Amazon’s catastrophic mishandling of Comixology–leading to its shuttering and folding into the Kindle platform at the end of 2023–has left a huge hole in the internet for comics readers wanting a similar, broad marketplace for digital comics. Now, at long last, it might be coming, with the help of a few former Comixology veterans.
Announced this week, former Comixology executives David Steinberger and Chip Mosher have created Neon Ichiban, spinning out of their comics publisher DSTLRY, a new worldwide digital comics platform that wants to offer a new potential centralized hub for comics readers after the digital marketplace largely siloed off into splintered, publisher-specific apps and services in the wake of Comixology’s implosion. As well as comics from DSTLRY, Neon Ichiban is already promising a buzzy list of supporting publishers across Western comics and manga, including Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Oni Press, Vault Comics, and Kodansha, with more to come.
“Understanding how comic book fans and people who should be fans want to shop and think about and browse doesn’t exist anymore,” Steinberger, who co-founded Comixology in 2007 and helped oversee its sale to Amazon in 2014, said in an interview with the New York Times. “The Comixology app, where you can have all your comics in one place, does not exist anymore. It’s all just part of Kindle.”
© Neon IchibanAside from the standard appeals of a combined library from multiple publishers, offering day-and-date digital releases, as well as offline access to comics (and direct downloads of purchased issues per individual publisher allowance), Neon Ichiban also wants to bring elements of physical comic book collecting into the digital realm. Steinberger and Mosher have already experimented with some of these plans with DSTLRY’s own digital releases, like exclusive variant covers–as well as the ability for creators to offer unique digital remarques and sketches, or to add signatures, giving collectors unique variants in their own rights.
That uniqueness is important in another fundamental pillar of Neon Ichiban’s offerings: the ability for users to buy and sell comics through a secondary market on the platform, which, aside from providing benefits to the users, will also benefits go towards publishers (if they agree to participate) and individual creative teams too.
Neon Ichiban is set to launch next month–and time will tell if it will amass the support form both comics fans and publishers alike fill the massive gap in digital comics that Amazon left behind.
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