Comics writer Warren Ellis isn’t optimistic about digital comic books.
“This year should be the year where a wide swathe of established comics creators go ‘digital-first’ with a broad variety of projects,” he wrote on his blog. “However, that should also have been last year. Which leads me to wonder whether or not there’s really a taste for it among the creative community (Aside from me: but I’m not certain I’d have the time or access to the artists that’d really make it work for me). So I’m going to go ahead and say this isn’t going to happen this year, and won’t until it’s really too late – and just hope I’m completely wrong about this one.”
Ellis also said that he expected to see “more new comics creators bypassing the standard model of comics publishing entirely this year, and going straight to book publishing houses and crowdfunded self-publication and direct-to-digital”.