

At launch, GlobalComix will be importing DC’s content over from DCUI, which means it’ll be ready for tablets and smartphones. If readers eventually get to scroll through more of their favorites, either via GlobalComix or DC Go!, that will take time.

Carter says that verticalization is a complex creative process overseen by human storytellers who need to make design choices on a case-by-case basis. That’s because a lot of comic creators exploit the specific qualities of the medium, including panel breaks and page turns, as part of their narrative approach, and those little details can get lost in the translation to vertical.

“A lot of my students are very attracted to comics in the vertical scroll format,” says Nick Sousanis, a graphic novelist and humanities professor at the University of San Francisco. “It’s good that Global is thinking about bespoke solutions for special situations. Anything that gets more comics into the hands of people is a good thing.”

According to Carter, it took nearly two years to convince DC that GlobalComix was the real deal. The company’s front-end reading experience ended up being one of the selling points. He said he is hopeful that today’s announcement will be the beginning of a longer partnership between the two companies.

DC declined to comment on its future plans with GlobalComix, but it’s clear the company can read the vertical writing on the wall. The publisher has partnered with Webtoon on several series, including the hit Wayne Family Adventures, but these titles are produced under license by Webtoon creators, featuring a storytelling aesthetic designed to appeal to Webtoon’s demographic base, not DC’s. DC Go! features three new series at launch, all with obvious appeal to today’s teens (Nothing Butt Nightwing), plus a couple of recent classics like Batman: Hush; DePies emphasized the “compelling, reader friendly” aspect of the mobile comics in the announcement.

While rival Marvel is also dipping its toes in the market with its own Marvel Infinity comics released this March, it is increasingly apparent that the vertical future of comics is just a flick of the thumb away.

Update: 10/15/2024, 10:20 AM EDT: This piece has been updated to clarify the date DC’s comics were made available on the GlobalComix platform.